RFK Goes Rogue
2nd October 2023
A week from today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to make an announcement in Philadelphia that will almost certainly entail running for president as a third-party candidate.
The signs have been there for months that RFK’s politically unique appeal would be crushed by the Democratic Party’s process, which is heavily skewed toward renominating Joe Biden by acclamation. The possibility of Biden debating Kennedy was always out of the question — not because they don’t take his challenge seriously, but because for all their dismissiveness, Democratic leadership takes it very seriously indeed.
The logistics of an RFK independent run would be the challenge — unless, given the unique changes that have taken place in their leadership over the past few years, he is able to run under the standard of the Libertarian Party. According to the New York Times, Kennedy already met with party chair Angela McArdle over the summer. Already on the ballot in all fifty states, the party would offer Kennedy the chance to skip a major challenge for outsider candidates, presuming that he can win the nomination over the objections of delegates who find him insufficiently libertarian.
Why would that bother them? The Democrats frequently run candidates who aren’t at all interested in democracy, and twice in my lifetime the Republicans have nominated Presidential candidates who were famous for being RINOs.