Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is running for the Democratic nomination for president for 2024, isn’t coming anywhere close to actually winning the party’s nod.
New polling from Quinnipiac University illustrates the problem. Finishing on June 12, the polling found an overwhelming majority of Democratic Party-aligned respondents backing Joe Biden as the incumbent seeks another term in office. A full 70 percent went with Biden, while — even with the obvious boost from name recognition — Kennedy only got 17 percent. A third candidate, author and speaker Marianne Williamson, had just eight percent of the support.
Though he’s running as a Democrat, Kennedy has been aligned with far-right causes. Familiar activists close to Trump like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have gone so far that they have suggested Trump choosing Kennedy as his vice presidential pick. Personally, Kennedy, who’s a lawyer, is also known for promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about vaccines — where it’s easy to see a common cause with the far-right quickly emerging, considering the rabid hatred that many leading Republicans and MAGA extremists have recently been fostering towards vaccines in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that shook the world.
Kennedy also promotes theories of government involvement in the deaths of his father and uncle (the latter of whom is the late President John F. Kennedy) and has found a consistently welcoming reception even from far-right agitator Alex Jones.
On the Republican side, Trump is still on his way to the nomination, as the surprisingly numerous candidates who’ve announced challenges to his bid to get back to the White House aren’t getting very far in polling. Even the prominent Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remains mostly behind Trump by double digits, at least in polling that’s done outside of Florida. There are a lot of other states besides Florida, though, and Trump could easily lock the whole thing down. The criminal charges he is facing at the state and federal levels have not created significant blows to his electoral support.
