If Americans vote out of hope instead of fear, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will win the 2024 presidential election, he told Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” on May 4.
Multiple polls have shown that at least half of American voters don’t want to cast their ballots for President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump, the presumptive nominees of their parties.
Mr. Kennedy announced his candidacy to challenge President Biden for the 2024 Democratic Party nomination in April 2023. Claiming that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was “rigging the primary” to prevent anyone from opposing President Biden, Mr. Kennedy decided to run as an independent in October 2023.
Since then, he has embarked on a quest to get ballot access in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The DNC has started a campaign to stop Mr. Kennedy from accomplishing that feat, citing concern that he is a “stalking horse” for President Trump who will prevent President Biden from getting reelected.
“Almost 100 percent” of people planning to vote for President Biden will say they are doing so because “they’re scared that President Trump will be elected and it will be the end of the Republic,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Many President Trump supporters are voting for the former president because they believe that President Biden will “get us into a war” or “just deteriorate in office,” Mr. Kennedy added.
“They would rather vote for me. My challenge is how do I get Americans to vote out of hope rather than out of fear,” he continued.
Mr. Kennedy referenced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic address in 1932 when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“He was watching what was happening in Europe and this global depression that had given rise to demagogues of the left, you know, in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and from the right in, in Italy and Spain and Germany, and all of them were using fear to manipulate public opinion,” Mr. Kennedy said.
“My job is to is to remind Americans that we can’t be responding out of fear.”
While the DNC has ramped up efforts to derail Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, President Trump has escalated verbal attacks on the independent candidate in recent weeks, calling him “the most radical, left candidate in the race” among other criticisms.
National Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern that Mr. Kennedy will draw votes away from their respective candidates.
Last week, Rasmussen Reports released a poll detailing a three-way race between President Trump, President Biden, and Mr. Kennedy. In the survey, President Trump led with 48 percent, followed by 36 percent for President Biden and 8 percent for Mr. Kennedy.
On April 25, a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll indicated that 46 percent of the respondents backed President Trump compared with 39 percent for President Biden and 12 percent for Mr. Kennedy.
On May 1, Mr. Kennedy announced the results of a Zogby Strategies poll that included 26,408 respondents from 50 states polled between April 13 and April 21 and featured a 0.6 percent margin of error.
President Trump would decisively beat President Biden in a head-to-head race in Electoral College votes with a tally of 294–244, according to the poll.
In a race between Mr. Kennedy and President Biden, the challenger wins in a landslide of 367–171, the survey indicated.
If President Biden drops out and leaves Mr. Kennedy as the main challenger for President Trump, Mr. Kennedy narrowly tops the former president, 270–268.
“If it was just me and President Biden in the race, I would beat him in a landslide,” Mr. Kennedy said, adding that he can beat President Trump and that President Biden cannot.
Mr. Kennedy noted that multiple polls have shown he has a higher favorability rating than President Biden and President Trump. He reiterated his belief that fear is the motivating factor for Americans backing both of his opponents, especially President Biden.
If voters are asked why they are supporting President Biden, “they will very rarely say because he’s brought great vigor and energy to the office” or they “expect great new things to happen in the next term.”
President Biden and President Trump are different in their personalities, ideologies, and communication skills, Mr. Kennedy said, but they drastically differ on “culture war” issues such as abortion, the Second Amendment, the border crisis, and transgenderism.
Those are “important” issues, Mr. Kennedy said, but President Biden and President Trump are not addressing “existential” issues such as the “$34 trillion debt.”
“We’ve added a trillion dollars in the last 100 days, it’s growing exponentially. The cost of servicing that debt now exceeds our defense budget. Within five years, the cost of servicing the debt will absorb 50 cents out of every dollar that the federal government collects in taxes within 10 years, so this is existential for our country,” Mr. Kennedy said.
“President Trump and President Biden have no capacity to deal with that issue because those presidents ran up a bigger portion (of the national debt) than any other president in history.”
President Trump “ran up $8 trillion, which is more than all the presidents combined from George Washington to George W. Bush, 283 years of history,” he added.
President Biden could match or surpass that figure, Mr. Kennedy said.
Mr. Kennedy told “American Thoughts Leaders” that he lamented the “toxic” polarization in the United States because of the two-party system.
“Neither President Trump or President Biden are capable of ending polarization because both of them are the products of it,“ he said. ”Both of them feed off it. Both of them are telling them telling their followers you have to vote for me because that person is evil.”
A campaign that started more than a year ago in Boston and changed tack in Philadelphia in October 2023 has now reached its final six months.
Mr. Kennedy said he is focused on getting on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia—an objective he insists he will achieve—and reaching voters to inform them of a platform that embraces unity, seeks to end “forever wars,” addresses issues such as tackling corporate corruption, what he calls “government agency capture,” censorship, and what he deems the “chronic disease epidemic.”
Chronic diseases cost the United States more than five times its defense budget and are an issue ignored by Democrats and Republicans, Mr. Kennedy said.
He also said that President Biden is a proponent of war while President Trump claims he is “anti-war but he just colluded with Speaker [Mike] Johnson” to send $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
Americans who vote for President Biden or President Trump will get “more of the same” if either is elected, Mr. Kennedy said.
Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that one of the most significant challenges in the campaign’s final six months is garnering support from voters who like him but are hesitant to cast their ballots for an independent rather than a Democrat or Republican.
“My job is to convince people that I can win, and once people are convinced I can win, then I will win.”
