“Kennedy, although a long shot at this point, starts in double digits – and can’t be ignored.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Texas Insider Report) — As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his bid to be the Democrat Party's presidential nominee in Boston earlier today, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds he has the support of 14% of voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 – a surprising show of strength for a candidate who has a famous political name, but is now known mostly an environmental lawyer who built a following on social media for opposing vaccine mandates as a violation of individual liberty.
In the survey of Democrat Primary Voters conducted Saturday through Tuesday, only 67% of Biden's 2020 supporters said they would support him for the Democrat nomination, while Kennedy stands at 14% and self-help author Marianne Williamson, a quixotic candidate for the nomination in 2020, stands at 5%, while 13% said they are undecided.Kennedy made his announcement to a crowd of more than 500 people – with a few hundred more standing in an overflow area – at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel that was bathed in red, white and blue lights as a brass band played and Kennedy family photographs played in a loop on large screens at the front of the room. The backdrop of American flags, patriotic bunting, and signs celebrating "Kennedy 2024" filled the room as signs were passed out to the crowd with a clear campaign message: “Heal the divide.”
Volunteers distributed "Kennedy 2024" signs and bumper stickers.
The 69-year-old Kennedy is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, and the son of former U.S. Attorney General and assassinated 1968 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he became a prominent promoter of the possible link between childhood vaccines and autism.Kennedy used his campaign launch speech to lambast school and business closures during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, and to insist that government and media “lie to us.”
He was a strident critic of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic – and its top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci – while railing against the coronavirus vaccine and vaccine mandates.
“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now – threatening now:
- to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country;
- to commoditize our children, our purple mountain’s majesty;
to poison our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs;- to strip-mine our assets;
- to hollow out the middle class, and
- to keep us in a constant state of war.”
- 33% of Biden voters who disapprove of the job the president is doing, and
- 35% of those who say his policies have been “too liberal,” and
- he was strongest among self-identified conservatives, younger voters, and those who don’t have a college degree.
Kennedy lives in Los Angeles, but chose Boston as a nod to his family’s deep political roots in the city, even though his father, Robert F. Kennedy, declared his presidential ambitions in the Senate Caucus Room on Capitol Hill in 1968, the same place his uncle, John F. Kennedy, launched his presidential campaign in 1960.
The poll was taken by landline and cellphone and was of 600 Biden Voters, identified from National & State Polls from 2020 to 2022. Its margin of error is +/- 4%
