Contrarian or crank? The zeitgeisty campaign of RFK Jr.

Until recently, George Stuscavage didn’t know much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He knew Mr. Kennedy was skeptical of vaccines and that a lot of people disagreed with him. But Mr. Stuscavage, a retired bowling center manager from North Port, Florida, didn’t really have strong opinions on vaccines. 

Then the pandemic happened, with its mandated lockdowns and public health orders. Mr. Stuscavage found himself increasingly doubting the advice and motives of those in authority, who seemed intent on shutting down any form of dissent.

So when Mr. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination in April – vowing to end the “corrupt merger of state and corporate power” that, he said, was threatening to “poison our children and our people with chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs, to strip-mine our assets, to hollow out the middle class and keep us in a constant state of war” – Mr. Stuscavage was captivated. Since then, he estimates he’s spent more than 100 hours listening to Mr. Kennedy’s appearances on various podcasts.

To the surprise of many political strategists and pollsters, Mr. Stuscavage is far from alone. In a number of highly rated June polls, Mr. Kennedy was found to have double-digit support among voters, with, in some cases, close to 1 in 5 Democratic voters favoring him over incumbent President Joe Biden.

Some of that can be attributed to his name. When asked by the Monitor what they like about the longtime environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic, several supporters cite their appreciation for former President John F. Kennedy (Mr. Kennedy’s uncle), or former attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (Mr. Kennedy’s father), or just the Kennedy family in general. Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm for President Biden – national polls suggest fewer than 40% want Mr. Biden to be their nominee in 2024 – is likely also boosting Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy. 

But another undeniable thread of support is coming from liberal and conservative voters alike who have become alienated from America’s two-party system and the public and private institutions that are entwined with it. Just as former President Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the GOP in 2016 by tapping into voters’ political and economic frustrations, Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy seems emblematic of a post-Jan. 6, post-pandemic nation, where distrust and conspiracy theories surround everything from elections to public health to the news itself. 

To be sure, it’s unlikely Mr. Kennedy will pose any real threat to Mr. Biden’s path to the nomination. The Biden campaign has ignored his candidacy so far, while other Democratic Party operatives openly dismiss him as a crank.

“Joe Biden is going to be in a solid position next November because of the extremism we have seen from folks like RFK and across the Republican Party,” says strategist Andrew Feldman. “We pride ourselves on being a big tent. But what RFK Jr. has been pushing has no place in our party.”

Still, less-well-known candidates than Mr. Kennedy have managed to play spoiler in past elections. He has ties to prominent figures from the tech and finance industries, who’ve held fundraisers for him and spoken approvingly about his candidacy, as well as to Hollywood through his third wife, actress Cheryl Hines.

And even if Mr. Kennedy’s current poll numbers represent the high-water mark for his campaign, the grassroots support fueling his bid offers a telling window into this polarized, skeptical moment in American politics – when many voters don’t feel at home in either political party, and the line between “truth” and “misinformation” seems increasingly blurred.

“He talks rationally, reasonably, and he doesn’t dismiss anyone’s opinion,” says Mr. Stuscavage. “So much of what we hear on TV is proven wrong. The way they ridiculed anyone who believed the [COVID-19] lab leak – and now it looks like it’s true. All this stuff is enraging to me.”

A life in the public eye

On paper, Mr. Kennedy certainly has the pedigree to be a contender in a Democratic primary. A scion of America’s most famous political family, he was a young boy when his uncle John F. Kennedy was elected president. He was a teenager when his father announced his own presidential campaign, before he too, like his brother, was assassinated. Mr. Kennedy, who struggled with drug addiction as a young man, attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia School of Law before becoming a prominent environmental lawyer known for holding powerful, polluting corporations to account. He was a leader in cleaning up New York’s Hudson River and founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, one of the largest water protection groups in the world.

Then, in the early 2000s, as Mr. Kennedy was speaking out about the dangers of mercury in fish, his interests expanded.

“These women start showing up at every lecture that I give,” Mr. Kennedy recounted to podcast host Joe Rogan in a recent interview. The mothers of “intellectually disabled children” would arrive early and sit in the front row and ask to speak with Mr. Kennedy after his lecture. They told him that they believed their children were injured by mercury in vaccines. “They would say to me in a respectful but vaguely scolding way, ‘If you are really interested in mercury contamination, exposure to children, you need to look at the vaccines.’”

As Mr. Kennedy tells it, his years of work for environmental causes had predisposed him to trust sources in the field over scientists. Fishers, he says, often know about water problems before government officials. He started reading studies on mercury in vaccines and soon became consumed. In 2005 he wrote an infamous article for Salon arguing that vaccines cause autism – an article that was subject to multiple corrections and eventually taken down from the site. Undaunted by the criticism, Mr. Kennedy went on to found the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to the vaccine issue, and to publish books on the subject. Numerous scientific studies have not found any link between autism and vaccines.

Over the past two decades, Mr. Kennedy has prominently voiced other debunked or unsubstantiated claims, including that the CIA was involved in the assassinations of his uncle and father, and that Democrat John Kerry actually won the 2004 election against former President George W. Bush. He has posited that Wi-Fi harms the brain, that a harmful chemical in the water supply is causing gender dysphoria, and that the rise in mass shootings is linked to antidepressants.

But it’s the vaccine issue that seems to have drawn in many of his supporters. When the COVID-19 pandemic upended American life in early 2020, and getting back to normal was in many places predicated upon a brand-new vaccine that had been developed in record time, anti-vaccine sentiment suddenly became a much louder voice in the public square.

“Vaccines have been one of the most important medical advancements in human history – saved countless lives,” said Mr. Rogan, who has been criticized for recommending discredited COVID-19 remedies to his millions of followers, when speaking with Mr. Kennedy on an episode that aired last month. “And I thought very strongly that they were important. ... Then the pandemic happens.” 

Mr. Kennedy, who says he is not opposed to vaccines but is concerned with vaccine safety, was poised to pick up the charge. In 2021, he published his book “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” which sold over 1 million copies and brought a new round of notoriety, setting the stage for his presidential run.   

The podcast circuit

That Mr. Kennedy’s book on Dr. Fauci was harshly criticized and even removed by some sellers only further endeared him to supporters. To many, the attacks on Mr. Kennedy were symbolic of America’s diminishing protections around free speech, as mainstream news outlets and social media companies suppressed “anti-vax” voices for posing a danger to public health. Instagram banned Mr. Kennedy’s account two years ago for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” before reinstating it last month due to his presidential campaign. 

Just as Mr. Kennedy’s support reflects a growing distrust of institutions and expertise, his approach to campaigning speaks to 2023’s fractured media landscape. He has appeared primarily on podcasts, speaking for hours at a time with popular hosts who are critical of traditional media like Mr. Rogan, Bill Maher, Bari Weiss, and Russell Brand. 

“I do have a chance with podcasts, because I’m able to outrun the censorship juggernaut,” Mr. Kennedy recently told The New Yorker.

Rather than reducing his visibility, this strategy appears to be paying dividends at a time when network news is “significantly reduced in power,” says Matt Sienkiewicz, chair of the communications department at Boston College and author of a book on right-wing comedy and podcasters like Mr. Rogan. Mr. Kennedy’s momentum should be seen as “largely a media story,” he says.

“It’s unprecedented to have such a national reach with such unbounded time frames,” says Mr. Sienkiewicz. “The idea of getting 90 or 120 minutes with a national audience like Rogan has – that’s completely new, and well suited for a candidacy like this. Without these opportunities, it would be hard to see him where he is now.”

Not all presidential candidates want to participate in such long, wide-ranging conversations, for fear of saying something that could be used against them later. “[South Carolina Sen.] Tim Scott isn’t going to want to talk to Joe Rogan for 190 minutes,” adds Mr. Sienkiewicz.

In that sense, Mr. Kennedy may have more in common with Mr. Trump than with Mr. Biden. Indeed, Mr. Trump has spoken favorably of Mr. Kennedy, and Trump ally Roger Stone recently tweeted out a mock “Trump-Kennedy 2024” campaign sign.  

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Kennedy “is not taken seriously, doesn’t have a lot of experience in politics, considers himself an outsider, and says things other candidates aren’t saying,” says Adam Enders, an expert on conspiracy theories at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. Most notably, both men blend “populist tendencies and an anti-elite flair” with just enough party-line policies to pacify some of the same elites they promise to fight, he says. 

Ideologically, Mr. Kennedy is hard to pin down. He supports abortion rights and affirmative action but opposes gender-transition treatments for minors. He is skeptical of gun control measures, has been critical of U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, and says he would impose higher taxes on wealthy Americans. He hired former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich – one of Congress’ most liberal members – as his campaign manager but speaks highly of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has lavished praise on him in return.

The Kennedy campaign did not respond to requests for comment.  

Fans on the left and right

Scroll through some of the Kennedy for President Facebook groups, and it’s clear that his outsider persona is a big source of his appeal. In these forums, Republicans and Democrats alike vent their frustrations with the two parties and their likely presidential nominees. Many see Mr. Kennedy as a fresher option, despite the fact that he’s only eight years younger than Mr. Trump and 11 years younger than Mr. Biden. Women re-post and “like” recent videos of Mr. Kennedy bench-pressing and doing pushups, shirtless. 

“It’s time for the next generation to step up,” says Ray Tetro, a retiree from New Jersey who voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020, and now supports Mr. Kennedy for 2024. “I think he represents the values of a younger generation.”

Many Kennedy supporters also say America needs a different kind of leader to “unite” the country. 

“Biden said on the stump, ‘I am going to bring this country together,’ but he didn’t even make it to the Oval Office before that went down the drain,” says Vicki Little, who retired from local newspaper delivery in upstate New York. After voting for Mr. Trump twice, she already has the paperwork to change her party registration from Republican to Democrat so she can vote in her state’s primary for Mr. Kennedy. 

Ms. Little especially likes the fact that she, a former Trump supporter, can have good conversations about Mr. Kennedy with her daughter, a Bernie Sanders supporter. 

The “horseshoe theory” in political science posits that voters on the far right and far left can be closer together ideologically than either are with moderate voters, and some see Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy as evidence of this. Others see his mashup of support as more a sign that tribal identification isn’t really about a set of deeply held beliefs. “People can be polarized about certain things, and they can be polarized in this squishy, identity-based way,” as the University of Louisville’s Mr. Enders puts it. 

Mr. Stuscavage considers himself a “conservative independent” and has always voted for Republicans. He’s even volunteered for the campaigns of conservatives like former Texas Rep. Ron Paul and the late Arizona Sen. John McCain. He voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but soon grew disenchanted with him, changing his party registration from Republican to nonpartisan and sitting out the 2020 election. Next year, when he plans to vote for Mr. Kennedy, will be the first time he has ever voted for a Democrat.

“We have been deceived for so long, and by both parties,” says Mr. Stuscavage. “[Mr. Kennedy] is the person needed to change the debate. We need a lightning rod in the White House who speaks the truth.”