RFK Jr’s ‘major announcement’ was a slideshow asking Biden to drop out

Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, the presumptive third-party candidate in the 2024 presidential election, summoned the nation’s media on Wednesday to an office building in downtown Brooklyn, next door to Norm’s Pizza, to make a “major announcement.”

Admittedly, the threshold for major announcements at this point in the campaign calendar, the dead zone between primaries and the conventions, is extremely low, but even by those standards, he fell drastically short.

What he delivered, instead, was a meandering PowerPoint presentation that he used to demonstrate that he was not a spoiler candidate (that’s the term given to when one political candidate who will clearly lose draws enough votes away from another candidate to ensure their defeat). Given that “spoiler candidate” has become something of an unofficial slogan for Mr Kennedy’s campaign, he faced an uphill battle.

After an uncomfortable minute spent trying to find his opening slide, Mr Kennedy presented a dizzying array of maps and polls and tweets to make his argument.

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He brought to the screen a “mammoth” Zogby poll commissioned by his campaign, with a sample size of 26,408 people — statistical overkill, in other words — that showed president Joe Biden would lose to former president Donald Trump in a head-to-head race if the election was held today.

The same poll showed Mr Kennedy narrowly beating Trump, he said, in a head-to-head-race. He invited the press to check his numbers at (www.kennedy24.com/spoiler).

The problem here, of course, is that Mr Kennedy is not the Democratic Party candidate, and unless he convinces the Democrats not to field a candidate for the first time in the party’s history, head-to-head polls don’t mean much.

One of his slides was simply the dictionary definition of the word “spoiler,” in its full glory.

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Barack Obama inspired the youth vote in 2008 with his soaring oratory. RJK Jnr, who has pitched himself as a candidate for disaffected young Americans, is doing it with his dictionary.

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Channeling Richard Nixon’s infamous “I am not a crook” speech, and similarly protesting too much, he insisted again and again that only he could defeat Donald Trump.

“The people who think that I’m spoiling at this point for president Biden need to look at data,” he said.

Mr Kennedy’s big announcement came towards the end of his slideshow. Blink and you could have missed it.

“No spoiler pledge,” the slide read.

In an act of blue-sky thinking the vaccine-sceptic Kennedy campaign has become known for, the pitch was for the Biden campaign to agree to co-fund and conduct a 50-state poll in mid-October, just a few weeks before election day, to discover who would make for the strongest head-to-head candidate against Mr Trump.

The loser, according to the pledge, would drop out.

“Ultimately, I think what we all want in this election is for Americans not to feel like they vote out of fear. That they feel like they can vote out of hope. That is only going to happen if there’s a two-way race,” Mr Kennedy said.

It was a brazen pitch: Asking both of the two main party candidates to drop out of a race on the strength of a Clipart rendering of an imaginary map.

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Still, there is another story here. The Kennedy campaign has been dogged by accusations that he is acting as a spoiler since the moment it launched. What is interesting about those claims, however, is that the people making them have changed.

As an heir to one of the most revered Democratic political dynasties in the country’s history, political observers thought that even a failed campaign by the son of Bobby Kennedy would damage Mr Biden.

The Trump campaign could hardly believe its luck, and the former president initially praised him as a “very smart person.”

But as the months dragged on, it became clear that the kind of audience that Mr Kennedy was attracting and the kind of media hits he was doing may indicate that he would instead be a drag on Mr Trump. The latest polls indeed show that to be the case, which led to Mr Trump going on the attack.

Over the weekend, Mr Trump made at least four Truth Social posts attacking Mr Kennedy, falsely asserting he is a “Democratic plant” installed to help President Joe Biden win, that he is more liberal than any other candidate and that his views on vaccines are “fake.”

Mr Kennedy replied with his own social media post.

“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged,” he wrote on X. “President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”

It was perhaps being tarred with the spoiler brush by both sides that Mr Kennedy felt the need to hold his press conference and beat the allegations.

The thing about candidate viability is that it is intangible. There is no set of specific personality traits required for someone to be able to win an election — the shock of Trump’s victory all-but proved that much. But one thing is for sure: If you have to keep shouting that you are viable, you probably aren’t.