Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has revealed what he says is his path to the White House as he faces increased pressure from the Biden and Trump campaigns targeting what some have described as his "spoiler" candidacy.
"All we need to do is get to 33% to win the election," Kennedy told Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo last week on his show "World Over," which appears on EWTN Global Catholic Network.
"You don't need 50%. It's a three-way race — and it's really a five-way race," he added, referencing independent candidate Dr. Cornel West and Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein.
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Kennedy told Arroyo he was already close to that 33% "in a bunch of states," appearing to cite internal polling, and argued he has an advantage over President Biden and former President Donald Trump when it came to young voters.
According to a number of recent public polls, Kennedy is polling better than any third-party candidate has since Texas businessman Ross Perot's back-to-back White House runs in the 1990s, and is doing particularly well with voters under the age of 35. He is, however, still trailing Trump and Biden in the demographic.
A Quinnipiac poll released last week found Kennedy with 16% support overall, with Trump and Biden each at 37%. He pulled significant support from Trump and Biden with voters aged 18-34, garnering 19% support, but still trailed the former president (34%) and president (30%).
The same poll taken last fall showed Kennedy leading Trump and Biden with voters aged 18-34, getting 39% to their 27% and 32% respectively. However, that poll did not include West and Stein.
One former Bernie Sanders pollster, Ben Tulchin, recently sounded the alarm over Kennedy pulling so much young support from Biden. Last week, he told The New York Times he was worried about Biden's chances of winning re-election because of Kennedy's appeal to the demographic, as well as Latino voters.
"Young voters and Latinos respond really well to a hard-edge economic populist message — and that is not Biden’s message," Tulchin said. "They’re dissatisfied about the political and economic status quo. And I see in that mind-set the potential opening to support a third-party candidate," he said.
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To prevent that from happening, the Democratic National Committee launched an effort to silence the threat to Biden's re-election from third-party candidates, namely Kennedy, in the form of a team that is expected to actively combat them with legal challenges and opposition research.
Likewise, Trump recently railed against Kennedy as a "wasted protest vote" in a post on Truth Social, and his campaign has launched a website targeting the latter as "radical f-----g Kennedy," describing him as a "friend of left-wing extremists."
Additionally, Biden appeared alongside six members of Kennedy's family as they endorsed him over their own, a clear snub in conjunction with the DNC's efforts.
Both sides have also accused Kennedy of being a "plant" in order to help boost the other side, something he vehemently denies.
