He’s controversial. He has a famous last name. His candidacy may determine who’s the next U.S. president.
And on Saturday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was at Kotecki’s Grandview Grove in West Seneca to speak at an event sponsored by the Constitutional Coalition of New York State. More than 300 people attended the $50-per-seat event, listening to the independent presidential candidate lecture about vaccines, environmental protection, Constitutional rights, and health and politics.
After a brief story about his first trip to Buffalo when he was 10, Kennedy launched into a 40-minute speech about the country’s national debt, involvement in wars and his priority of ending the chronic disease epidemic.
“None of the presidential candidates are going to talk about this and none of them are going to do anything about it,” Kennedy said.
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Kennedy also focused plenty on his criticism on the country’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the trust-the-experts approach to vaccinations, arguing that merely trusting the experts is not how democracy works.
“If you don’t think the government is lying to you, you’re not paying attention,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy, the son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is a polarizing figure in the U.S. presidential race. He’s an environmental lawyer who has been criticized for his views on vaccines as well as pushing what some deem conspiracy theories. Still, his famous name and his appeal among voters disenchanted with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump means he could play the role of spoiler in determining which of the two candidates emerges victorious this November.
Kennedy’s campaign is racing to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, something that won’t be easy as an independent candidate.
Kennedy has reportedly officially qualified for ballot access in three states – Utah, Michigan and Hawaii – and his campaign has claimed it has enough signatures to get him on the ballot in several other states.
New York is among the more difficult states to get on the ballot as an independent candidate, requiring a minimum of 45,000 signatures during a narrow six-week window that ends May 28.
In an interview with The Buffalo News this week, Kennedy said his campaign has volunteers working in almost every county in New York State to collect signatures. In the campaign’s first week of gathering signatures, Kennedy said they were able to collect 10,000.
“We’re going to shoot for about 80,000,” Kennedy said.
Campaign volunteers were busy gathering signatures at Saturday’s event, as attendees drank coffee and munched on doughnut holes while waiting for Kennedy to arrive.
Niagara Falls resident Patrick Posey, dressed in a tie-dye Kennedy shirt, grabbed a good seat in the fourth row. Posey, who is interested in access to better food, air and water, said he is drawn to Kennedy’s environmental views and admires his past work helping to clean up the Hudson River.
If Kennedy is on the ballot in New York come November, Posey plans to vote for him.
“I like his ideas, and I like how he’s trying to maybe be less polarizing,” Posey said. “He seems to be the best of both parties.”
Kennedy’s controversial views
Kennedy has had no shortage of views that have generated controversy, perhaps none more so than his stance on vaccines.
In an interview with The News, Kennedy claimed his views on vaccines have been “distorted in the media.”
“If people want to get vaccinated, they ought to be able to, and we ought to have good science – safety science and efficacy science – on every vaccine, and we ought to be open and transparent about it,” said Kennedy, adding that “we should all have informed choice.”
But a deep examination by the Associated Press in July, which reviewed campaign finance filings and Kennedy’s public statements, found “that the anti-vaccine movement lies at the heart of his campaign.” Kennedy also leads Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group mostly known for its anti-vaccine views and claims.
Further, a three-part series by FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, found Kennedy has opposed vaccines since at least 2005, around the time he penned an article in Rolling Stone and Salon that peddled the since debunked idea that certain vaccine ingredients cause autism.
And in 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the Center for Countering Digital Hate put Kennedy on its “Disinformation Dozen,” described as 12 anti-vaxxers who played major roles in spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines.
Dr. Thomas Russo, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases in the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, called the Covid-19 vaccines “a critically important public health tool,” imperfect at preventing infection but effective at decreasing the likelihood that a person will get severely ill from the virus.
“Individuals that have disseminated misinformation about it have really been detrimental to the health and well-being of people in this country,” Russo said. “And it’s sort of sad and frustrating, because many Covid bad outcomes are preventable through vaccination.”
What he’s running on
When asked by The News about the issues he’s running on, Kennedy did not mention vaccines in his three-minute answer.
Instead, he homed in on economic issues such as affordability and specifically the “unavailability of housing for an entire generation of kids.”
He said the younger population will be a generation of renters if the housing crisis continues, and he called that scenario “a disaster for America.” He argued homeowners are more ingrained in their communities, likely to care deeply about schools, hospitals and other local institutions. Homeowners, he said, also build equity, which he said is important for those who have “an entrepreneurial impulse” that they want to pursue.
“The central promise of the American dream when I was growing up was that if you worked hard, and you played by the rules, you could finance a home, you could take a summer vacation, you could put something aside for your retirement and raise your family on a single job,” Kennedy said.
He said younger generations such as millennials – those born between 1981 and 1996 – no longer “believe that promise applies to them, and they’re losing faith in our country.”
Kennedy said he also wants to unravel the country’s “addiction to forever wars,” end the chronic disease epidemic for Americans and focus on good food and regenerative agriculture, rather than processed foods.
Kennedy is a former senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and had built a reputation for efforts to clean up waterways.
But on April 19, the National Resources Defense Council Action Fund called on Kennedy to drop out of the presidential race.
“Joe Biden is the real environmental candidate in this race,” said Manish Bapna, the action fund’s president and CEO.
Could Kennedy determine the winner?
Shawn Donahue, an assistant professor of political science at UB, said Kennedy’s views don’t fit in one particular basket.
“I think he has some views that are more liberal and some views that are more conservative, more aligned with Trump,” Donahue said.
That means Kennedy is a hard candidate to figure out, making it difficult to know whether he will take more voters away from Trump or Biden.
National polls have come to different conclusions.
A recent NBC News poll, with a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points, showed Biden with a 2-point advantage over Trump, at 39% to 37%. In that poll, which includes five named candidates, Kennedy got 13% of the vote, while other third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West received 3% and 2%, respectively.
In the head-to-head matchup, that poll found Trump led Biden by 2 percentage points, 46% to 44%.
Other earlier polls, however, have shown Kennedy chipping into Biden, likely off the strength of his famous name.
Donahue said that’s likely a primary reason why more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family endorsed Biden at a campaign stop April 18 in Philadelphia.
When asked about those endorsements by The News, Kennedy said there are 105 members of his family and several of them are working on his campaign.
“We’re a big Irish family,” Kennedy said. “There’s rarely any issues on which we all agree.”
Donahue also noted that many Americans have a negative view of Biden and Trump. A Gallup poll released in January found Biden was viewed favorably by 41% of U.S. adults, versus 42% for Trump.
That creates an opening for a candidate such as Kennedy to lure some votes.
But it’s difficult to know which voters he’ll get.
As Kennedy put it: “I draw voters from across the spectrum.”
Former Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw, a Trump supporter and Republican politician, was outside Kennedy’s event in West Seneca, handing out flyers supporting Trump and criticizing “RFK’s left-wing agenda.”
In a statement Saturday, Erie County Democratic Party chairman Jeremy Zellner said Kennedy "is the flip side of the Trump coin and differs very little from the MAGA extremism that now defines the American Right."
A long-planned event
Nancie Orticelli, president of the Constitutional Coalition of New York State, said her organization started planning Saturday’s event before Kennedy announced his presidential campaign last year.
Orticelli described her organization as “pretty much nonpartisan, even though we do subscribe to a lot of conservative ideologies based on the Constitution.” Zellner has previously called the Constitutional Coalition “a far-right extremist group.”
One of the coalition’s biggest priorities is what Orticelli called “medical freedom,” particularly as it pertains to vaccines.
“We’re not saying vaccines are bad,” said Orticelli, a West Seneca resident. “We’re saying that people should have a choice, whether or not to inject themselves with something that they may not trust fully.”
The Constitutional Coalition became more involved in that topic in 2019 when New York State decided to no longer allow religious exemptions from mandated vaccinations for children attending school.
She made clear, however, that Saturday’s event was not an endorsement of Kennedy.
In fact, she noted, most coalition members and followers “are probably voting for President Trump.”
Jon Harris can be reached at 716-849-3482 or jharris@buffnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ByJonHarris.