Republicans have made it clear that they hope Robert Kennedy Jr.’s campaign damages Biden.
An April 21-24 Fox News poll is showing Kennedy at 19%, and that network has been been frequently covering the campaign, as one might expect.
The Washington Post points out that name recognition is clearly a significant factor in the surprising poll numbers, as well as the number of Democrats saying they don’t want Biden to run.
Now Kennedy is showing up on other networks, including ABC and CNN.
ABC News is saying it edited an interview with Kennedy to exclude remarks he made about Covid vaccines.
“We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines,” ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis said. “We’ve used our editorial judgment in not including portions of that exchange in our interview.”
CNN also ran an interview with Kennedy in which the discussion was about censorship, the direction of the country, and his comparison of the Holocaust to Covid protocols. Kennedy said the media made up the comparison, and that he and his family were damaged by the media’s censorship of him.
Really.
The WaPo specifically cites the name Robert Kennedy Jr. in an Alabama Senate election in 2017, and how the name produced an artificial “sugar high.”
The 2017 Alabama U.S. Senate special election featured a candidate by the name of Robert Kennedy Jr. (no actual relation this time). And a late Democratic primary poll showed him with a shocking share of the vote: 49 percent. That was more than 20 points ahead of the national party’s favored candidate, Doug Jones, despite Kennedy not seeming to have run an actual campaign.
“I understand that my name will give me some points,” that Robert Kennedy Jr. said when the poll came out. “But to suggest that my name in that particular poll gave me 49 points is disrespectful to the voters.”
Three weeks later, he received 18 percent of the vote, losing to Jones by nearly 50 points.