Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday sought to claim that he can do what no third-party or independent candidate in modern American history has accomplished: win the presidential election. Opinion polls show Kennedy far behind, but both major political parties, President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, see him as a potential spoiler.
Speaking at a rally on Long Island, a suburb of New York City, Kennedy cited polls purportedly conducted by his campaign that showed him winning in two scenarios. The first time was against Trump without Biden.
He claimed he was behind in a three-way race because “so many Americans are voting out of fear.”
“Their only strategy is to keep me from voting and scare everyone away from Donald Trump,” he said of Democrats, adding of Republicans, “On the contrary, they’re doing the same thing.” . “When someone tells you to vote out of fear, they are trying to manipulate you into abandoning your values,” he says.
Kennedy acknowledged to a crowd in Holbrook, New York that Biden and Trump are different in many ways.
“If you look at their personalities, temperaments, presentations, ideologies, approaches to life and interactions with other people, there are huge differences,” he says.
But he said issues on which Biden and Trump have very different positions, such as abortion, border security, guns and transgender rights, are “culture war issues that will be used to divide us all.” ” he claimed. He said there was no significant difference in their positions on the national debt and chronic disease, issues he called “vital to our country.”
While discussing the prevalence of chronic diseases, Kennedy lamented the disproportionately high death rate from the coronavirus in the United States compared to death rates in other developed countries; This is a contributing factor to the relatively low vaccination rate, he said. He campaigned against.
He said the country’s poor response to COVID-19 is contrary to scientific evidence showing the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and data showing higher death rates in states with lower vaccination rates. suggested that this was a sign of a backlash against vaccines.
“No matter what we did, no matter what we did, it was wrong,” Kennedy said, referring to vaccination mandates, lockdowns and other pandemic responses.
