Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made denunciations of his own party a centerpiece of his campaign, attacking leaders with a blend of unfounded election-rigging allegations and real complaints about the disadvantages he faces in the nominating process.
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison decided Tuesday that the party needed to respond.
“[I]t is clear that there are serious misunderstandings of the Democratic nominating process that are important to correct,” Harrison wrote in the letter to the Kennedy campaign obtained by The Post. “I am hopeful that a meeting with our Delegate Selection leadership team will prevent future instances of voters receiving erroneous information that could cause confusion about the equity of the Democratic nominating process.”
Kennedy and his campaign manager, former Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, have in recent days claimed that Georgia officials are plotting to strip Kennedy from that state’s ballot for campaigning in New Hampshire; that Democrats have been talking about making Kennedy pay for the cost of primaries; and that party rules have been changed to allow insiders to overrule the will of voters on the first ballot at the convention.
Those claims are either inaccurate or without foundation. Even after reading Harrison’s letter refuting them, Kucinich continued to maintain that they might still be true in the future or that they were true in different ways than initially described. He said he does not trust the word of party leaders since the DNC is working closely with President Biden’s reelection campaign.
“Once the party breached impartiality nothing they say is believable,” Kucinich said.
The refusal of both sides to agree on the plain facts that govern the nominating process, even in the face of clearly written rules, is likely to deepen divisions. Kennedy and his team have started to say in recent months that party leaders will never allow him to win the nomination, even if he beats Biden at the polls, which current polling suggests is unlikely. In August, he polled between 7 and 17 percent nationally among Democratic primary voters in public polls, or roughly 50 points or more behind Biden.
“I think the American people will always appreciate candidates who have the courage and nerve to believe they could win a rigged game,” Kucinich said.
Kennedy has accused his party of “fixing the process so it makes it almost impossible to have democracy function” and “disenfranchising the Democratic voters from having any choice in who becomes the Democratic nominee.”
His concern centers on the dual role the DNC is playing, as both an integral part of Biden’s campaign effort and as the referee of a nominating process that could result in Biden’s defeat at the convention. Party leaders have refused to schedule primary debates with candidates like Kennedy because Biden is an incumbent running for reelection, following a precedent both parties have used for decades.
But the Kennedy attacks also echo the broader focus of his campaign, which has centered on sometimes true, sometimes false and often unproven claims that powerful people are secretly lying about matters of great importance. Kennedy has presented himself as a truth-teller who is assiduous about correcting himself if he makes an error.