RFK Jr. Looks Likely to Win First 2 Dem Primary Season Contests as States Prepare to Defy Biden
President Joe Biden is headed for a ballot embarrassment — and he’s got his party’s racial obsession to blame.
With the presidential primary season getting closer by the day, Biden’s campaign is poised to give away two early contests for the Democratic nomination to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., best known as an anti-vaccine activist and a member of the Democratic royal family.
And according to a poll released Wednesday, Kennedy is also scoring higher approval ratings than any other name in the presidential field.
In The Economist/YouGov poll, the son of former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had a combined favorability rating of 49 percent, higher than both Biden (45 percent) and the leading GOP contender, former President Donald Trump (43 percent).
For Trump, of course, Kennedy is no competition — at least not on the immediate horizon. The former president has Republican rivals to worry about. But for Biden, a man who struggled to win his party’s nomination fight in 2020, it could be a different story.
The problem for the president stems from the February decision by the Democratic National Committee — supported by Biden — to make South Carolina the first state on the Democratic primary calendar, as reported at the time by ABC News.
The move was a sop to the party’s black politicians and activists — and a repayment for South Carolina’s role in resuscitating the flailing Biden nomination campaign in 2020.
But it also stripped New Hampshire of its century-old position as the first primary state and Iowa of its decade-long prominence as the first caucus state — and both states are being defiant.
New Hampshire state law mandates that it be the first state to hold a primary, and its lawmakers took no action to change that this year. Iowa Democrats are likely to hold their caucus in January, according to a May report in the Des Moines Register.
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That all adds up to the very real possibility that Biden won’t even submit his name to be on the ballot in either state.
And for Biden and the Democratic Pary, that means an embarrassment and a stunning display of party dissension right at the outset of the 2024 campaign.
It’s all, of course, thanks to the party’s racial politics. New Hampshire and Iowa are overwhelmingly white, as Axios noted Thursday. New Hampshire is about 87 percent white, Iowa 82 percent.
South Carolina, meanwhile, is majority-white but only about 62 percent — meaning it has a much larger percentage of black voters. And it was black voters, with the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn, who gave Biden the primary victory in the Palmetto State in February 2020, as PBS reported, after his losses in New Hampshire, Iowa and Nevada.
If New Hampshire and Iowa persist in holding their elections before South Carolina, they would likely be stripped of their delegates, Axios reported, meaning they would be nothing more than a beauty contest. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have an impact — highlighting the thralldom of Democrats, and Biden in particular, to the black Democratic vote.
Biden’s captivity to Democratic racial politics is no secret, of course. The United States has a manifestly incompetent vice president in Kamala Harris and a manifestly dishonest Supreme Court justice in Ketanji Brown Jackson simply because of the president’s forced pandering to black women.
But those gestures didn’t cost Biden politically — they strengthened him with his party’s base, even if their craven nature made sane Americans despise him more. His deliberate snubbing of Democratic voters in New Hampshire and Iowa could be a different matter — considering the momentum RFK Jr.’s likely wins there could give Kennedy’s campaign.
Conservatives and Republicans have no reason to reminisce about the Kennedys. For more than half a century, the family has inflicted its progressive politics on the United States while its own wealth protected it from any of the downsides. The assassinated President John F. Kennedy and his brother, RFK Jr.’s father, are enshrined in popular culture thanks to their early deaths.
(Considering that those deaths were at the hands of a communist and a Palestinian terrorist, respectively, it might make a sensible person wonder why Democrats haven’t taken a hint about the dangers of those two political pathologies, but Democrats do what Democrats do.)
Ted Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s uncle, never became president, thankfully, but spent decades in the Senate inflicting incalculable damage on the country (not to mention the family of Mary Jo Kopechne, the campaign aide who died about 40 years before Ted, and in considerably less comfortable circumstances).
Among other things, his character assassination of then-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1988, by itself, helped poison the politics of the country to the point where they are today.
To be clear, RFK Jr. might be making some of the right noises now, but he likely wouldn’t be much of an improvement on old Uncle Ted — there aren’t any conservatives slurping clam chowder at the Cape Cod compound.
But for Democrats, the Kennedy name no doubt still holds magic particularly compared with the doddering Joe Biden, who looks more corrupt every day.
Whoever wins the Republican nomination is going to have plenty of ammunition to use against the president — the increasingly serious allegations of bribery, the disaster on the nation’s southern border and ruinous inflation fed by Democratic spending, to name just a few.
Democrats and the establishment media would like the country to forget how hard it was for Biden to win his party’s nomination in 2020 (before going on to supposedly win 81 million votes in the general election!). But under the surface of party unity, the Democrats have serious issues to work out — with the chief one being that a large number of Democrats, both voters and officeholders, are simply insane.
Starting off the nomination race with two self-inflicted losses is looking like one more burden for the Biden campaign — and he’s got only his party’s obsession with skin color to blame.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
