When Joe Biden reached the microphone in the White House’s East Room at a St. Patrick’s Day brunch this weekend, the first person he singled out in the crowd was Ireland’s prime minister. The next three were Kennedys.
He greeted Joe III, the ex-congressman and current envoy to Northern Ireland; Kerry, the human-rights activist; and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor and current Labor Department adviser.
The shout-outs weren’t terribly subtle: Joe is the nephew and Kerry and Kathleen are the sisters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nor was Kerry’s subsequent X post featuring over 50 beaming Kennedy family members surrounding Biden. “It’s not enough to wish the world were better, you must make the world better,” she wrote.
But then, none of it was supposed to be subtle. The message was sent: The majority of the famous political family stands with Biden, not their rogue vaccine-skeptic brother running for president as an independent. It was just one particularly public piece of a broad and well-funded backstage effort at the top of the Democratic Party this spring to address obstacles to a straightforward Biden-versus–Donald Trump rematch that those around the president are banking on in order to win.
In recent weeks, the Democratic National Committee has built a unit dedicated to monitoring and responding to third-party candidates. The effort, overseen by longtime senior strategist Mary Beth Cahill and led by veteran operatives Ramsey Reid and Lis Smith, recently added Matt Corridoni, a frequent deputy to Smith, for communications help. Simultaneously, former Biden deputy campaign manager Pete Kavanuagh launched Clear Choice, a super-PAC whose goal is to help liberals coordinate their efforts to minimize third-party candidates’ political influence by the fall. Rather than planning a big negative-ad campaign now, the push is intended to organize previously disparate efforts to mount legal challenges to third-party campaigns’ attempts to get on ballots, and to research the candidates’ pasts.
For months, leading Democrats’ expectation had been that the No Labels group would pose the greatest threat to Biden, but the organization now looks unlikely to field a well-known ticket of its own — long gone is the dream of a Nikki Haley–Joe Manchin ticket, possibly replaced by a relatively anonymous long-ago governor of Utah and an ex-Dallas mayor. Though No Labels still maintains it is pushing forward, and both Jill Stein and Cornel West are still running, the overwhelming focus is now on Kennedy. And that means that opposition research — the efficacy of which has often been questioned at the presidential level in an age that’s redefined political dirt — is once again part of the equation.
“There’s a fairly unique opportunity for the first time since maybe 2016 where a major player potentially in the general election is relatively unknown, or without information saturation,” said one Democrat involved in the overall effort, speaking just hours after CNN reported that Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets quarterback rumored to be on Kennedy’s shortlist for running mate, shared conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting. (Rodgers mostly denied this.)
The overall shift to focus more on independent and third-party campaigns, and then on Kennedy specifically, is a long time coming. It was largely driven by Cahill, the former presidential campaign manager to John Kerry in 2004 who has been a senior figure at the DNC in recent years and who has convened leading liberals to plan for the third-party and independent threat since late last year. Donor interest spiked soon after, with well-heeled liberals looking for concrete ways to help Biden. A loose constellation of outside groups had been ramping up, and the clearest signs that the central party infrastructure would get involved came last month when the DNC began issuing statements and paying for billboards arguing Kennedy was helping elect Trump, and when it filed a legal complaint about Kennedy’s alleged illegal coordination with his super-PAC.
Though many of the Democrats involved in the effort are wary of talking about it or previewing their plans for fear of giving Kennedy fodder — he, like No Labels, has claimed he is being unfairly targeted by his former party — it is already clear that they will make sure voters associate Kennedy with Trump, and that he is in fact a “stalking horse” and a “spoiler.” They point to conservative mega-donor, Tim Mellon, who has been both the largest donor to Kennedy’s super-PAC (contributing $20 million) and one of Trump’s biggest backers, too (giving $15 million to his super-PAC). The political math behind the argument is straightforward: Leading Democrats believe that while voters don’t know much about Kennedy, the data suggests he takes more support from Biden than from Trump, and that pro-Trump forces are therefore eager to boost him. Much of his preliminary support appears to come from younger, male voters, and often Black and Latino ones — the exact group that Biden supporters are most concerned about maintaining. In those Democratic circles, it’s widely understood that Biden must keep as many of his 2020 supporters as possible to beat Trump, who they think cannot reach a majority of the vote.
The underlying alarm about Kennedy comes from the fact that this election could hinge on the results in just a few cities. “If you move 7,000 people in a couple of these states, that’s the ballgame. You’re not talking about flipping 100,000 Trump voters in Pennsylvania,” said one senior Democrat who’s been involved in the anti-Kennedy effort. That’s why much of the early work is likely to involve checking and possibly challenging Kennedy’s petitions to get on ballots in key states as long as he remains independent and doesn’t switch to the Libertarian Party in an attempt to secure their party’s spot on state ballots.
The DNC is far from alone in its legal plans. It has challenged Kennedy’s alleged illegal coordination with his super-PAC and so has Third Way, the centrist group that has been pivotal in combating No Labels’ efforts both publicly and privately for months. Meanwhile, even as the DNC operates its own research team to dig into opponents’ pasts, the Democrat-aligned super-PAC American Bridge is using its own, as well. Future Forward, the best-funded Democratic super-PAC and primary ad-running operation, may work to identify target voters and test the best messages to reach them. Already, Citizens to Save Our Republic, a group of longtime Washington grandees led in part by Dick Gephardt, has run television ads in D.C. warning the political class against third-party spoilers, and Democrats are discussing the best way to reach young progressive voters who might side with Stein or West as a way of rejecting Biden. Some party leaders still blame Stein for Trump’s win in 2016 and are thus planning now to treat the threat more seriously than then, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign mostly addressed their Stein problem by asking Bernie Sanders to rally his young lefty supporters for Clinton that fall.
This time, Biden’s allies feel extra pressure to minimize the third-party threat early. Much of their fundamental plan is to paint this election as a clear binary choice, which is why they are aiming to tie Kennedy to Trump now. “The thing that makes this so difficult is the sheer number of the electorate that doesn’t see this as a Biden-versus-Trump race,” explained one top operative who’s been monitoring Kennedy specifically as he’s hit 15 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls.
Still, part of the push remains unofficial, and within the corridors of power in Washington. No Labels may still mount a ticket, but its threat appears much less prominent now than six months ago thanks in large part to the pressure Third Way in particular exerted on its possible candidates, almost all of whom have passed on the group. (Biden’s team may still choose to aggressively challenge No Labels this summer, if it goes ahead with trying to get on swing state ballots even with a little-known candidate.) This work was joined by a handful of powerful Democrats who believe third-party candidates have had outsize influence on modern elections in general, and not just 2016. Bill Clinton, for example, remembers both 1992 and 2000 well, and he helped dissuade both Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan from running with No Labels.
Yet, as one strategist involved in the latest push told me, Kennedy requires a different kind of handling. Deterring the No Labels candidates was one thing, he said, but Kennedy “can’t be deterred” like that. “He’s a crazy person. The reason they’re freaking out about him is he’s right in front of them.”
It was no coincidence that by the end of Monday — less than 24 hours after Kerry Kennedy’s X post — at least four other Kennedys had amplified the family picture with Biden with their own comments. “You are the best @potus!” wrote one. That was Rory, yet another of Robert’s sisters.
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