The Democratic War Room Against RFK Jr.

Smith is leading the party’s efforts to reduce support for Kennedy and thus his potential disruptive power in this year’s presidential election. She shared insights from the Democratic “war room” on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive. “One thing we’ve found is that even though (RFK) is currently polling at 10 to 15 percent, a lot of voters who say they favor him or are willing to vote for him don’t know much about it. about him beyond his last name,” Smith says. Plus, “the more people hear or see RFK Jr.,” she says, “the more they learn about him, the less they like him. “.

This is what Democrats (and some Republicans) are banking on. “It’s our job to fill in the blanks for voters,” Smith says. “To let them know he’s a spoiler for Donald Trump. To let them know that a vote for RFK is a useless vote. And to clearly explain the issues of this election. Smith prepared for the podcast with anti-RFK arguments that doubled as anti-Trump arguments: “He was recruited by Trump’s allies, he’s funded by Trump’s biggest donor, and his team has identified stopping Biden as their main goal.

Smith says she’s not opposed to third-party candidates in theory — “I don’t think having more choices is a bad thing” — but “at the end of the day, there are only two people in this election with a realistic path to victory, and these two people are Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That’s why the Democratic Party has established a formal effort to warn voters about third-party candidates. “This is the first time in history that a war room like this has existed,” Smith says. “And it came about because Democrats finally learned the lessons of the 2000 and 2016 elections: when third-party candidates played the role of spoilers and threw the election away for Republicans with disastrous results. »

Democrats have certainly not forgotten how candidates like the Green Party candidate Jill Stein moved the votes away from Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We ensure that third-party candidates receive similar scrutiny that traditional major party candidates receive,” Smith said. In practice, that means “we’re basically living and breathing everything about RFK Jr. right now,” she says. “We listen to or watch all of his interviews, all of his events, and we go out and make sure voters are fully informed about him. »

This opposition research effort is imitated, to a certain extent, by the Republicans. “They understand, as we do, that RFK Jr. could be a wild card in this election,” Smith says. But pro-Trump forces are “divided” on Kennedy’s candidacy, Smith says. One day, Fox Sean Hannity hits him on air; the next day, Hannity’s prime-time colleague Jesse Watters is questioning him. “Biden and Trump go on the offensive against RFK,” a banner on Watters’ show proclaimed during the interview.