The columnist Michelle Goldberg recently reported from a rally for the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She entered the event believing he would be a spoiler in the election, but whose chances might he spoil — President Biden’s or Donald Trump’s? In this audio essay, hear what Kennedy’s supporters told her about what’s motivating them.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece.
“The Opinions” is a collection of audio essays from Times Opinion. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Michelle Goldberg: I’m Michelle Goldberg. I’m a columnist for the New York Times Opinion section. I recently went to a rally for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in Oakland, Calif.
[TAPE OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.] We need to sit with each other and listen to the feelings and not walk away. And not see each other as enemies. And learn to love each other, even through that anger and vitriol. We need to start coming back to each other as Americans again.
Michelle Goldberg: It was at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, this huge auditorium that wasn’t anywhere close to full, although there were hundreds of people there, people who had very eccentric politics. I witnessed one interesting exchange outside, where somebody was collecting signatures to try to reinstate California’s three-strikes laws, basically to make criminal penalties stricter in California. And he went up to these two white-haired men, who really blanched, and they were like, “No, we’re from the left. We have no interest in law-and-order crackdowns.” One of them was wearing a button that said, “Ask me about 9/11,” which I actually didn’t because I didn’t have that much time.
Kennedy, it seems obvious, is going to play a spoiler role in this election, but it was very unclear to me who he was going to be a spoiler for. And in some ways, my favorite kinds of stories are the ones that you walk into really looking for the answer to a question and kind of not having much of a predetermined view one way or the other.
[TAPE OF MICHELLE GOLDBERG] What is the most important issue for you in this election?
[TAPE OF CHRIS, RALLYGOER] The First Amendment, the freedoms, medical freedom, you know.
Michelle Goldberg: Covid was really the deciding factor for a lot of people.
[TAPE OF CHRIS, RALLYGOER] The Covid lockdowns were something that was really important to me that I felt was unconstitutional. You shut down all these small businesses, and people are not recovering from that.
Michelle Goldberg: A number of people I spoke to had never been to political rallies before. One of them was Chris Inclan, a drug and alcohol counselor who had this sort of ideologically erratic voting history.
[TAPE OF CHRIS, RALLYGOER] So I voted for Jill Stein, 2016. And then in the primaries Andrew Yang. I felt like Biden was so ingrained in the establishment and politics as usual, so I ended up voting for Trump.
Michelle Goldberg: But he didn’t really like Trump, either. He basically felt like it was unfair. And in this, I think he speaks for a lot of Americans, that he just didn’t want to have to make this decision again.
[TAPE OF MICHELLE GOLDBERG] What’s your name?
[TAPE OF JACKLYN, RALLYGOER] Jacklyn Fisher.
[TAPE OF MICHELLE GOLDBERG] Were you a Democrat in the past? Or were you independent?
[TAPE OF JACKLYN, RALLYGOER] No, I had been Republican but became independent, gosh, several elections ago. I lean more towards libertarian.
[TAPE OF MICHELLE GOLDBERG] Are you somebody who was attracted to, like, the medical freedom?
[TAPE OF JACKLYN, RALLYGOER] Yes. Especially during Covid. It was very hard. We couldn’t go to church — all of these restrictions. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again, so that’s very important to me. Medical freedom, religious freedom.
[TAPE OF MICHELLE GOLDBERG] If Kennedy wasn’t on the ballot, who would you be voting for?
[TAPE OF JACKLYN, RALLYGOER] You know what? That’s so hard. The lesser of two evils. But honestly, probably Trump.
[TAPE OF MATT, RALLYGOER] I was so disillusioned after 2020, with the mandates. So I took a lot of vaccines. The third one hit me quite hard. I just kind of went along with the herd. Big mistake.
Michelle Goldberg: Matt Castro is a bus driver in San Francisco who said that if R.F.K. isn’t on the ballot, he’s going to vote for Donald Trump.
[TAPE OF MATT, RALLYGOER] I just think that the vaccines, ultimately, they lied to us, right? They suppress the truth about what was actually given to the population.
Michelle Goldberg: There’s an overlap between New Age wellness culture and the far right that goes way, way back. In terms of libertarianism, there’s a sense of “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do.” There’s a fundamental distrust of experts. There’s a weakness for quackery. People associate crunchy New Age culture with the left, and there’s obviously something to that association. My guess is that most of the people at my yoga studio are voting for Democrats. But there’s also this real strain on the right, and it’s gotten more intense since the pandemic.
There were definitely people at the rally who voted for Biden in 2020. But they were mostly people who had already decided to definitely not vote for him again. I don’t think anybody knows the precise nature of the spoiler role that Kennedy is going to play.
There’s a lot of pundits who think that R.F.K. Jr. is primarily a threat to Biden, but there’s also political insiders, both Republican and Democratic, who see it that way. I think we know from Kennedy’s own remarks, from things that he said recently on CNN, that he considers Biden a bigger threat to democracy than Trump.
[TAPE OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.] And the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.
Michelle Goldberg: So he seems like he would be happy to spoil the election in Trump’s direction. But the other side of that is that he’s going to attract people, presumably, who see things the same way. And those are people who would lean Trump if he weren’t in the race.
R.F.K. Jr. is assembling this coalition of the distrustful, this coalition of the alienated. And there’s a lot of overlaps between that coalition and Donald Trump’s coalition. It’s not precisely the same thing, but there’s a lot of room in the Venn diagram where the two intersect.
[TAPE OF JACKLYN, RALLYGOER] I think most people think I’m different and weird for questioning. I think most people just want you to be quiet and trust the government.
[TAPE OF RALLYGOER] I’d like to see them really taking on these pharmaceutical companies and the companies that are poisoning the water and all of that so that we can have really a good generation of children.
Michelle Goldberg: I would say that his rally surprised me because it was a much more conservative or heterodox, libertarian-leaning crowd than I had anticipated.
[TAPE OF RALLYGOER] I’m more scared of the multilateral organizations — the W.T.O., the United Nations, the World Economic Forum — because they have the money and the power and they influence and pay off all the politicians from all the states in the world.
Michelle Goldberg: And it’s tricky when you report on things like this, because on the one hand, it’s true that anecdote and data are not the same thing. You can’t extrapolate from the people who go to a rally about what the electorate at large is going to do, because people who go to political rallies are a very kind of distinct breed, right? Most people just aren’t that into any politicians. But I also remember back in 2016, when I would go to Trump rallies and I would have this sinking feeling — this doesn’t feel on the ground the way conventional wisdom says this election is going to shake out — and saying, “But this is what the polls say.” Having gone through that, I think that we can at least take something away from the texture of these actual events and the stories of these actual people.
(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski.
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