Rory Kennedy, the sister of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Monday that she fears former President Donald Trump will be elected in such a way that she will not vote for her own brother.
She said in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that a second Trump term “will be, quite frankly, catastrophic, not just for our country, but for the world.”
Kennedy – who was promoting her latest documentary series, The Synanon fix — was among a group of family members who attended St. Patrick’s Day festivities at the White House and posed for a group photo with President Joe Biden in a show of support.
“You know, the truth is, I love my brother, and it pains me to stand against him, but I’m very concerned about the stakes in this election, and I’m very concerned by the polls that I’m seeing. he gets many more votes from Biden than from Trump,” the documentary filmmaker said.
“And I think this election will come down to a handful of votes in a handful of states, and I fear that his campaign and his candidacy as an independent will lead to the election of Trump,” she added.
Rory Kennedy, the sister of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said Monday that she fears former President Donald Trump will be elected so often that she won’t vote for her own brother.
Rory Kennedy (second from left, front row) was among a group of family members who attended the St. Patrick’s Day festivities at the White House and posed for a group photo with President Joe Biden in a show of support
RFK Jr. launched his campaign in April and said he would run against Biden in the Democratic primaries, but when he failed to gain enough traction to defeat the president, he announced in October that he would instead run as an independent for the general elections.
His sister told Mitchell, “I’m a big fan of President Biden.”
“I think he’s done a fantastic job and doesn’t really get the credit he deserves over the last four years in terms of the policies he’s put in place and the changes he’s made that I think have been hugely impactful and positive.” , she said.
Yet Biden is behind Trump in the polls.
The March DailyMail.com/JL Partners national survey shows Biden trailing Trump by four points — 39 percent to 43 percent — with RFK Jr. captured 7 percent of the vote in the 2024 general election.
RFK Jr. is currently hurting Biden more, switching over 9 percent of voters who voted for the president in 2020, while just 5 percent of Trump supporters four years ago said they would choose the independent candidate.
Ipsos polls are more favorable to Biden, with RFK Jr. peels off Democrat and Trump supporters about evenly, and in the longer term this could be more damaging to the ex-president because of the type of voter the independent party attracts – the “disaffected moderate Republicans in the suburbs.” Ipsos president Cliff Young told DailyMail.com last week.
Still, all signs point to the 2024 race being incredibly close between the major party candidates.
“So I think the stakes honestly couldn’t be higher,” Kennedy told Mitchell. “So, you know, I would love to sit on the sidelines and not be in this position, but I don’t feel like I can do that.”
On Tuesday, RFK Jr. announced that his running mate would be Bay Area lawyer and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, 38, who is new to politics but out of the spotlight – as she was previously married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
She denies a salacious report from the Wall Street Journal that said a tryst with Elon Musk broke up her marriage to Brin and killed the friendship between the two billionaires.
While Shanahan teamed up with RFK Jr. appears on the campaign trail, the campaign continues to work to gain access to ballots for general elections across the country.
On Monday, RFK Jr.’s campaign announced. announced that they had enough signatures to get on the ballot in North Carolina, which could become a swing state because of the governor’s race.
Last week, the Kennedy campaign went to war against Nevada after discovering that signatures already collected may not count because Shanahan’s name was not on the petition for candidacy.
The Nevada Secretary of State’s office admitted that the campaign had received bad information.
A spokesperson for RFK Jr. told DailyMail.com that the campaign plans to sue the state to ensure the signatures collected will count.