Nobody likes a spoiler. For that reason, Lis Smith, a well-known Democratic operative, is on a mission to make sure nobody likes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Smith is leading the party’s efforts to reduce Kennedy’s support and thus his potential spoiler 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 that we’ve seen is that while [RFK] attracts 10 to 15% in the polls right now, a lot of voters who say they are supporting him or open to voting for him don’t know much about him beyond his last name,” Smith says. Furthermore, “the more people hear or see RFK Jr.,” she says, “the more they learn about him, the less they like him.”
That’s what Democrats (and some Republicans) are banking on. “It’s incumbent upon us to fill in the blanks for voters,” Smith says. “To let them know that he’s a spoiler for Donald Trump. To let them know that a vote for RFK is a wasted vote. And to really lay out the stakes of this election.” Smith came prepared for the podcast with anti-RFK talking points that doubled as anti-Trump points: “He was recruited by Trump allies, he’s being funded by Trump’s biggest donor, and his staff has identified stopping Biden as their top goal.”
Smith says she is not opposed to third-party candidates in theory—“I don’t think more choice is a bad thing”—but “ultimately, there are only two people in this election with a realistic path to victory, and those 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 contenders. “This is the first time in history that a war room like this has existed,” Smith says. “And it came into existence because Democrats finally learned the lessons of the 2000 election and the 2016 election: when third-party candidates played the role of spoiler and threw the election to Republicans with disastrous results.”
Democrats certainly haven’t forgotten how candidates like Green Party nominee Jill Stein drew votes away from Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We’re making sure that third-party candidates receive a similar amount of scrutiny that the major party traditional candidates receive,” Smith says. In practice, this means “we basically live and breathe everything RFK Jr. right now,” she says. “We listen to or watch all of his interviews, all of his events, and we just go out and make sure that voters are fully informed about him.”
This opposition-research effort is being emulated, to some degree, by Republicans. “They, like us, understand that RFK Jr. could be a wild card in this election,” Smith says. But pro-Trump forces are “of two minds” about Kennedy’s candidacy, Smith says. One day Fox’s Sean Hannity is bashing him on the air; the next day Hannity’s prime-time colleague Jesse Watters is interviewing him. “Biden, Trump Go on Offense Against RFK,” a banner on Watters’s show proclaimed during the interview.
