In 2006, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thought he was on to something big. In an article for Rolling Stone he argued that the 2004 election had been rigged to guarantee a George W. Bush victory, wrongly denying Democratic candidate John Kerry his place in the Oval Office. Citing research from a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Kennedy argued that a discrepancy between exit polls and actual vote counts, along with voter disenfranchisement in Ohio, constituted likely proof of a concerted effort to unlawfully install Bush in office.
“Despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004,” Kennedy wrote.
In fact, there was no media blackout, and 2004 election conspiracy theories were, if anything, somewhat mainstream. Mother Jones published a story about them in November 2005, and Christopher Hitchens did so in Vanity Fair even earlier, in March 2005. Many disappointed Democrats shared broad suspicions about the fairness of the whole process. Shortly after the election, Senate Judiciary Democrats even demanded an investigation into alleged voting irregularities, showing how loud and sustained those allegations were.
But Kennedy held himself out as the lone man asking the hard questions, a tactic he has used throughout his entire career. And now, in his quest for the presidency, he’s doing so again. The arc of his campaign clearly shows that he has laid the groundwork for his supporters to blame his inevitable loss on an elite conspiracy; it seems perhaps reasonable to ask whether Kennedy’s team or supporters will question some aspects of the results of the 2024 election.
The Kennedy campaign told WIRED it will not. “Mr. Kennedy believes that his opponents’ tactics are unscrupulous and anti-Democratic but that they do not fit the definition of fraud,” spokesperson Stefanie Spear wrote in an emailed statement. “He has no plans to contest the election results.”
But whether Kennedy himself actually does so is in some ways beside the point—he’s already benefiting from the existence of a truthering style he helped pioneer.
During his candidacy, Kennedy hasn’t shied away from extreme claims of political corruption and revisionist history. He has significantly downplayed the riot of January 6, 2021; in a fundraising email, his campaign referred to those arrested as “activists” who had been “stripped of their constitutional liberties,” and he falsely claimed in a statement that they were not carrying weapons. “I have not examined the evidence in detail,” he wrote, “but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection.” (After an outcry, Kennedy walked those remarks back, calling them “a mistake,” and specifically admitted that the claim that the rioters carried no weapons was incorrect.)
Connections with election deniers and January 6 supporters also keep popping up throughout Kennedy’s team. The campaign fired a New York campaign consultant, Rita Palma, after CNN reported that she’d attended the Stop the Steal rally on January 6 that preceded the riots and had encouraged voters to support Kennedy in New York because it would help Donald Trump’s reelection. The campaign did not, however, denounce her rally attendance; Kennedy’s campaign manager and daughter-in-law, Amaryllis Fox, said Palma was fired for “misrepresentation” after she claimed to be the New York state campaign director.
Soon enough, there was another January 6–related scandal, when NBC News reported that Zach Henry, a far-right influencer whose engagement firm the campaign recently hired, appears to have been outside the Capitol during the riots. (Henry has not been charged with or accused of any crime, nor is he accused of entering the building.)
Kennedy also keeps surrounding himself with famous backers who also make broad use of the rhetoric of suspicion, like comedian Rob Schneider, who has alleged that elections have been fixed or deviously stolen by Democrats. Schneider, a prolific tweeter, has accused the Biden administration of orchestrating “a flood” of new immigrants “to make every election a Democrat win,” which he calls “the most devious and destructive policy ever implemented.”
And a medical freedom conference that Kennedy recently appeared at near Buffalo was hosted by the Constitutional Coalition of New York State, which, as the Daily Beast reported, is a Trump-supporting group that has posted about Stop the Steal and has ties to Patriot organizations which had a presence in DC on January 6.
All of these tendencies have been evident from the start. At the time that he wrote his Rolling Stone article alleging 2004 election fraud, Kennedy, one of the many sons of a powerful and often troubled political family, was already in the midst of a metamorphosis. He was moving from his identity as a noted environmental lawyer, recovering heroin addict, and alleged serial philanderer into what would become his final form: an intensely conspiratorial, influential, and anti-vaccine activist whose work in that area had “heartbreaking consequences,” as a later open letter from family members would put it.
In his Rolling Stone article alleging election fraud, Kennedy chose to argue that 2004 exit polls had been so flawed they were in fact suspicious. The polling companies themselves made a more prosaic—and more believable—argument, which was that Republicans were more likely to refuse to be interviewed by pollsters, skewing the results. The more general claims about 2004, though, have proven to be incredibly durable, and applied easily to future elections, as Politico noted in a story about the 2004 stolen election movement.
“Rather than recede with age, in many cases these 2004 skeptics’ concerns only deepened,” journalist Joanna Weiss wrote; those skeptics were, predictably, mostly on the left. By 2020, they were “embracing Trump’s claims about the results,” she wrote, even when they found themselves on the other side of the ideological divide from him on other issues—an example of Kennedy being himself a progenitor of the horseshoe-theory politics on which his presidential run is now premised.
Around the time he penned the voter fraud article, Kennedy also employed similar ways of talking about multiple issues, most notably vaccines and drug safety. In 2005, he published the now infamous story “Deadly Immunity,” which ran in both Rolling Stone and Salon and alleged that government agencies had “colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public.” (Thimerosal is a preservative ingredient that was used in some childhood vaccines until 2001, and which Kennedy has frequently and falsely claimed is linked to autism.) The piece, which contained a number of basic factual and scientific errors, was appended with more than half a dozen corrections soon after publishing; in 2011, Salon retracted the piece entirely and eventually took it offline. (Rolling Stone also took the piece offline sometime in 2010, without explanation.)
In both the thimerosal and the voter fraud articles, Kennedy was beginning to shape the basic methods of argument that he uses to this day: dangerously bombastic and oversimplified ways of talking about complicated dynamics, an inability to fact-check himself, and a tendency to suggest that every institution is fundamentally corrupt. His work often involved grandiose statements about fraud, corruption, and collusion, all focused on proving that a secret cabal runs everything, and that scientific, democratic, and even public health institutions can’t be trusted.
These are, of course, themes repeated by any number of conspiracy peddlers the world over, and Kennedy has used them to powerful effect, to try to shape his public image into that of a bold and singular truth teller, unafraid to take on the powerful at considerable personal risk.
In 2024, this is deeply appealing soil for Kennedy to till, and he has already repeatedly implied that the establishment is working against him personally. In September 2023, his then campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich, sent two letters to the Democratic National Committee alleging that it planned to rig the Democratic primary process against him. (Kucinich, at the time an Ohio congressman, also made a cameo in Kennedy’s 2006 article alleging election fraud in 2004, telling him, “The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections—not throw them.” Kennedy is now running as an independent, making his claims about the Democratic primary moot.)
Since then, after beginning his candidacy seeking to downplay his career as a professional conspiracy theorist, Kennedy is back to his conspiratorial roots once more in more ways than one, holding a “health policy” roundtable that was almost entirely made up of anti-vaccine activists and reportedly suggesting at a dinner that Covid could have been a bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
He has suggested that the elites are arrayed against him personally, telling Joe Rogan that he takes “precautions” to keep from being murdered by intelligence agencies. He’s also repeatedly implied that it’s unusual for him not to be receiving Secret Service protection. (This is not true: A CNN analysis found that, apart from Barack Obama, who faced unique threats as a Black senator seeking the presidency, most candidates since 1968 haven’t gotten that protection, especially not early in the race.) This is not incidental: The notion that elites are working in secret against the public and that he alone will stand against them is central to his appeal.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the campaign wears on, there have been more and more clear references to the same kind of rigged-election logic Kennedy used to talk about 2004. As he seeks to get himself on state ballots, his campaign has sent numerous fundraising emails about how unjust the rules are.
“Just as the DNC tried using underhanded tactics to keep us off the ballot in Nevada, the political establishment is expected to continue forcing our hand by dragging us through costly court battles,” a recent one read. Kennedy also recently claimed that he and Donald Trump are the victims of “rigged polling methodologies that biased DNC-influenced media have used.”
The idea of “rigged polling methodologies” is obviously self-serving—Kennedy argues that in a poll he commissioned, he comes out ahead of Biden and scarcely behind Trump. But it’s also fundamentally a complaint about not being portrayed as a serious candidate, despite his having been featured in countless articles, podcasts, and interviews with outlets both fringe and mainstream.
In a marker of just how seriously his candidacy is being taken, in fact, both the DNC and Trump are now treating Kennedy as a true threat. A pro-Trump super PAC launched a website recently aimed at painting Kennedy as a radical leftist, and President Biden pointedly appeared with more than a dozen other Kennedys to celebrate their endorsement. (In a bit of an ongoing theme, a coalition of 50 people at the Natural Resources Defense Council also recently called on him to drop out in an open letter that ran in The New York Times.) Neither standard opposition research from his opponents nor his own family denouncing him is proof of a conspiracy against him, but it’s convenient to his interests to be able to claim that the establishment is targeting him, personally and specifically.
Kennedy has busily suggested that the conspiracy against him is exceedingly broad, involving not just the political establishment but also media elites. He recently amplified a baseless claim that the current CEO of NPR is a spy, tweeting “Operation Mockingbird is alive and well,” and asserted that a journalist named Dick Russell, who often writes about the Kennedy assassination, had proved that “liberal media outlets,” including the Daily Beast, Salon, Rolling Stone, and Daily Kos, “have all come under the control of Intelligence Agency operatives.”
“As president, I will direct US Intelligence Agencies to end these dangerous and unsavory relationships,” Kennedy added.
Operation Mockingbird was an alleged CIA program—which would have been active during the presidency of Kennedy’s uncle, John F. Kennedy—to manipulate the American press. While there is no conclusive proof that Operation Mockingbird existed, it’s true that the CIA did try to influence media outlets and cultural figures, both domestically and abroad. Here, again, Kennedy used a grain of truth to create a deeply self-serving work of fiction, implying that the “liberal media outlets” that happen to be critically covering his campaign are all filled with spies and CIA dupes.
In elections, as in all things, Kennedy’s world is a web of conspiracy theories, allegations, half-truths, and unfalsifiable claims. There’s a symmetry between his attitude toward vaccines and his attitude toward elections—both are self-serving positions that also pose a genuine danger to the public and the body politic.
None of that, however, is likely to keep Kennedy and those around him from using this rhetoric to his advantage over the next few months. For his most devoted fans, he’s building an architecture of belief, a cosmology that will be used to explain things if he fails to perform well at the polls. Election denial is, ultimately, a means to an end, a bridge to bring Kennedy even closer to realms of real influence and power. It’s the place to which he was born, and where he has clearly always felt that he belongs.
