The son of former attorney-general Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of former president John F Kennedy, RFK jnr regularly invokes his family name on the campaign trail.
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However, he is often regarded as the black sheep of the modern Kennedy clan, partly because of his anti-vaccine stance and his history of promoting conspiracy theories.
His campaign had been doing relatively well while the election race was a Trump-Biden rematch that most Americans did not want.
But the momentum around Harris has resulted in the vice president consolidating the Democratic base and winning over more people who had been considering Kennedy or other third-party candidates.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, said he will speak Friday in Phoenix, Arizona at noon local time. Trump has announced that he will appear at a rally in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale at 4pm local time.
Kennedy spent six months running for the Democratic nomination for president last year, but announced in October that he would split from his party and run for the White House in his own right.
Since then, he’s slipped from 16.7 per cent approval to under 5 per cent according to the Real Clear Politics polling averages, taking a particularly large hit in the weeks since Harris entered the race.
In a strongly worded speech when he announced his candidacy, he claimed that US politics was “rigged”, warned of a “rising tide of discontent” among voters and declared his “independence” from the two-party system.
“Instead of two parties we have a two-headed monster that’s constantly bickering with itself as it leads us over a cliff – and at the bottom of that cliff is the destruction of our country,” Kennedy said.
Source Agencies
