Those who forget presidential election history could be doomed to repeat it. That fear explains why in 2024, the Democratic National Committee is gearing up to take on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose independent presidential bid is seen as a danger to President Biden’s reelection.
To counter the RFK threat, the DNC has put together a strike force led by Mary Beth Cahill and Ramsey Reid, with Nick Bauer as a senior adviser, Lis Smith as a communications adviser, and Matt Corridoni as spokesperson.
“I think this time we don’t want to take anything for granted,” Corridoni, who most recently worked as a top aide to Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “We know for sure it’s going to be a close election. We know how high the stakes are. We are engaging with third party candidates early in the cycle, and making sure we’re defining them first.”
Democrats learned the high price of ignoring third party or independent candidates 24 years ago. That’s when Al Gore, the party’s nominee, lost Florida by 537 votes — and with that, lost the White House to Republican George W. Bush. The closeness of the final tally, determined after a month-long recount that was settled by a landmark Supreme Court decision, also put a spotlight on the 97,488 votes won in that state by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
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“The problem with Florida in 2000 is that they didn’t pay attention to Nader,” John Sasso, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran the Broward County vote recount in 2000, told me. He still has a punch card ballot that displays a dreaded “hanging chad” — a dent rather than a fully punched-out perforation — that affected the Florida vote count.
Based on that experience, when John Kerry ran in 2004 as the Democratic nominee, “We launched a very aggressive campaign against Nader and knocked him off the ballot,” recalled Sasso, who was a senior adviser on that campaign.
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With Kennedy, “I wouldn’t hesitate to go completely full bore to knock him off the ballot,” Sasso said. “He’s unstable, a conspiracy theorist. I remember back in 2004, he wrote an article for Rolling Stone, saying the election in Ohio was stolen. It wasn’t.” Kennedy wrote it anyway, said Sasso, despite the best efforts of Kerry campaign advisers to show him he was wrong.
In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein was blamed by some Democrats for taking crucial votes away from Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Stein is running again in this election cycle, along with Cornel West who is running as an independent. But Kennedy generates the most anxiety, because of his political lineage, access to money and media, and the open boosting of his candidacy by Donald Trump.
The DNC playbook against Kennedy calls for rapid response across social media. For example, when a woman initially described as Kennedy’s New York state political director was caught on tape urging an audience to support Kennedy because it would help Trump defeat Biden, the DNC quickly put out a statement calling out the RFK campaign for admitting its “spoiler role.” The woman, Rita Palma, was subsequently fired by the campaign, which said she had been hired as a ballot access consultant in New York and had falsely identified herself as the New York state director of Kennedy’s campaign.
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The DNC also put out mobile billboards linking Kennedy to Trump, with one purporting to show the candidate and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. Through campaign surrogates, the DNC is also making sure voters know about Kennedy’s past controversial statements on a range of issues. Corridoni describes it as “holding candidates accountable and making sure people are educated about his policies.”
But ballot access is shaping up to be a major battleground and the one that could really make a difference in 2024. A team of lawyers, led by Dana Remus, Biden’s former White House counsel, is making sure that “everyone is playing by the rules,” as Corridoni put it.
Over the weekend, Kennedy claimed success in getting on the general election ballot in Iowa through what ABC News reported as “a quirk in state law,” which entailed gathering at least 500 eligible voters from 25 of the state’s 99 counties at a small, one-day convention. After that accomplishment, Kennedy predicted that he is “100 percent confident” he can get on the ballot in all 50 states. The DNC has not yet said whether it will challenge Kennedy’s effort to get his name on the ballot in Iowa.
RFK Jr. says he has ruled out a Libertarian Party run for president.
Meanwhile, two states are warning that Biden could be kept off their ballots. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Republican secretaries of state in Ohio and Alabama sent letters to local Democratic officials warning that Biden’s name won’t be on the ballot because his nomination at the DNC convention in August doesn’t meet ballot access deadlines. As the Monitor reports, this follows a previous effort by Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state to keep Trump off her state’s ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol — a decision that was unanimously overruled by the Supreme Court.
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Richard Winger, founder of Ballot Access News, told the Monitor that in almost all recent elections, a few states have been asked to adjust ballot access deadlines to accommodate major-party presidential candidates “and they always do.” But in the Trump era, the old niceties are under attack from all sides.
For anyone who wonders whether there’s something fundamentally undemocratic about Democrats trying to keep Kennedy off the ballot, Sasso said, “The real threat to democracy is Trump being elected with RFK’s help.”
Whatever the disappointment of Gore and his supporters about losing, the demise of democracy was not their main concern when Bush won the White House with an assist from Nader.
This column first appeared in The Primary Source, Globe Opinion’s free weekly newsletter about local and national politics. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.
