Also there’s no advantage to either Trump or Biden in having RFK on the stage. They want the contrast between them to be clear, and he’d just pull focus.
On NPR yesterday, there was an interview with RFK Jr. from about a year ago (I think). First of all, he’s a lunatic and a liar. But, second, what’s with his voice? Did he have throat cancer or something? He sounds older than Biden or Trump.
I guess I had never heard him speak before, but I cannot imagine his voice wouldn’t be a major problem for a lot of people.
He has a condition where his vocal cords are squeezed together. I agree it would make me uncomfortable listening to it for a long speech, as shallow as that sounds.
Other Kennedys have sounded like that too. Maybe a genetic condition?
No one else in the family has sounded remotely like that.
Better to focus on the lunatic things Junior says, rather than the quality of his vocalizations.
I agree with this. He’s a reality-denying lunatic, who lies about his own positions.
Also, a worm ate part of his brain. That can’t be good.
Especially from the worm’s point of view.
The one they found was dead. I suspect it starved to death. His gray matter does not even suffice to support his worms.
I concur.
I concur again. He is even more of a nutjob than trump.
Snort… 
Anyone? As in, I just need one voter as a counterexample?
I guess that’s not what you meant, but there is one interviewed in the final few paragraphs of this New York Times story:
As to how many are on the fence between Kennedy and Biden, I cannot find a survey. But consider that Kennedy is now polling around ten percent, and that third party candidates fade as the election approaches. So most of that ten percent (and some others who currently insist they are undecided) is likely on the fence. If the election is anything close to close, and hardly anybody who is on the fence with Kennedy today votes for Biden, Biden will lose.
As for Biden refusing to debate if the networks invite RFK Jr, the one thing swing voters focus groups are going to agree on that they want the candidates to debate. And very few voters* who aren’t already locked into voting for Biden are going to think ABC inviting RFK Jr is an acceptable excuse for refusing to debate.
P.S. I do NOT say Joe should therefore try to appeal to voters who find Kennedy’s ideas appealing. Campaign less, govern more.
The New York Times has clearly been trying to get Trump reelected for awhile now. Of course they’re playing up the guy they see as Biden’s spoiler.
Sure. Anyone who is even considering voting for Kennedy is someone whose thought processes are so bizarre as to be incomprehensible, and so it is impossible to know how to attempt to appeal to such voters, and so you might as well consider them lost causes. Sure, you might manage to attract a few, but without any rationality behind them, you’re likely to repel just as many, and it’s essentially random.
Anecdote: Today I was swinging by Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things for the guest we’ll have over the holiday weekend. There was a RFK Jr volunteer soliciting signatures to try to get him on the Colorado Ballot (apparently he did a rally yesterday in Aurora.
They were very carefully staying juuuust far enough from Trader Joe’s to not quite be soliciting and there was a big sign saying TJ’s does not support people doing so on their grounds, so a nasty little standoff. When they approached me I said words to the effect of “Don’t talk to me until your candidate makes a formal, public full page apology for insinuating a link between COVID and Jews” to which they attempted a "but that’s not what he meant as I walked away.
But the local that they’re trying to solicit seems to me at least to indicate they’re trying to focus on RFK Jr’s *environmental" policies and dissatisfaction with Biden, while hoping no one has heard any of the REST of what he’s spewing. Reporting from the article above also seems to support this POV:
Instead of stoking division, Kennedy said, he intends to talk about what Americans agree on.
“Everybody agrees we want to take care of our environment,” he said. “If you want to divide Americans, just start talking about climate change, but if you want to bring them together, talk about clean water, clean air, protecting a habitat.”
A little side note though, about someone else who was there to show interest:
Steve Monahan, the GOP’s 2022 nominee in the 6th Congressional District, told Colorado Politics he’s still a Republican but attended the rally to support Kennedy in his “personal capacity.”
The first part of appealing to any potential supporters is to not insult them.
Beyond that, it shouldn’t look much like campaigning, but Joe Biden’s skills in showing compassion fit in with their worries about sickness and death. Biden shouldn’t say anything he doesn’t believe. But Kennedy occasionally mentions reasonable areas for Biden to talk about:
So, travel to some place with a bad water supply, hopefully where his infrastructure spending is helping. My favorite idea is to make a big deal of the coming predicted-to-be-record hurricane season, both before and during.
What… and I mean this with true sincerity… the ever-loving fuck?
There’s a Youtube documentary that explains what he’s talking about, but it’s not short.
TLDW version is that “apes” are dudebros who don’t understand stock bubbles or the stock market and finance in general and are convinced that by buying up loads of worthless stock from failing companies they’ll somehow drive the price up to millions of dollars per share, whereupon the entire economy will collapse as “the elite” are forced to bankrupt themselves paying off these shareholders who will then become the rulers of the world.
Well, it seems a lot of people polled just see the Kennedy name.
See: the GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond ‘meme stocks’.
Those two stonks are the main topic of the documentary I linked to above. It’s well worth watching if you have a few hours to spare.