“We can’t waste any votes,” former President Donald Trump told a crowd gathered for the 153rd annual National Rifle Association meeting Saturday. He was talking about independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy is challenging both Trump, the presumptive GOP candidate for the November election, and current Democrat President Joe Biden. Though he’s from a famous family of Democrats, Kennedy changed things up and decided to run as an independent.
As of Thursday, his campaign said that its efforts to secure ballot access in all 50 states was fully funded. It also announced that he had collected enough signatures for ballot access in New Jersey. That means he now has access in seven states: Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Texas. He also has enough signatures for access in seven more in addition to New Jersey: New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa and Ohio.
As of his speech Saturday, polling data compiled by the FiveThirtyEight showed that Trump was polling just slightly ahead of President Joe Biden at 41.4% to 40.3%. Meanwhile, Kennedy was polling at 9.7%.
Kennedy is poised to be a general election spoiler, but it isn’t clear who he’ll pull more votes from. While he has a long history as a Democrat and his work on environmental issues, he has also gained notoriety for an anti-vaccine stance more commonly held by Republicans.
“He’s got no policy,” said Trump regarding Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer status. He went as far as to call Kennedy “radical left,” and urged the crowd not to vote for him.
While Trump noted that he believes gun owners are a “rebellious bunch,” he said they should be rebellious and vote this time,” for him.
Kennedy himself has also made headlines this spring for some unusual reasons. A New York Times report revealed that he said part of his brain was eaten by a parasitic worm and Audacy covered reports that his own family planned to back Biden over him.
Last month USA Today reported that Kennedy threatened the Department of Homeland Security with legal action, after department Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denied his fifth request for Secret Service protection.
According to a Friday report from CNN, Kennedy and his running mate Nicole Shanahan also have also differed on their abortion stance. While Kennedy said he supports restricting abortion access at “fetal viability” Shanahan indicated the campaign supported restrictions “between 15 and 18 weeks” said the outlet. Funding from Shanahan has been a major source of support for the campaign’s goal of getting ballot access, per POLTICO.
Trump has said that he’s ready to debate Biden, and this week said he would debate Kennedy too.
“We can’t take a chance on Joe Biden winning,” Trump said Saturday, adding that the current Commander-in-Chief has the globe “teetering on the edge of World War III.”