Why you need to be watching Robert Kennedy Jnr
He may not have much chance of winning the US election but he's polling at up to 14% he can "change the conversation."
At the end of last year we invited Dr Pippa Malmgren (drpippa.substack.com) on our Merryn Talks Money podcast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2023-12-14/merryn-talks-money-avoiding-war-in-space-podcast . If you didn’t listen to it at the time, now would be a pretty good time to catch up. Why? Because one of the (many) things we discussed was the US election. Here’s what she said.
“The person that I'm watching most closely is Robert F. Kennedy. And everyone goes, What? That's crazy. He's not even in this race. He's an independent. I'm like, watch his following. It is increasing at an extraordinary rate. And What he's done is first of all, to go down the middle. So he's a Clinton Democrat.
So he says, let's not tax the entrepreneur because they're building the future. A lot of Republicans go, yeah, I like the [00:23:00] sound of that. A lot of Democrats go, I like the sound of that. He says, but big corporates are not paying. Anything. And that's not right. So let's fix that. And again, everyone left and right nods their head
Let's face it. Let's look at the past elections… we love to elect somebody you've never heard of three years before. You never heard of Bill Clinton. Nobody thought George W. would win. It was supposed to be his brother, Jeb. Nobody ever heard of Obama. I can tell you, no one thought Trump was going to win, right? And I wrote, he was, he had a real chance in 2015. People were like, Oh, you're insane…I can see how the forces are moving. Well, today they're like, don't be ridiculous, Robert Kennedy. But I'm telling you, watch this space.”
We’ve been watching the space. And increasingly you should be too. Kennedy is now interesting enough to election watchers that he has been profiled in The Times. “Biden can’t beat Trump,” he told the paper (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/robert-kennedy-jr-interview-donald-trump-56lphdw86 ). “But I can.” And now Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square, increasingly vocal political commentator and with a bit of luck a future Merryn Talks Money podcast guest, says that he is coming round to him. Everyone still seems to think the election is a two horse race says Ackman in a tweet that has 2.7m views so far. But we “need to consider another viable option – Robert Kennedy Junior (
https://twitter.com/billackman/status/1786939955089969540?s=48
). You might think he is something of a bonkers conspiracy theorist. But “you need to put aside what you have read about RFK or ‘heard’ about him, and rather listen to what he has actually said and read what he has actually written. If you do so, I think you will be intrigued.” And if you want to know more about him (which at this point you really should), says Ackman, you need to watch this mini documentary on his life so far.
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Back to Pippa. When we recorded last year, she was pretty clear: she did not expect him to actually win (polls show him with anything from 8-14% of the vote with both Biden and Trump raging that a vote for him is a wasted vote). But she did expect his success to introduce an the relatively unusual scene of a three way race in the US and therefore “change the conversation.” That’s beginning to happen.
For more on this, on the future of space and on the progress of World War II (yes it has begun) listen to the (FREE) podcast with Pippa here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2023-12-14/merryn-talks-money-avoiding-war-in-space-podcast