RFK Jr accuses Democratic National Committee of 'rigged process' that makes it impossible for candidates to challenge Biden

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused the Democratic National Committee (DNC) of deploying unfair tactics to ensure President Joe Biden isn’t challenged in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election in a new interview with Forbes.

Kennedy, the son of the late Senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, launched his White House bid back in April. Also challenging Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination is Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who also mounted a White House bid in 2020.

During an appearance Thursday on Forbes Newsroom, Kennedy leveled several accusations against the DNC, which has largely ignored his upstart campaign.

“They’ve made rules that if any candidate sets foot in the state of Iowa or sets foot in the state of New Hampshire, then none of the votes that are cast for that candidate will be tallied,” Kennedy told Forbes assistant managing editor Diane Brady in an interview that was released on Thursday.

In a statement released on Friday, the Kennedy campaign said it had contacted the DNC seeking “to clarify its position on ensuring that every voter registered in a Democratic Primary has their vote counted in the 2024 Primary Election.”

The Iowa Caucus, the first official event in the primary season, is scheduled for Jan. 15, 2024, and is viewed as an important barometer for how a candidate will fare. Similary, the first primary vote, typically in New Hampshire is critical to a candidate’s success as well as a White House hopeful’s capacity to remain in the race given that it has historically been the first official primary.

The DNC has arranged for South Carolina to lead off the presidential primary season in 2024.

“In other words any delegate that I win in New Hampshire or Iowa would go instead to the president,” Kennedy continued. “If you add up all the super-delegates that they control, and all of the automatic delegates that just go to the party, I would have to win almost 80% of all the states.”

Kennedy likened the maneuvering by the DNC to holding a “coronation” for Biden. “Their logic is that they don't need a primary because they already have a candidate,” he said. “It's a process that is rigged.”

Kennedy is not the first member of the Democratic Party to accuse the DNC of rigging the primary process. Longtime political strategist and former DNC chair Donna Brazile accused the party of rigging the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary Clinton, despite Bernie Sanders, the U.S. Senator from Vermont, riding an unexpected groundswell of support deep into that primary season.

Brazile later backed off the rigging accusations, according to CNN, but the sentiment was echoed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. During an appearance on PBS Newshour in 2017, Warren was asked by Judy Woodruff whether she thought the election was rigged to favor Clinton. “I think it was,” Warren, who also ran for the party’s nomination in 2016, responded.

Meanwhile, Kennedy has surprised some Democrats and political pundits with strong showings in some early polls. One survey in late April showed he enjoyed 19% support among Democrats, far behind Biden’s 62%, but a surprise nonetheless. In mid-June, another poll showed Kennedy had 15% support among Democrats.

But the latest poll, from the Morning Consult and released on Friday, showed Kennedy’s support among Democrats had slipped to 9% and that Biden had notched 76%, according to the survey, his largest lead over Kennedy and Williamson yet.

Kennedy has been highly critical of the Democratic party throughout his campaign and before it. During an appearance on the Getting Caught Up podcast in early May, Kennedy said the “Democrats have turned into the war party, the party of fear, the party of censorship, and the party of pharma.”

Kennedy has also been adamant that Biden should debate his two challengers, though the Biden campaign and the DNC have swatted away such suggestions. Last week, Andrew Yang, another former 2020 candidate in the Democratic primary, urged Biden to debate Kennedy and Williamson.

“In the absence of that kind of debate, then you're going to have some candidates with a legitimate grievance,” Yang told Axios. Yang added that “it’s a real problem” that the DNC and Biden are refusing to debate the primary challengers.

When asked whether he’d consider running as an independent to get around the rules, Kennedy demurred, saying he was waiting to see if the DNC was going through with the rule changes. But Kennedy suggested the DNC even considering such changes is undermining voters’ faith in the system by trying to make it “impossible” for him to compete.

“We live at a time in American history when a lot of Americans think that democracy is broken, that the system — the political system — is rigged, and that there's not really any democracy. And, unfortunately, the DNC is taking a lot of steps that confirm that outlook,” Kennedy said in the interview, which touched on a range of issues including the flagging U.S. economy and the border crisis.

Watch the full interview below.