RFK Jr. finds shocking fundraising momentum in Maine
A model of this text was initially printed in The Every day Temporary, our Maine politics publication. Join right here for every day information and perception from politics editor Michael Shepherd.
As issues stand, President Joe Biden is below no severe risk to lose the Democratic nomination in 2024.
However one in all his rivals is producing some fundraising momentum in Maine regardless of his longshot standing and fringe views. That’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose marketing campaign raised simply over $23,000 from Maine between February and the tip of June, based on marketing campaign filings.
It was greater than every other presidential candidate in addition to Biden and former President Donald Trump throughout that interval. Maine was the second-smallest of the 30 states he has drawn probably the most cash from thus far. This can be extra a curiosity than an indication of main help, however it’s notable in relation to the remainder of the sector and for who it’s coming from.
The context: Kennedy rejects the “anti-vaxx” label, however the Related Press not too long ago examined his document and located quite a few examples of him taking that line, together with when his anti-vaccine group, Kids’s Well being Protection, promoted a sticker marketing campaign together with one saying “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
His group is paying for the authorized protection of Dr. Meryl Nass, who’s preventing a Maine board’s determination to droop her license based mostly on her remedy of three COVID-19 sufferers with medicine that haven’t been confirmed to battle the situation. She has additionally blogged that vaccines trigger reproductive hurt, one thing that has by no means been substantiated.
After a listening to final month, she texted somebody to say she has succeeded in making the board case “a spectacle” given the eye it has acquired from Kennedy’s group and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem, the Maine Monitor reported.
Nass, who lives in Ellsworth, has donated greater than $1,000 to Kennedy this 12 months. He has additionally gotten cash from Christiane Northrup, a former OB-GYN and movie star physician whose Instagram account was suspended in 2021 for COVID-19 misinformation. Final 12 months, Maine Public reported that she espoused conspiracy theories to Maine lawmakers, telling a committee that the vaccines have been a part of a “international genocide enterprise” to depopulate the world.
What’s subsequent: The political stakes are doubtless low right here, since presidential candidates don’t usually elevate a lot cash in Maine. Kennedy continues to be sitting within the single digits in Democratic polls each nationally and in key states.
Nevertheless, Maine is debuting open presidential primaries through the 2024 election, which is able to permit 350,000 or so unenrolled voters to take part in a single election or the opposite.
Kennedy’s degree of help right here could possibly be an fascinating case research if Trump continues to maintain a agency maintain on a crowded Republican main and a few select the Democratic one to lodge protest votes towards Biden, given Maine’s previous propensity to embrace longshot candidates from Ross Perot within the Nineties to comparatively excessive shares for newer third-party hopefuls.
