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Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made denunciations of his own party a centerpiece of his campaign, attacking leaders with a blend of unfounded election-rigging allegations and real complaints about the disadvantages he faces in the nominating process.
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Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison decided Tuesday that the party needed to respond.
“[I]t is clear that there are serious misunderstandings of the Democratic nominating process that are important to correct,” Harrison wrote in the letter to the Kennedy campaign obtained by The Post. “I am hopeful that a meeting with our Delegate Selection leadership team will prevent future instances of voters receiving erroneous information that could cause confusion about the equity of the Democratic nominating process.”
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Kennedy and his campaign manager, former Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, have in recent days claimed that Georgia officials are plotting to strip Kennedy from that state’s ballot for campaigning in New Hampshire; that Democrats have been talking about making Kennedy pay for the cost of primaries; and that party rules have been changed to allow insiders to overrule the will of voters on the first ballot at the convention.
Those claims are either inaccurate or without foundation. Even after reading Harrison’s letter refuting them, Kucinich continued to maintain that they might still be true in the future or that they were true in different ways than initially described. He said he does not trust the word of party leaders since the DNC is working closely with President Biden’s reelection campaign.
“Once the party breached impartiality nothing they say is believable,” Kucinich said.
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The refusal of both sides to agree on the plain facts that govern the nominating process, even in the face of clearly written rules, is likely to deepen divisions. Kennedy and his team have started to say in recent months that party leaders will never allow him to win the nomination, even if he beats Biden at the polls, which current polling suggests is unlikely. In August, he polled between 7 and 17 percent nationally among Democratic primary voters in public polls, or roughly 50 points or more behind Biden.
“I think the American people will always appreciate candidates who have the courage and nerve to believe they could win a rigged game,” Kucinich said.
Kennedy has accused his party of “fixing the process so it makes it almost impossible to have democracy function” and “disenfranchising the Democratic voters from having any choice in who becomes the Democratic nominee.”
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His concern centers on the dual role the DNC is playing, as both an integral part of Biden’s campaign effort and as the referee of a nominating process that could result in Biden’s defeat at the convention. Party leaders have refused to schedule primary debates with candidates like Kennedy because Biden is an incumbent running for reelection, following a precedent both parties have used for decades.
But the Kennedy attacks also echo the broader focus of his campaign, which has centered on sometimes true, sometimes false and often unproven claims that powerful people are secretly lying about matters of great importance. Kennedy has presented himself as a truth-teller who is assiduous about correcting himself if he makes an error.
Kennedy’s argument against the party begins with the fact that the DNC will not award him delegates won in contests that take place outside the approved Democratic nomination calendar, an enforcement mechanism that both major political parties have employed for years to varying extents.
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For this cycle, Democratic leaders, at the direction of Biden, have instructed state parties in Iowa and New Hampshire to buck state laws requiring that they respectively host the first caucus and primary in the nation. Biden, who performed poorly in both states in 2020, has said he wants to elevate more ethnically-diverse states like Nevada and South Carolina.
While delegate selection plans have not yet been finalized, Iowa and New Hampshire appear headed toward early contests that do not directly produce Democratic convention delegates. Similarly, Republican officials in Nevada have said they will not award delegates from the results of the state-run primary there, but will instead hold party-run caucuses.
Democratic candidates who campaign in states that do not follow the approved calendar “shall” lose delegates from that state, according to party rules that were revised and adopted in 2022. Harrison, as national party chair, is also empowered to take additional “appropriate action to enforce these rules.”
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After those rules passed, Kennedy announced his Democratic campaign for president and vowed to campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire even if they held unsanctioned contests. He has cast the decision of the party to reorder the nominating states as an attack on voters and an attempt to prop up Biden.
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“They are really the only states that really require you to do retail politics,” Kennedy said in an interview last week with Forbes.
Kennedy and Kucinich have both made additional claims that are not based in fact.
“They are trying to change it so that if I campaign in New Hampshire, that none of the votes cast for me in Georgia will count, and that’s significant because its hard to win the nomination without Georgia,” he told Forbes.
This claim is based upon a typo in an earlier version of the Georgia state delegate selection rules. The original draft said Georgia Democrats would grant ballot access to campaigns that meet the requirements of “Rule 12. K” of the national party. Rule 12 concerns the nominating calendar, but it does not have a subsection K.
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Georgia officials say the initial draft should have referred to “Rule 13. K,” which has nothing to do with the calendar but describes the basic requirements of a candidate for office, including their eligibility under the U.S. Constitution for the presidency. That mistake has since been corrected in the online draft.
“The RFK Jr. campaign’s interpretation of Georgia Democrats’ delegate selection plan is not accurate,” said Ellie Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the state party. “The party has no plans to bar any candidate from the ballot based on campaign activity in other states.”
Kucinich said that he had tried to seek clarification from the state party in August and never received a response. But even after Harrison addressed the issue in Tuesday’s letter, Kucinich said he did not accept it, because the Georgia rules have not been finalized. “We’ll see. As far as I’m concerned, it’s an open question,” he said.
Kennedy has also claimed incorrectly that he could lose the nomination even if he wins an overwhelming share of the party’s state primaries, because party leaders will overrule the will of voters at the convention on the first ballot.
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“If you add up all the superdelegates that they control and all of the automatic delegates that just go to the party and go to the president, I would have to win almost 80 percent of all of the states to beat President Biden,” Kennedy said in the Forbes interview.
This calculation is based on an incorrect analysis of the party rules by Kucinich. After the 2016 election, Democratic reforms eliminated the power of unbound party officials, known alternately as “super” or “automatic” delegates, to vote on the first ballot if the outcome was contested.
But Kucinich has argued falsely that something changed since then.
“Unfortunately, it appears that the DNC has created a class of pledged delegates, called Party Leaders and Elected Officials (PLEOs), who are essentially the same as superdelegates, due to the amount of control the party exercises over elected officials,” Kucinich said in a statement last week.
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PLEOs have in fact existed in the Democratic Party rules for decades, as a subgroup of the delegate class. Candidates are able to select their own PLEO delegates based on the outcomes of the state contests, and they are considered pledged delegates at the convention, according to the rules, bound to "in all good conscience to reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”
Larry Cohen, an ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who served as vice chair of the party reform effort after the 2016 election, said in a statement that nothing had changed to erode the reforms meant to keep party leaders from potentially overruling the will of voters on the convention’s first ballot.
“There has been no change to the party reforms enacted by the DNC in 2020, as required by enforcement of the 2020 convention resolution 1,” said Cohen, who is board chair of Our Revolution, a group founded by Sanders. “So called 'superdelegates’ again cannot impact the nomination of a presidential candidate on the first — and likely only — ballot. All other delegates are chosen by the candidates proportional to their vote in any primary as long as they meet the 15 percent voter threshold.”
Kucinich modified his argument on Tuesday, after receiving Harrison’s letter refuting it, saying that his concern is that party leaders and elected officials would refuse to take pledged slots for Kennedy if he won primaries, possibly leaving empty seats at the convention. There is little historical precedent for such an outcome, as local officials tend to want to support candidates supported by their voters.
The disputes over the reality of the nominating process between Kennedy and the DNC do not end there. “They are talking about having me and Marianne Williamson pay for the primaries because they consider it an unnecessary process,” Kennedy said in a recent Fox News appearance. His campaign offered no evidence of such conversations.
Rather, Kucinich pointed to states that have party-run contests, like Hawaii and Missouri, where the state parties are still raising funds to pay for the process. He said he doubts that they will be able to fund those contests, which could lead to requests to Kennedy to help fund them, another hypothetical. Harrison said that will not happen.
“The DNC has not and will not make any such request,” Harrison wrote in his letter.
Kucinich accused the DNC Tuesday morning of attempting a “hidden-ball trick” by not publicizing a public meeting of the Rules and Bylaws committee this Thursday. “The DNC wants to carry on without public and media attention,” he said in a release. The DNC sent a media credential advisory for the event Monday.
Kucinich requested in a recent letter to Harrison that the Kennedy campaign be allowed to address the Thursday meeting of the rules committee, after brief remarks to the same group earlier this year by Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager.
Harrison did not extend an invitation to the rules committee.
“As I hope you’ll agree, a strong Democratic Party is beneficial to all Americans in the general election,” Harrison wrote to Kucinich Tuesday.
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