RFK Jr., Borrowing a Page From His Late Uncle, Targets Latino Vote With Campaign of ‘Viva Kennedy 2024’

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is launching a Latino voter outreach effort that trades on his family name and his uncle John F. Kennedy’s legacy of successfully bringing Latinos to the Democratic Party. It also signals the importance the Latino vote will have in 2024.Mr. Kennedy will be hosting a Cesar Chavez Day event at Los Angeles on March 30 to celebrate the launch of this Latino voter engagement effort, dubbed “Viva Kennedy 2024” — a repackaging of President Kennedy’s 1960 “Viva Kennedy!” platform. The event will feature remarks from the candidate, a mariachi band, Mexican food, and voter registration efforts.Mr. Kennedy has also just launched a Spanish-language campaign website. His campaign released a Spanish-language response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.Latinos are the fastest growing and second-largest demographic group in the United States, with roughly 36.2 million of them eligible to vote this year. Republicans are also making a big pitch for the Latino vote, which has historically gone mainly to Democrats. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to specifically target the Latino vote in 1960 with his “Viva Kennedy!” campaign. They set up clubs across the southwest to register Latino voters and drive turnout. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is hoping to replicate this success with “Viva Kennedy 2024.”Early polling suggests President Trump may earn 40 percent of the Latino vote, which would be a record not seen by a Republican presidential candidate in decades. Messrs. Trump and Kennedy have come out strongly in favor of border security. “Basically every Hispanic I talk to is for Trump at this moment,” a Cuban-American libertarian activist who lives at Miami, Martha Bueno, tells the Sun. “I think one of the big reasons for it is because now he’s being persecuted like we see in our own countries.”Ms. Bueno grew up mostly in Venezuela and then moved to Miami. She says a lot of Hispanics like Democrats for the “free stuff” they give out, but she says the Cuban and Venezuelan Americans she speaks to at Miami are largely supporting Mr. Trump. She says Mr. Kennedy’s nostalgia campaign that harkens back to his uncle will not help him with Cubans because of the Bay of Pigs, a disastrous effort to invade the island in 1961 by Cuban exiles that many Cuban-Americans blame on JFK.“I also haven’t seen him reach out to the Hispanic community directly,” Ms. Bueno says of Mr. Kennedy — at least so far.Mr. Kennedy’s press release Thursday says that a large percentage of Latinos are independent and cites two Quinnipiac polls that show “a virtual tie with Presidents Biden and Trump among Hispanics — Kennedy 31%, Biden 35%, and Trump 30%.” Mr. Kennedy’s Latino outreach campaign — at least so far — looks targeted toward Mexican Americans, the largest Latino group in the country.“Kennedy has continued the legacy of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was a good friend of Cesar Chavez,” the Kennedy campaign press release says. “RFK Jr. continued his father’s work by joining farmworkers to fight against the poisoning of workers and consumers. He was a pallbearer at Chavez’s funeral after the legendary labor leader passed away in 1993.”The Latino vote could swing the election in a few battleground states, such as Arizona and Nevada. Mr. Kennedy is working on getting ballot access in those states. His campaign has so far completed petition gathering in only four states. He will be announcing his vice-presidential pick next week. Several states require the vice president to be named before attaining third-party ballot access.The Democratic National Committee has built a unit to respond to third-party challengers this year, after Green Party candidate Jill Stein earned enough votes in 2016 to cost Senator Clinton the election. With No Labels unable to find a big-name candidate so far, the unit’s focus is directed now at Mr. Kennedy. Legal challenges to ballot access signatures are reportedly their topline strategy.

RFK Jr., Borrowing a Page From His Late Uncle, Targets Latino Vote With Campaign of ‘Viva Kennedy 2024’

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