One story below Park Avenue, an eclectic crowd has assembled for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s New York holiday party: his friend of four decades, a pilot, an immigrant documentarian, a retired teacher, a Trump-loving attorney, and dozens of their Camelot-wistful comrades.
Since launching his campaign for president—first as a Democrat, then as a third-party candidate—Kennedy has confronted a series of controversies. He once compared COVID lockdowns to life in Nazi Germany, he sowed doubt about the safety of vaccines, and he suggested that the coronavirus may have been “ethnically targeted.”
Just on Friday, he insisted to a CNN anchor that he is not an anti-vaxxer, even as a clip showed him arguing this year that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Such statements initially relegated Kennedy’s campaign to a sideshow, yet he has since attracted a potentially decisive portion of the electorate. Multiple polls show him with between 16 and 22 percent support, and there are signs his campaign could end up favoring Trump in a three-way race. One of his biggest boosters is Republican mega-donor Timothy Mellon.
After he announced his third-party bid, four of Kennedy’s own siblings condemned him. “Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment,” they wrote. “We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.”
His supporters don’t seem to care. The holiday party, which took place in a mood-lit lounge in Gramercy Park on Tuesday, could be viewed as a microcosm of that base. Kennedy’s backers hail from across the political landscape; by and large, they don’t trust the press, nor are they rattled by his past flare-ups. Many of them see the candidate, and themselves, as bravely non-conformist.
“He’s got some wild takes on things, but then again I’m a very out-of-the-box thinker myself,” a commercial real estate investor who asked to be identified as “Bob” told The Daily Beast. “That is one of the reasons why I support him.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a no-show for the gathering, but Santa made it.
Noah Kirsch/The Daily Beast
The yacht rock is thumping and the conversation is flowing as Kennedy crew members work the room. On the sidelines, two volunteers are complaining about mask mandates (22 months since they were lifted in most public places), while against the bar, a man dressed as Santa Claus is talking to someone who could pass as Benjamin Franklin.
Santa, it turns out, is a man named Prince, who helps oversee Kennedy’s campaign in New York. He doesn’t want to be interviewed. Franklin’s distant cousin is chattier, though he asks to remain anonymous. He’s known Kennedy since the 1970s, he says, and thinks the candidate will patch things up with his siblings after the election. Franklin also believes voters will look past Kennedy’s contentious statements and credit him for his environmental work.
Near the dance floor, Bob, a New York City native in his 40s who says he also works as a pilot for the defense department, is detailing his trip to the Bronx to canvass for RFK. “All the younger crowd was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll check him out,’” he says, but the older cohort wasn’t interested.
Many of Bob’s friends are wary of Kennedy, too. “‘He’s an anti-vaxx nutjob. Why are you wasting your time on him?’ A lot of people say that to me,” Bob recounts, seemingly mystified by this characterization.
“I can’t even get that far with my friends,” chimes in Sara Gross, who works in economic development. “They just react and I’m like, ‘Woah,’” she says. “It’s an automatic rant where they don’t even want to hear about anything positive.”
Bob, like Kennedy, had doubts about COVID vaccines. (The Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and World Health Organization all consider the vaccines safe, citing only “rare” adverse side effects.) He received a flu shot as a kid and felt sick, and since then, “I typically don’t take any shots ever,” he says. He was immunized twice against COVID because of his government work but doesn’t plan to get boosted.
Gross initially didn’t want to get vaccinated either. “I waited very late,” she says.
Gross, who has traditionally voted for Democrats, says she soured on Biden over concerns about his physical and mental fitness—though RFK is pushing 70—and his son Hunter’s series of scandals.
Kennedy could perhaps tilt the election toward Trump, she concedes. “I’m willing to take a chance.”
Stocking stuffers? The fundraiser featured a table of campaign paraphernalia.
Noah Kirsch/The Daily Beast
Over at the cash bar, 40-year-old attorney Ali, who asks to be quoted only by his first name, is less worried about another Trump win. He likes the 45th president, just not as much as he likes RFK. As for his dislikes: the corporate press.
The coverage of Kennedy has been “completely unfair. Totally unfair. Totally unfair,” he says with diction that would make the ex-president grin. “It really shows how disingenuous they are, because you can hear for yourself, you know, exactly how reasonable and honest and intelligent he is.”
Ali gravitated to Kennedy because of his “anti-establishment policies,” such as “medical autonomy,” and he resented the push to get COVID shots during the pandemic. Still, he insists, RFK is “not necessarily anti-vaxx. He’s pro vaccine safety.”
This is arguably a semantic distinction. In 2021, Kennedy said during a podcast appearance, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated.’”
Prince, still disguised as Santa, grabs the microphone and cues up a message from the candidate himself, who isn’t showing up in person. Kennedy thanks his supporters for their work and grumbles about the trouble he’s had getting on the ballot in New York.
“I spent a lot of my childhood in the Adirondacks skiing and camping and fishing. And all over New York State. I love this state. It’s my home,” he says. “They’ve made it the most difficult for us.”
Prince again takes the mic and swings a bell, mimicking the Salvation Army volunteers who solicit cash around Christmastime. In this case, he suggests, the crowd should open their wallets for a different cause: “You give to Santa now, and Santa will give you the president that you want and that we need.”
The festivities are winding down as Chris Geissmann, a retired English and history teacher, makes a pitch for RFK. Dressed in a black beret and matching scarf, a tweed jacket, and a turtleneck, he is, as another attendee described him, “kind of bohemian, even though he was raised on the Upper East Side.”
“I’m of an age to have backed his father and been an admirer of JFK,” Geissmann says over the music. Kennedy’s opponents, he argues, are inherently compromised because “they owe debts to the party establishment,” while Kennedy will be able to govern on principle alone.
Never mind the “gossip and rumors” and the “unfriendly propaganda,” Geissmann continues, Kennedy’s campaign “is not a mischief-making activity.”
Ten feet away, 39-year-old documentary filmmaker Katya Gimro offers a dark fantasy for 2024 that certainly would raise eyebrows inside the Secret Service. “A couple minutes ago, two of us [were] asking God to take these two candidates”—Biden and Trump—“so that Kennedy will have a better chance.” If that were to happen, she’d like to see him face off against billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who is currently in fourth place in the Republican primary polls.
“I don’t like to listen to them. I don’t trust them,” she says, referring to the leading contenders. “They’re already too old. I’m young, cool, I see the world differently.”
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