MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki claimed on Thursday that third-party presidential candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are the “biggest challenge” to President Biden’s re-election chances.
“These third-party candidates are a huge, huge, huge problem, and there’s a number of them,” Psaki told MSNBC “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, before specifically talking about how Kennedy has powerful name recognition in certain parts of the country.
Psaki mentioned that though former President Donald Trump has “broad support in his base,” candidates like Kennedy are the real threat to Biden.
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“If you look at RFK Jr., it’s the name recognition issue, as Tom was just talking about. And there are still states in this country, obviously — I mean, Georgia is one of them, I will name, where the Kennedy name is beloved, right?” she said.
Psaki then went on to disparage the independent candidate, claiming that his fan base might be too caught up in his last name to see his “conspiracy theorist” beliefs.
She continued, “People may just not still — where they may just not know a lot about the fact that he is an anti-vaxxer, who’s a conspiracy theorist. They don’t know that yet.”
Psaki noted that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are focusing on this third-party threat.
“There is an aggressive effort that the campaign has been working with the Democratic National Committee on to run on this, but it needs to be broad, people need to be shouting it from the rooftops because this is one of the biggest threats to Joe Biden being re-elected — is these third-party candidates,” the former White House official said.
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Many in the Democratic Party have acknowledged this third-party threat. Veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi told NBC News last week that these candidates are the “biggest threat” to Biden as well.
He said, “The single biggest threat that helps put Trump back in the White House is third-party candidates. It’s not Biden’s age. It’s not whether Trump gets convicted. It’s not any of that stuff.”
Seeing this, the DNC is moving to establish an official committee, led by former Pete Buttigieg campaign staffer and Democratic operative Lis Smith, to counter the third-party threat, according to NBC News.
Democratic opposition research group American Bridge president Pat Dennis told the outlet, “We see [Kennedy and No Labels] essentially as an arm of the Trump campaign, and we intend to treat it as such.”
Former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill also told NBC News, “The Biden campaign is going to have to spend a boatload of money educating people about the danger of a third-party vote. Biden will have to spend money explaining there’s no vote for anyone else that’s not a vote for Trump.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House and the Biden campaign for comment but has yet to receive a response.
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
