We’ve heard a lot this week about RFK Jr’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign and endorse former President Donald Trump. And a lot of that coverage has focused on analyzing the potential impact of RFK’s decision on swing state polls. That’s obviously a very important part of the story — but how do RFK’s actual supporters feel about this? What are they talking about this week?
The Show's Sam Dingman went to one of the Valley’s little-known political enclaves, located in a shopping center, to get some answers.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a small group of RFK Jr. supporters are gathered around a table at Panera Bread. It’s just shy of a week since Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump.
PAULA OBEID: This is an open dialogue place, so feel free to talk, and not everyone feels comfortable, which is very fair, OK?
[audio of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
"And we talked not about the things that separate us, because we don’t agree on everything, but on the values and the issues that bind us together. And one of the issues that he talked about was having safe food, and ending the chronic disease epidemic! Don’t you want healthy children?" Kennedy said in a recent speech.
OBEID: I would love for you to maybe share what brought you into the Kennedy coalition, kind of, of hearts that came together, and when you heard the announcement of him stepping out, what happened then. What your emotions were, and how are you going forward maybe, and how are you going to vote. Is that OK?
DINGMAN: That’s Paula Obeid, a Kennedy campaign volunteer. She’s the one who organized this meeting. Paula’s in her 60s. She has short brown hair and a perpetual smile. She’s got a Ziploc bag on the table full of Kennedy campaign stickers and buttons. Paula asks Madison Curtis, a young woman with short black hair and a toddler on her lap, what got her interested in Kennedy.
MADISON CURTIS: Um, probably when he started — he was talking about just like, cleaning up our food, and stuff, in the country? That’s, like, a really big thing for me.
DINGMAN: Next to Madison sits Zach Lauer. He’s 36, has a thick black beard and wears a blue bandana. As he speaks, he looks around the table, making eye contact with everyone.
ZACH LAUER: I came to Bobby via my important issues, which are really, are food. Like, that to me is the most important thing. I’ve had health issues due to food in the past, and I’ve had a decade of repairing that. Like, if you go to the grocery store, right? It’s all highly processed, genetically modified, chemical-ridden food that’s destroying our health, it’s destroying our guts. Our guts are completely destroyed — the microbiome’s off, affects mental health. You know, you fix our food supply, you fix a lot of issues.
DINGMAN: Obeid nods as Lauer tells his story. Health issues are what first brought her to Kennedy, too. When Obeid’s daughter was 16, she started having fainting spells, and her hair started falling out. They couldn’t figure out what was going on.
OBEID: We didn’t know for a whole year, we were in the ER every month. And they found out that she had rheumatoid arthritis — at 16!
DINGMAN: Doctors prescribed an aggressive campaign of drugs, and Obeid's daughter eventually recovered. But the whole thing left Obeid wondering how she got so sick in the first place.
OBEID: When you look at the rise of chronic illness in our children, it doesn’t make sense. And so mothers like me, who care about our children, you know, we don’t know what to do.
DINGMAN: Obeid wants the National Institutes of Health to do research on cases like her daughter’s. But she says she doesn’t have much faith in the NIH these days.
OBEID: Because they’re bought out by, you know, corporate interests.
DINGMAN: Obeid feels the same way about the DNC. Once upon a time, she says, she was a regular donor to Democratic candidates. In fact, she was a self-described “Bernie Bro.” In 2016, when she was living in California, Obeid voted for Kamala Harris, who was elected to the Senate that year. But 2016 was also the year Obeid started to feel disillusioned by the Democratic Party.
OBEID: They left me. They made Bernie take the knee when he was winning every primary, and they took the knee when Biden won one state. Because it’s all planned.
DINGMAN: Lauer agrees. He thinks Harris’s nomination for the Democratic ticket was part of a grand scheme.
LAUER: Obviously the decline of Biden’s mental cognition was apparent for a lot longer. And they gaslit America until they got to the point where it looked like Trump was gonna beat Biden. Then they roll out Biden for an early debate. Unprecedented, right? Because their plan was to replace him. It’s very anti-democratic, I don’t know how else to say it.
DINGMAN: As the group talks about the various things that made them want to get involved in RFK Jr.’s campaign, I can’t help noticing that nobody brings up his political lineage. It comes up briefly, but only in passing. Jennifer Juca, a former social worker, makes oblique reference to the fact that most of Kennedy’s relatives have denounced his candidacy. For Jennifer, that gives RFK Jr. a kind of emotional credibility.
JENNIFER JUCA: The way he talked about, when people ask him about his family not agreeing with him, and how he’s OK with that? He’s like, everybody disagrees. I have the same thing in my family. I think I’ve always been a person that like, I sit back, and I watch, and I don’t feel like I fit in a lot of places. And when I started listening to him, I felt like I fit in. He feels like home.
DINGMAN: “He feels like home.” Curtis, bouncing her baby on her lap, agrees.
CURTIS: People need somebody who cares. And you can feel that when he talks.
DINGMAN: The group seems to agree that part of Kennedy’s appeal is that he understands how they feel. Like they’ve had to deal with really scary problems in their lives. They’ve been lied to by the government. Debilitated by mysterious health problems. And it feels like there’s no one they can talk to about it.
CURTIS: I feel like a lot of people in my age group I can’t even talk about politics. It’s just completely off the table, because most of my friends are pretty left-leaning, and so it’s just hard to have a conversation, because there’s just kind of that wall where they don’t want to talk, and they’re stuck in their ways. So, yeah.
DINGMAN: These are all big, amorphous problems. They’re hard to define — and in some cases, hard to prove.
LAUER: I had somebody come at me on Facebook about how RFK Jr. says that SSRIs lead to mass shootings. And it’s like, well, no, he didn’t say that. He said that in America we have the most mass shootings. We also have the most number of people on SSRIs. They say the side effects are psychosis, suicidal ideations, right? Those are listed side effects of these drugs. Let’s do a study and see if there is something there. I’m not saying there is.
DINGMAN: But for the folks around this table, these things feel true.
OBEID: This country’s in crisis, and I have lived experience for all of it. My son, he’s 30 now and doing great, but when he was younger, he was having a mental health break. And I got him in to someone, they put him on some SSRIs, a week later he attempted suicide.
Now does he, stress — have — you know my husband, I was a widow at 40. My husband was coming home, and a drunk driver killed him, and I had two young kids. So they had a lot of trauma and reasons to be sad. But the thing is, he was paranoid, and you know, mass shootings are people who are paranoid delusional thinking and stuff, so it’s scary. But I’m not the only American mom out there. I have two kids, I’m a widow. And I can’t get resources for my kids.
DINGMAN: Mass shootings, suicide, these things are undeniably horrific, and almost impossible to make sense of. But in Kennedy, this group of supporters sees someone willing to ask big questions that could finally lead to some big answers.
LAUER: A lot of America lives in a state of fear, our world is full of distortions to get us into that state of fear. When I watch Bobby, I don’t see a state of fear. I see somebody that’s living in a state of love. He’s a great model for all of us. He’s helped me tap into that, that feeling of love, and being more loving to people that disagree with me.
OBEID: You know, and then we he said, “Let’s make America healthy again,” you know, for our children? I cried.
DINGMAN: Obeid is talking about a line from the speech Kennedy gave when he endorsed Donald Trump.
"Don’t you want a president that’s gonna make America healthy again?" Kennedy said in the speech.
The endorsement looms over the conversation at Panera Bread. Everyone seems to be processing it in their own way.
Obeid is thrilled that Trump offered Kennedy a role on his transition team.
OBEID: If he’s on the transition team and he’s helping Trump get the right people in. We’ll all come together one by one on topics, is what I’m hoping. So I’m excited!
DINGMAN: Juca is not excited.
JUCA: I have a hard time voting for Trump. And I don’t know how to explain it, but he just kinda turns me off.
DINGMAN: Lauer is somewhere in between.
LAUER: We’re being heard by more people now, due to doing the unity party with Trump. And the other side won’t even talk. So again — what side am I supposed to go to? The side that’s not even coming to the table and talking and listening to ideas? Or the side that is? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like I have a choice.
DINGMAN: Lauer had a lot of issues with the first Trump administration. But he thinks Kennedy could be a positive influence on Trump. And he’s taking Trump at his word that Kennedy would have a big role to play in a potential second term.
LAUER: I could be wrong, right? Could be duped. Trump could be pullin’ one over on us. Could be the case. But I’m hoping that Trump learned from his first term. I’m hoping that with RFK that they can work together.
DINGMAN: And if Trump does keep his word? It might just be the answer to everything.
LAUER: ‘Cause I want him the head of the NIH, the FDA, the CDC, the CIA, the FBI. I want him everywhere!
DINGMAN: The meeting adjourned after about two hours. No one ordered any food.
