Rita Palma, an anti-vaccine activist who has worked as a consultant for Robert Kennedy Jr.'s campaign and is helping him get on the New York state ballot, openly discussed using the third-party candidate to help defeat President Joe Biden in November.
In a video presentation, the two-time voter for former President Donald Trump said that while she plans to vote for Kennedy, “if I wake up on Nov. 6 and Trump wins, I’m not going to be overly upset,” as reported by Politico. To her, a second Trump term would be better than the alternative: reelecting Biden.
The video of the presentation was first reported by CNN and posted on X on April 5, 2024.
Palma said that her “good strategy” of gathering 45,000 signatures to back RFK Jr. as an independent candidate could force a contingent election in November. A contingent election is when no candidate wins enough electoral votes, and gets thrown to Congress, where Republicans control enough state delegations to potentially throw the election to Trump. The last contingent election was in 1836; as it stands, RFK Jr. is not polling well enough to win a single state.
But Palma insisted that Republicans, for tactical reasons, should get behind the Kennedy campaign.
“If Republicans accepted the fact that New York, Maryland, Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, most of the Northeast is going to go blue, why wouldn’t we put our vote to Bobby and at least get rid of Biden and get those 28 votes in New York,” Palma said.
Following the backlash, an RFK Jr. spokesperson, in a statement to CNN, downplayed Palma's role while still describing her as an active part of the campaign.
“Rita Palma is a ballot access consultant responsible for scheduling volunteer shifts for our upcoming signature collection drive in the Empire State. She is not involved in electoral strategy, nationally or in New York,” said Stefanie Spear, a campaign spokesperson. (Palma is listed on the campaign's website as the co-host of an upcoming Kennedy fundraiser in Melville, New York.)
Spear went on to say that Palma’s statements were made as a private citizen and did not reflect the Kennedy campaign's actual strategy, which she described as trying to win the White House with “votes from former Trump and Biden supporters alike.”
