Hello everyone and welcome to the focus group podcast I'm Sarah

Longwell publisher of the bulwark and this week we are talking about a real wild card

in the 2024 presidential election Robert F Kennedy Jr. R. F. K. who's running as an independent and breaking double digits in many

national polls. Now, R. F. K is a bit of a paradox. On one hand, he's an environmentalist, and on the other other hand he's also an anti-Vaxer and he comes from one of the most prominent families in democratic politics and he's also been doing interviews with the likes of Steve Bannon, so it's not entirely clear

whether his candidacy will hurt Trump or Biden more. I wanted to dig into why

voters in both political parties are interested in Kennedy.

And to discuss it all, my guest today is Estad Herndon,

New York Times National Political Reporter and host of their excellent politics

podcast the run-up it is one of my favorites.

Instead, thanks for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you listening too.

Yeah, you know I'm a political junkie, so what can I do?

Yeah, yeah, a song.

And you get out there, you get out there and talk to people, which is like my favorite thing to do.

So I love your work.

I think we share a similar premise of wanting to hear people's voices and hear them directly.

And so I really love the work that y'all do and we think of the run-up as an opportunity to bring in those voices from the ground that often get left out.

So, you know, that's the whole idea.

Do you know what else I like about the run-up is you seem like genuinely curious about people and like,

even when people are saying just really

really bad stuff crazy things I still think they're sort of delightful yeah and

and I like I just I like people still, they're funny and they're quirky and they're great.

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