Winning the votes of two of the leaders of the anti-Trump resistance in the Senate would seem like a long shot for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his bid to win confirmation as President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services.
Then again, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are Democrats who represent Massachusetts, and Kennedy is… a Kennedy, the son of a Democratic senator and nephew of two other Democratic senators.
Kennedy’s decision to meet with the Bay State’s Senate delegation on Thursday shows, to some political insiders, the lasting power of the Kennedy name in the state, which launched the political careers of Kennedy’s namesake father and uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward Kennedy.
“The Kennedy name is still strong and has a lot of lasting power in the Bay State,” said Brad Bannon, longtime Massachusetts pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. “It’s smart politics for Kennedy — and Warren and Markey.”
Before he dropped his own presidential bid over the summer, Kennedy was polling in the high single digits in a matchup with Trump and President Joe Biden in Massachusetts. He ultimately did not appear on the state’s ballot.
Markey and Warren voted for very few of Trump’s first term nominees, even compared with their other Democratic colleagues.
A Markey spokesperson said the senator is “hearing from his constituents about Mr. Kennedy’s nomination, as well as all of Trump’s nominees,” and that he’s meeting with many other nominees.
Markey, who upset one of Kennedy’s nephews, Joseph P. Kennedy III, to win his Senate seat in 2020, haspreviously said Kennedy is an “unqualified, unserious and dangerous” choice for HHS. And Warren has saidshe would laugh at the nomination “if it weren’t so scary.”
Even many of Kennedy’sown family members have decried his run for president and later endorsement of Trump.
But the Kennedy legacy remains strong — even beyond Massachusetts.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who sits on the Finance Committee that will have to approve Kennedy’s nomination before it goes to the Senate floor, told reporters that he and Kennedy had “some interesting conversations” about the senator’s experience with Kennedy’s uncle Edward, who served as a Massachusetts senator for nearly five decades and was the second-most senior senator when he died in 2009.
He was “sort of the lion of the Senate back when I first got here,” Cornyn said. “And what a larger than life personality he was.”
