Hi, I’m Anthony Galli and the three main
reasons I’ve heard in the media for Joe
Kennedy III’s defeat is that he didn’t
have a clear enough campaign message, didn’t
go negative soon enough, or that he didn’t
go far enough left.
But those three reasons are weak because Kennedy
started with a 10-point lead in the polls
so the onus was on Markey to differentiate
himself, not to mention, Kennedy copy-and-pasted
the same campaign message that his relatives
John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were able
to successfully use to win their senate seats,
i.e. that Kennedy would do “more for Massachusetts.”
And then as to the other reasons, Joe Kennedy’s
negativity most likely hurt him with progressives,
which I’ll go more into in a second, and
then finally the fact is there was very little
ideological difference between Joe Kennedy
and Edward Markey as they were both campaigning
for racial justice, Medicare-for-All, and
the Green New Deal.
The real reason for Joe Kennedy III’s defeat
can best be encapsulated by a moment, which
occurred 43 minutes into the last Massachusetts
U.S. Senate Democratic Debate…
Of course, Senator Markey quickly denounced
those tweets and proceeded to point out the
inconvenient fact that whoever said those
mean things isn’t affiliated with his campaign,
i.e. a staffer/volunteer/family.
Congressman Kennedy never named the user who
sent those mean tweets so we can only conclude
it was somebody with a stock icon and a username
like JaneDoe53 or IAmNotARussianBot2342. But
by invoking his great uncle’s assassination
to try and score political points, it showed
just how far Congressman Kennedy was willing
to go to win.
Congressman Kennedy’s attack line was an
unfair complaint because how could he reasonably
expect Senator Markey to apologize every time
one of 262 million Twitter users says something
mean about him or his family? It’s also
a poor excuse to say that so long as people
say mean things on Twitter then Senator Markey
can’t complain about his father and brother
spending millions of dollars on negative attack
ads via a Super PAC.
It’s difficult to imagine Congressman Kennedy
genuinely being angry at Senator Markey for
something presumably IAmTotallyAMasschuettesDemocraticVoter300
said, and if he was distraught over it then
perhaps he could have brought that up in a
private conversation first. For this reason,
it seems far more likely that he and his staffers
thought the attack line was something that
would play well with the mainstream media
and the “emotional masses.”
It was calculating over sincere, but it wasn’t
even a good calculation because the very people
Joe Kennedy was trying to win over in the
campaign, i.e. progressives, had been upset
by that same line of logic being used against
Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential
primary to somehow blame Senator Sanders for
every mean thing someone who supposedly supports
him had said on the internet.
Ultimately, despite Joe Kennedy III starting
the campaign with more media-support, money,
name-recognition, and a 10-point lead in the
polls, he lost to Senator Markey 55%/44%.
This massive swing in support doesn’t occur
simply because your political messaging is
fuzzy or you aren’t sufficiently left enough
when both candidates were running very much
to the left. This swing in support can best
be explained by Joe Kennedy III’s insincerity
on the campaign trail and in the debates.
And to support my claim I’ll take a page
out of Joe Kennedy’s book and quote random
people on the internet…
These were some of the top YouTube comments
of their debate, which YouTube swings toward
a younger demographic who Kennedy was expected
to do well with.
And so Congressman Kennedy conceded about
three hours after the polls closed. Concession
speeches are usually an opportunity for a
candidate to bow out gracefully and earn some
respect and sympathy from even their sharpest
critics. I did a quick YouTube search of various
concession speeches: Hillary Clinton, Ted
Cruz, Mitt Romney, Elizabeth Warren. Every
concession speech I saw had more likes than
dislikes, except one —  Joe Kennedy
III’s
He ends his “cliche political concession
speech” by saying, “Always spend your
life in the ring. It’s worth the fight.” He
then tweeted a paragraph from his speech…
This tweet is a not-so-subtle signal that
he will run again, after all, he has only
ever worked in government and he has an inherited
estimated $43 million dollars so when money
is not a concern and legacy is on your mind
why not “do it again”? After all, the
people need him, or perhaps, he needs the
people.
