Karl Rove Breaks Out Whiteboard to Explain Why RFK Jr. Might Blow Up Biden Re-Election Campaign: ‘They Should Worry’

[Clip starts]
BEGALA: “Third parties, they’re like cockroaches in the kitchen, okay? It’s not what they carry off that upsets you, it’s what they fall into and foul up. Bobby Kennedy could fall into every swing state and foul it up for Joe Biden.”
(...)
PSAKI: “This is one of the biggest threats to Joe Biden being re-elected.”
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Kennedy: “I do worry that Bobby just taking some percentage of votes from Biden could shift the election and lead to Trump’s election.”
[Clip ends]

BAIER: “Well, it sounds like red alert. Now that RFK Jr. Has named running mate, choosing entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan as his VP pick, Democrats are ramping up efforts to try and knock him out of the race for the White House and they’re raising concern again and again. Let’s bring in Karl Rove, former White House deputy chief of staff, Fox News contributor. Karl, good afternoon. First of all, are they right to worry as much as they do, and what do you think of Nicole Shanahan as RFK Jr.’s pick?”
ROVE: “Yeah. Well, they should worry. In 2016, third-party candidates got 5.8% of the vote. That’s one out of every 17 voters cast a ballot for third-party candidate, and in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the Green Party candidate got more votes than Hillary Clinton lost those states by. In 2020, 1.9%, one out of every 50 voters, voted for a third-party candidate, and in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, the libertarian candidate got more votes than Donald Trump lost those states by. So even if they get a very small fraction of the vote, if it’s in the right places, it can cause enormous harm.”
TURNER: “Karl, right now, he has a lot of potential in key swing states, but he is only on the ballot in Utah. Is anybody pushing back on the other side of this, anyone who doesn’t work for the Biden campaign, and saying some of this fearmongering is overblown?”
ROVE: “Well, he is behind the eight ball, but look, a number of states, 20-some odd states require you to have a running mate before you can get on the ballot. So you either could get on the ballot last year for a party before you nominated the candidate, but now that he’s an independent candidate, he has to have a running mate to get on in a number of states. So we don’t know how many he will end up getting, but in 2016, a dissident Republican got on the ballot in 20-some odd states and received votes in 37 states, even though he did not even become a candidate until the summer. So there is still a chance for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To get on a large number of ballots. One of the reasons he could get on the ballots is if he has enough money, which says to me that’s the reason why he chose the former wife of one of the Founders of Google to be his running mate. You know, I’m sure she is an admirable person, but she has a big checkbook and I think that is probably the most compelling reason to pick her. She already underwrote a television ad that ran during the Super Bowl. Talk about, from a politically — from a political perspective, a dumb move, you know, run one ad during the Super Bowl and hope to affect voters who will be voting nine months later. Not a really smart move, but she had the checkbook and the desire to write the check.”
BAIER: “Yeah, the Kennedy family was not too happy with that Super Bowl ad, and they weighed in on it. In fact, President Biden welcomed a lot of Kennedys to the White House to say, ‘Hey, look, the Kennedys are with me.’”