Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has the highest favorability rating of any presidential contender, according to a new Harvard-Harris survey released only days after Democrats tried to prohibit him from testifying at a House hearing on censorship.

According to the poll, which was conducted from July 19 to July 20 among 2,068 registered voters, Mr. Kennedy has a net favorable rating of 47% and a net unfavorable mark of 26%.

According to poll respondents, former President Donald Trump has a 45 percent favorability rating compared to a 49 percent unfavorability figure. In comparison to Mr. Kennedy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has a 40% favorable to 37% unfavorable rating, while President Joe Biden has a 39% favorable to 53% unfavorable rating.

According to the poll, Mr. Trump would defeat Mr. Biden by a 45 to 40 percent margin in the Republican primary and general election.

According to the poll, the former president would defeat vice president Kamala Harris 47 percent to 38 percent.

What would happen if Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump faced up head-to-head was not predicted by the survey.

In a June poll conducted by The Economist/YouGov, Mr. Kennedy—whom many political commentators had written off as a long shot—had the greatest net favorability of all the 2024 presidential contenders.

49 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of Mr. Kennedy, translating to a net favorability rating of 19 points. 30% of people had a negative opinion of him.

45 percent and 43 percent of the respondents, respectively, had a favorable opinion of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump.

Mr. Biden’s net favorability rating was minus 7 while Mr. Trump had a minus 10 net favorability rating.

Bipartisan Support

In his campaign, Mr. Kennedy continues to gain support from both parties.

Explosive arguments between Democrats and Republicans during a July 20 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the federal government’s role in silencing Americans about Mr. Kennedy’s remarks about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic were a defining feature of the event.

At the hearing on the governmental weaponization, Mr. Kennedy was a prominent witness.

Republicans stood up for Mr. Kennedy, claiming that the Democrats’ protest over his attendance at the session amounted to censorship. Republicans came under fire from Democrats for providing Mr. Kennedy a “megaphone” to express his opinions on vaccines.

In addition, Mr. Kennedy defended himself in response to allegations that he recently made anti-Semitic slurs.

Mr. Kennedy was heard discussing how some research indicated that the COVID-19 virus disproportionately affected Caucasian and black people while being comparably mild for Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, who Mr. Kennedy suggested had a stronger immune response to the virus, in a secretly recorded video that was leaked to the media. Mr. Kennedy also brought up the possibility that some ethnic groups could be targeted more severely by bioweapons than others.

Democratic party members and other Mr. Kennedy detractors denounced the remarks as “racist” and “antisemitic.”

The charges have been fiercely refuted by Mr. Kennedy. He demanded that a newspaper report on the video, which he termed “false, underhanded, and inflammatory,” be withdrawn on Twitter and stated that he “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.”

At the congressional hearing, Mr. Kennedy addressed accusations of racism and antisemitism without using his prepared statement and instead spoke spontaneously.

“In my entire life, I have never uttered a phrase that was racist or antisemitic,” he said, citing his record of support for Israel.

“I have fought more ferociously for Israel than anybody, but I am being censored here through this target, through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association, which is a tactic that we thought had all been dispensed with since … the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s,” Mr. Kennedy added.

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for allegations of wide ranging bribery corruption involving Joe Biden, and son Hunter to be investigated.

Kennedy told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo Sunday that while he has thus far avoided criticizing Biden, “the issues that are now coming up are worrying enough that we really need a real investigation of what happened.”

“I mean, these revelations… where you have Burisma — which is a notoriously corrupt company that paid out apparently $10 million to Hunter and his dad — if that’s true, then it is really troubling,” Kennedy added.

Kennedy made the call after the FBI document claiming that Mykola Zlochevsky, the co-founder and CEO of Burisma, claimed that he had been “coerced” into paying both Bidens $5 million each to end a Ukrainian probe into his company was made public.

RFK Jr. also warned that “every American needs to worry about… our federal agencies, which used to be above politics, and now [have] become weaponized as political instruments,” adding and “that, again, is ano ther really damaging trend for our democracy.”

Watch:

Elsewhere during the interview, Kennedy reiterated comments he made last week in House hearings concerning censorship.

Kennedy urged that freedom of speech “needs to be bipartisan,” adding that “The word ‘liberal’ means freedom and applies specifically to freedom of speech. We can’t have a democracy if we don’t have freedom of speech. It is the cornerstone of our democracy. That’s why the framers, put it in the First Amendment.”

He continued, “It is as I said, it’s the sunlight, it’s the water, it’s the soil of democracy. Without free speech, democracy will wither and die. And everybody knows that. We’ve been warned about that by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn… Heinz. Everybody knows the beginning of totalitarianism.”

“The people who censor speech when we look back in history, they’re never the good guys,” Kennedy further asserted, adding that “it’s inevitable that if you do start censoring speech because government abuses every power that it’s given and if government suddenly has the capacity to censor its critics, it is a license for any atrocity.”

Full interview below:

According to a Gallup poll issued on Monday, former President Donald Trump has a 46% popularity rating, while John F. Kennedy has a 90% approval rating, making him the most well-liked former president in recent memory.

According to the survey, Ronald Reagan has a 69% approval rating, which is second only to Kennedy’s.

Seven out of the nine presidents rated well by the majority of Americans. Richard Nixon finished in bottom with a 32% approval rating, while Trump got the second-lowest.

Due to over 20% of Americans being unable to express an opinion on the previous presidents in a Gallup poll conducted five years prior, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford were not included in the study.

Retrospective approval ratings for George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon have all risen by four points since that 2018 poll. Bill Clinton’s approval rating decreased by four points during this time.

With a 4% margin of error, this poll of 1,013 American adults was conducted from June 1 to 22.

SOURCE: GALLUP