John Stockton is a retired NBA point guard. Stockton, during his career as a professional athlete, was the 10-time all-star point guard from the Utah Jazz, a team for which he played for nearly two decades. Though he has mostly stayed out of the public eye and politics since he retired, Stockton just jumped into the 2024 fight to endorse outsider candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Stockton did so during an appearance on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” during which he explained his endorsement and noted what he thinks is doing wrong in America that makes backing the former Democrat, now Independent member of the Kennedy dynasty important.
Beginning, Stockton introduced the topic by saying that this time is different, both in terms of having someone like RFK Jr. to get behind and vote for and in terms of importance given the way the country is headed. He told Watters, “It’s a rare opportunity to have a candidate like him available in the first place, but never has it been more important.”
Explaining why he thinks America needs a change from the current political situation, he said, “I mean, we’re more divided than ever. We’ve been more distrustful of government than ever. We’ve had more things jammed down our throats that aren’t even legal than has ever happened maybe in the history of our country.”
Continuing, Stockton argued that though Mr. Kennedy is a warrior for what he believes in, he is also always the smartest person in the room and has a way of articulating his viewpoints quite well. He said, “If you ever have a chance to hear him speak, I highly recommend it, because you can be a doubter, and then you hear him speak and you say, ‘Wow, there’s something to that man.'”
Then, returning to the issue of why he’s now speaking out about the issue and why he hasn’t done so in the past, Stockton said that he generally keeps his politics to himself, but now thinks the situation is to pressing to not speak about. “I’ve always tried to keep my voting private, and I probably try to keep it pretty balanced historically, but again, this is a rare opportunity,” he said.
Watters, speaking to Stockton about Kennedy’s run, noted that polling shows both that Mr. Kennedy is polling at a significant level of the vote and that he seems to be pulling votes from both candidates, though perhaps more from Biden than from Trump. Particularly, Watters cited a Harvard-Harris poll which showed that, in a matchup between the three, Trump is at 44 percent, Biden at 36 percent, and Kennedy at 21 percent.
That significant level of support means that Mr. Kennedy is by far the most important third-party threat to the two-party presidential election system since Ross Perot, a tech tycoon from Texas, ran in 1992. However, Mr. Perot then spoiled HW Bush’s campaign and led to Bill Clinton’s electoral victory, whereas now it looks like Mr. Kennedy is taking more votes from the Democrats than from Trump.
Featured image credit: By All-Pro Reels – https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeglo/51911094688/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115702476
"*" indicates required fields