Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenged the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Sunday to take a beat and refrain from simply “anointing” Vice President Kamala Harris as the new 2024 presidential candidate.

Kennedy started out running his 2024 presidential campaign as a Democrat, but announced later — after effectively being shut out by the DNC — that he would be running as an independent. In a statement posted via X — after Biden announced he was dropping out of the race and endorsed Harris as his choice to replace him on the ticket — Kennedy argued that the DNC should give the choice back to the people.

I commend President Biden for stepping down. His infirmities were evident to any unbiased observer from the beginning. It was this progressive deterioration — and his abandonment of Democratic Party principles — that prompted me to enter the race and ensure American voters had a…

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 21, 2024

“I commend President Biden for stepping down. His infirmities were evident to any unbiased observer from the beginning. It was this progressive deterioration — and his abandonment of Democratic Party principles — that prompted me to enter the race and ensure American voters had a viable, vigorous alternative to Donald Trump,” Kennedy began.

He went on to explain that the same things that had driven him to leave the Democratic primary and run his campaign as an independent could make the voters feel the same distrust in the DNC as he had.

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“Yet the response of the DNC was to try and hide President Biden’s degeneration from the American public and disable democracy to ram him through to his party’s nomination,” he explained. “Many Americans fear that the same DNC elites are about to rig the nominating process again to get a monumentally unpopular vice president to step into President Biden’s shoes.”

“I call on the Democratic Party to return to its traditional commitment to democracy and exemplify it with an open process,” Kennedy concluded, proposing a solution. “Instead of anointing a candidate hand-picked by DNC elites, the party should use neutral polling to identify the candidate who can best beat Donald Trump. The delegates should then select a nominee based on this information. If they had done this to begin with, I would not have had to leave the Democratic Party.”