If you want to know how scary former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is to Democrats, their erratic legal reaction to his candidacy offers a winding road of clues.

When Kennedy announced his presidential bid in February – with early polling giving him up to 15 percent of the electorate – President Biden’s reelection campaign filed lawsuits seeking to disqualify him from the ballot. It disparaged RFK Jr.’s candidacy as a “stalking horse” for the then-presumptive Republican nominee, former president Donald J. Trump. The Biden campaign filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging collusion between Kennedy’s campaign and an aligned PAC. Biden’s people reportedly deployed an entire team devoted to denigrating the former Democrat. A Biden-aligned PAC even funded a website that had no other purpose than to criticize Kennedy’s positions. It featured a graphic that morphed Kennedy’s face into Trump’s.

Along with RFK Jr., the Democrats have also taken measures against leftist third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein and even smaller third-party bids that could deprive them of votes in November.

The reason for these actions is simple enough. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat who is the son of a Democratic martyr and a scion of the most iconic Democratic family in America, and who had chosen another lifelong Democrat as his running mate, threatened to take votes away from Biden in the general election. When Vice President Harris became the nominee in July, her campaign continued the legal efforts against Kennedy. Ultimately, Kennedy declared, this burden made his campaign impossible due to huge legal bills and excessive court time.

In a 90-minute speech on Aug. 23, Kennedy announced that he would suspend his campaign and seek to have his name removed from ballots in battleground states where his presence might help Harris by drawing votes away from Trump. He also endorsed the Republican nominee, claiming that he agrees with him more than the Democrats on “existential” issues, such as free speech, war policy, and public health management . Moreover, Kennedy excoriated the mainstream media for promoting first Biden and then Harris while minimizing attention to his campaign.

Within hours, most polling agencies agreed that RFK Jr.’s supporters, who had dwindled to 5 percent of the electorate by the time of his announcement, would mostly break for Trump over Harris and help his reelection bid.

The Democrats and their media allies had a massive meltdown. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called RFK Jr. a “f***ing anti-American disaster” in an X post just hours after his announcement. Within 72 hours, the far-left Atlantic published a detailed first-hand account written by a college classmate of RFK’s who claimed that Kennedy sold him cocaine at Harvard in the 1960s. Five of the former candidate’s eight living siblings denounced his endorsement of Trump as “a betrayal of the values the our father and our family hold most dear.” A sixth sibling, California attorney Maxwell Kennedy, penned a lengthy op-ed in The Los Angeles Times urging American voters to ignore his prominent brother and cast their votes for Harris. Across the corporate media, RFK Jr.’s habits, views, policies, personal past, interactions with animals, and odd foibles were dredged up  to undermine his credibility .

In the days that followed, anti-Kennedy legal action transformed dramatically. Now the Harris campaign wants him to stay on as many ballots as possible. On Tuesday, they won a major victory when the elections committee of Wisconsin, a vital battleground state, voted 5-1 to keep his name listed against his wishes, despite the election being over two months away. He will also remain listed in Michigan, North Carolina, and Nevada. While this does not mean that all of Kennedy’s supporters will disregard his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, it stands to reason that some of them very well do exactly that.

If the Democrats, who feel no shame about their sudden shift in affirming the legality of Kennedy’s ballot listing, can maintain or expand this activity, the effects could propel Harris into the White House in November.