Meet RFK Jr.'s biggest Central Illinois supporter
DWIGHT — For the past six months, the roughly 3,500 motorists who traverse Mazon Avenue through the heart of Dwight on any given day have passed an unassuming, once-vacant storefront featuring an unlikely political message: "Kennedy: Independent for president."
In the window of the small, red brick building — previously a flower shop — is a yard sign with a picture of the man himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the black sheep scion of the famed Democratic political family who spent about a year running a renegade campaign for U.S. president.
Inside are yard signs, leaflets and other campaign materials for the Democrat-turned-independent, who suspended his campaign in August and threw his support to Republican former President Donald Trump, again the GOP nominee.
The campaign may be over. But the Dwight outpost remains.
It's all the handiwork of one man: Calvin Coleman, a 48-year-old married father of one who lives in town and owns Coleman & Son Garage directly next door to the makeshift campaign headquarters.
Coleman, a self-described "outsider looking in" new to politics, said he found himself earlier this year gravitating towards Kennedy's maverick campaign. And, like an evangelist, wanted to do what he could to get the word out.
"And I thought, 'Man, I'm right here on this busy stretch and we've got this vacant building," Coleman told The Pantagraph in an interview. "Let's see here, I can spend a couple $100 and have a sign made and do everything.'"
In March, the sign went up.
"It's not like I've gotten any money or anything," Coleman explained. "This was just strictly a guy that believed in RFK enough to stand up and try to put something together and give a centralized location for people if they wanted a yard sign or some materials or anything like that. And ultimately, that's kind of what it really is."
It is true. Coleman is not a paid campaign staffer. His office was never an official Kennedy campaign office. It was a grassroots effort in the truest sense. And it's one that continues even as the campaign halts.
"I understand that he's not going to be the president, at least not for 2024," Coleman said in an interview earlier this month. "I'm not going to try to paint some false narrative around that. "However, it is still important to show that his movement did grow large enough to where former President Trump noticed — people noticed."
'Fed up'
Coleman was never heavily involved in a political campaign before this year. He once considered himself a Democrat, but could not recall the last time he voted for the party's presidential candidate.
He has an anti-establishment streak. And, like a lot of Americans, he's fed up with the dominance of the Democratic and Republicans parties in national politics.
He said this discontent is what fueled "a diversity of people" toward Kennedy, even if they do not agree on every single issue — with the candidate or among themselves.
"That's one of the really deep things about us: It's really, really this big mixture," Coleman said.
This past year, Coleman has proven to be one of Kennedy's most loyal Illinois foot soldiers.
He gathered signatures to get the candidate on the ballot and later took time off from work at his auto repair shop to appear before the Illinois Board of Elections when the candidate's petitions were unsuccessfully challenged.
And he was also among a cohort of Kennedy supporters who protested outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month. They were upset Kennedy was not to be included in the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Kennedy dropped out and endorsed Trump days later.
Even now, with Kennedy's campaign all but over, Coleman still wears his Kennedy swag nearly every day. And, while hundreds of Kennedy volunteers still hop on weekly Zoom calls, Coleman is among the few still hosting events, which appear on Kennedy's campaign website, now rebranded mahanow.org , which is short for "Make America Healthy Again."
"For the most part, we all rally kind of around common sense," he said. "It's just, here's the things that are important to us, here's the things that are important to Bobby (and) here's the policies. And it's a lot of people that are just fed up with the two-party system."
Indeed, the path for an independent candidate in American politics to win a state or federal election outside the two-party system is next-to-impossible.
In Illinois, for instance, Democratic and Republican presidential candidates only need to gather 3,000 signatures to get on the primary ballot. But an independent candidate must attain at least 25,000 signatures.
"The Democratic and Republican parties, they write the rules and they make it easy for established political parties to pass petitions and get on the ballot, and they make it hard for third party candidates and independent candidates," said Kent Redfield, a retired professor of political science at the University of Illinois Springfield.
The petition process is "complex" and "easy to screw up," Redfield said. And, even if the candidate survives a petition challenge as Kennedy did, it often comes at a significant cost in the former of legal bills.
"They want to eliminate competition and they want to eliminate uncertainty," Redfield said of the major parties.
It's this disillusionment with the political system that drove Coleman and those like him to Kennedy.
He specifically mentioned Kennedy's stance against an interventionist foreign policy, pledge to reign in corporate influence on government and his focus on addressing chronic health issues as reasons for his support. These positions are not necessarily reflected in either party, he said.
Besides being the namesake of one of the country's most beloved political figures, Kennedy is most known for his anti-vaccine positions. This was turbocharged during the pandemic, when the candidate spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.
Coleman said he knows "people want to jump on Bobby about the vaccine thing," but he personally doesn't think Kennedy is anti-vaccine.
Kennedy has also been at the center of several bizarre stories. In August, for instance, he acknowledged a 2014 incident in which he picked up a dead bear from the side of the road and dumped it in Central Park in New York. He described it as a "prank."
"I mean, not the best judgment, probably, but it's not like he killed the thing to do it, you know what I mean?" Coleman said, adding that he feels some of the criticism of Kennedy is "a grasping of straws to try to find something to make the guy look bad."
If anything, Coleman said this makes his candidate look like someone who "has made mistakes and acknowledges the mistakes."
"If he did something, he seems to own it, just like with the bear thing," Coleman said.
What next?
There is a certain incongruity to the campaign office Coleman set up in Dwight, a town of about 4,000 is on the northern edge of Livingston County.
By every metric, it is Trump country, with the county giving the former president 71% of its vote in 2020. Every county office is held by Republicans. And it has not voted for another party's presidential nominee since Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover.
When Kennedy's uncle, former President John F. Kennedy, was on the ballot in 1960, Livingston County voted for Republican Richard Nixon by a 2-to-1 margin.
In that sense, the Kennedy presence appeared out of place.
And some in the county say that, even if it is visible, it is not a large presence.
"I haven't really heard much about him, honestly," said Dan Hobart, the chairman of the Livingston County Democratic Party.
"Maybe I should reach out to him," he added.
Dave Rice, the chair of the Livingston County Republican Party, also said he is not familiar with Coleman or any RFK-related activities in Dwight. But he said it was a signal for the party not to take anything for granted or to "assume everyone thinks like us."
"I like competition," Rice said. "I think competition is healthy. I think it also starts discussion for what do we do and believe that's different from what you do and believe? I feel confident that we'll come out on the other side of that conversation better and stronger having had it."
And now, with Kennedy's support of Trump, they are on the same team. And Kennedy perhaps doesn't look so out-of-place in Trump country.
At this point, Coleman said he is not sure whether he will vote for Kennedy or for Trump, as Kennedy has told his supporters, even in safe blue and red states, to do.
It goes back to his general frustration with the two-party structure.
But the plan is to keep moving the Kennedy message forward.
"And if we have to do that through Donald Trump, then I guess we have to, because at this point, I would rather settle for any portions of his policies... as opposed to zero," Coleman said.
Trump has said he would consider appointing Kennedy to a role in his administration if he wins. Kennedy said this week that he is helping identify candidates to lead key agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
Still, the future of the movement is in question. Kennedy is 70, so running again is not a given. And since he ran as an independent instead of creating a new political party, it can be difficult to sustain, especially one stitched together by a specific candidate's personal appeal.
"I think that the jury's still out on that," Coleman said. "I think that a lot of that's going to be left up to us — to see if we can carry the message without him being the leader of it, to an extent, to see if there's enough like-minded people that agree with it to where, if another person four years down the road wants to run for president, and just adopt his policies, whether we'll be able to get behind it or not."
But, at least for now, there's still an ember of the movement in Dwight.
Contact Brenden Moore at . :
Stay up-to-date on the latest in local and national government and political topics with our newsletter. State Government Reporter
