Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may be here to stay as new polling shows Democratic voters are unenthusiastic about re-electing President Biden 2024. 

Kennedy’s polling numbers have remained steady since he launched his 2024 presidential campaign, and the most recent Fox News Poll from this week shows the challenger commanding 16% of the Democratic primary vote, a sizable chunk for a primary challenger against an incumbent president. 

Biden’s other primary challenger, author Marianne Williamson, took 8% of the vote while the president stagnated, maintaining 62% of Democratic primary voters’ support since April.

Williamson shifted down one point from controlling 9% of Democratic primary voters.

Although Kennedy’s Fox News polling numbers are 3% lower than where he found himself in April, maintaining double-digit support since April shows President John F. Kennedy’s nephew has some political staying power. 

The polls also suggest that even many Democratic voters remain unenthusiastic about backing the 80-year-old president for another term.

Other polling shows Kennedy’s share of blue primary voters staying in the same range, with CNN’s most recent polling showing the environmental lawyer controlling 20%.

Biden does not fare much better in the CNN poll either, receiving support from 60% of Democratic primary voters while Williamson took 8%.

The president can breathe a sigh of relief though. The Democratic National Committee announced it would not be hosting primary debates for the 2024 cycle.

Still, a lack of primary debates does not mean Biden is out of the woods.

With enough money and support, Kennedy could potentially mount an independent campaign without the Democratic Party’s backing that could damage Biden’s re-election effort.

Kennedy could be a spoiler in the election if he keeps his momentum up, plays his cards right and keeps up his media push that will likely take him to Twitter for an interview with billionaire owner Elon Musk.

That possibility also becomes more of a reality should Williamson drop out of the race and the majority of her supporters fall into Kennedy’s camp.

However enticing that path may be to some, becoming a presidential spoiler in America’s two-party system is a rare feat that requires that a candidate spend a lot of money and for the planets to align.

Still, Biden’s political bleeding serves as a warning to his campaign that his re-election is not as buttoned-up as the campaign may believe it is.

The Massachusetts Senate approved a $55.9 billion state budget proposal for the new fiscal year on Thursday, setting up negotiations with the House on a final spending plan to ship to Democratic Gov. Maura Healey by July.

One focus of the budget is higher education.

The Senate budget would let all Massachusetts students, regardless of immigration status, qualify for in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities — as long as they attended a high school in the state for at least three years, and graduated or obtained a GED.

‘Massachusetts will be competitive so long as people from all over the world can come here to fulfill their dreams,’ Democratic Senate President Karen Spilka said.

The budget would also create a free community college program for nursing students.

One item which failed to be included in the final Senate plan is a proposal to allow online sales of lottery tickets. The budget plan approved by the Massachusetts House would allow the online lottery games.

Healey has also signaled support for the move, citing competition for gambling dollars from online sports betting companies, like Boston-based DraftKings.

The issue will now be hashed out by a six-member House and Senate conference committee charged with drafting a final budget proposal.

Like the Massachusetts House, the Senate’s budget plan would split the anticipated $1 billion in added revenue from the state’s new ‘millionaire’s tax’ between education and transportation initiatives.

Of the $500 million dedicated to transportation, the Senate plan would include $190 million for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority — and another $100 million for roads and bridges.

Unlike the House budget, the Senate decided against including money for universal free school meals in their budget plan. Senate leaders say they hope to take up the issue in a separate supplemental budget.

Both House and Senate budget proposals would funnel money into the state’s ‘rainy day’ fund. The account currently has about $7.1 billion. Both budget plans would bring the total to just over $9 billion.

The House approved its $56.2 billion state budget plan in April. Healey unveiled her budget plan earlier in the year.

The budget debate comes as April tax revenues plummeted more than $2.1 billion below collections from last April and more than $1.4 billion below predictions for the month.

Healey has downplayed the gloomy numbers, saying the state remains in a strong financial position.

The House last month also approved a separate $654 million tax relief package.

The bill is aimed at helping older adults, renters, businesses and wealthier homeowners while rewriting the law that sent about $3 billion back to taxpayers last year.

The House measure would also raise the state’s estate tax threshold from $1 million to $2 million. Healey, who released her own $742 million tax relief package in February, would eliminate the tax for estates valued up to $3 million.

Spilka said the Senate plans to take up the details of its own $575 million tax relief proposal after the budget.

A final compromise budget, approved by both chambers, must be in place by the start of the new fiscal year on July 1.

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South Carolina’s six-week abortion ban put on hold by judge, offering a temporary relief for providers as the state Supreme Court reviews the law, which reflects a larger trend of restrictive abortion measures across the country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.The ruling Friday by Judge Clifton Newman came 24 hours after Gov. Henry McMaster signed the bill.The new law is similar to a ban on abortion once cardiac activity can be detected that lawmakers passed in 2021.

A judge put South Carolina’s new law banning most abortions around six weeks of pregnancy on hold Friday until the state Supreme Court can review the measure, giving providers a temporary reprieve in a region that has enacted strict limits on the procedure.

Judge Clifton Newman’s ruling that put the state’s abortion law back at roughly 20 weeks came about 24 hours after Gov. Henry McMaster signed the bill into law without any notice, which had left dozens of people seeking abortions in limbo and created the potential for a legal abortion becoming illegal as a doctor performed it.

‘It’s extraordinarily difficult not only for the women themselves, but for their doctors — not just the doctors at Planned Parenthood — but hospitals all across the state who need to understand what to do in an emergency,’ said Vicki Ringer, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood in South Carolina.

The developments in South Carolina are a microcosm of what has played out across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade a year ago, allowing states to decide their abortion laws and leaving patients scrambling to find care wherever they can in situations where weeks or even days can make a huge difference.

The South Carolina measure joins stiff limitations pending in North Carolina and Florida, states that had been holdouts in the South providing wider access to the procedure, threatening to further delay abortions as appointments pile up in the region.

The state has seen the number of abortions climb sharply as other Southern states passed near-total bans. Before the overturn of Roe, less than 1 in 10 abortions in South Carolina were performed on people who lived out of state. Now, that figure is near 50% and the number of abortions each month has at least tripled, according to state health data.

The law passed Tuesday by the General Assembly is similar to a ban on abortion once cardiac activity can be detected that lawmakers passed in 2021. The state Supreme Court decided in a 3-2 ruling that the 2021 law violated the state constitution’s right to privacy.

Legislative leaders said the new law makes technical tweaks that should sway at least one justice to change his mind.

But Newman said it wasn’t his role to figure out if that would be successful.

‘The status quo should be maintained until the Supreme Court reviews its decision,’ Newman said. ‘It’s going to end up there.’

Planned Parenthood immediately sued after the law went into effect Thursday, saying South Carolina’s abortion clinics were flooded with canceled appointments from patients further along in their pregnancies and doctors were forced to carefully review the new regulations on the fly.

The abortion rights group said the new law was so similar to the old one that clinics and women seeking treatment would be harmed if it were allowed to stay in effect until a full court review.

Nearly all of the 75 women with appointments for abortions over the next several days appeared to be past six weeks, Planned Parenthood attorney Kathleen McDaniel said.

‘There is irreputable harm. It is happening. It has already happened,’ McDaniel said.

The majority opinion in the South Carolina Supreme Court ruling striking down the 2021 law said that although lawmakers have the authority to protect life, the privacy clause in the state constitution ultimately gives women time to determine whether they want to get an abortion and most women don’t know they are pregnant six weeks after conception.

Justice Kaye Hearn wrote the opinion. She has since had to retire because she turned 72 and was replaced by a man, making the South Carolina’s the only high court in the country without a woman on the bench.

‘I would say that nothing in the law has changed,’ McDaniel said. ‘The only thing that has changed is there is no longer a woman on the Supreme Court.’

The changes in the new law are directed at another justice in the majority, John Few, who wrote his own opinion saying the 2021 law was poorly written because legislators didn’t show it did any work to determine if six weeks was enough time for a woman to know she was pregnant.

Few suggested he would have found an even stricter full ban on abortion constitutional, saying that if a fetus had all the rights of a person, then a ban would be like child abuse or rape laws that don’t violate privacy rights.

Lawyers for the state leaned on the hope Few will change his vote.

‘We would strongly encourage the court to review that decision very carefully, to understand it focuses on one law, the 2021 act,’ state assistant attorney general Thomas Hydrick said. But, he said, the new law is a good faith attempt to correct flaws lawmakers saw in how the justices interpreted the 2021 law.

Newman said that’s outside his role as a lower court judge. ‘Am I being asked to overrule the Supreme Court?’ he asked.

Lawmakers continued to say they are confident they wrote a bill that will stand up to the high court’s scrutiny this time.

‘While I respect Judge Newman’s decision, I remain convinced that the heartbeat bill is constitutional and that the Supreme Court will agree,’ Republican state Senate President Thomas Alexander said in a statement.

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Most voters think artificial intelligence technology will change the way we live in the U.S. in the next few years. Whether that is a good thing or bad remains to be seen.

In the latest Fox News national survey, voters were asked their main reactions — without the aid options — when they think about artificial intelligence. 

Most often, the response was negative, with the top mentions being afraid and dangerous (16%). Others think it is generally a bad idea (11%) or they can’t trust it (8%).

There are positive sentiments as well, albeit in smaller numbers. Voters say AI is innovative (7%), and they are impressed or excited (6%) or cautiously optimistic (5%) about it.

Seven percent say AI confuses them, 6% think of robots, 6% have mixed feelings and 4% feel it needs more research.

Among most demographic groups, the top response is afraid or dangerous, especially for women, Gen Xers and Republicans.  

‘The power of AI and the speed of its development clearly weighs on the minds of many,’ says Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts the Fox News Poll along with Democrat Chris Anderson. ‘We’re not quite at the ‘red pill, blue pill’ stage like Neo, but we are worried about where all this is headed.’

In a blog post published Monday, OpenAI leaders wrote, ‘It’s conceivable that, within the next ten years, AI systems will exceed expert skill level in most domains and carry out as much productive activity as one of today’s largest corporations.’

Still, just 4% of voters say AI makes them think it is a threat to jobs.

An overwhelming majority agree artificial intelligence will change the way we live in the U.S., and it’ll be in the next few years (86%).

Forty-three percent feel it will change a lot while another 43% say just some. Twelve percent believe it won’t change much (9%) if at all (3%).

Over half of voters are concerned about artificial intelligence technology (56%), which lands it in 11th place (and tied with climate change) among a list of 15 concerns. Women, nonwhite voters and voters over age 65 are among those most concerned while men, White voters and voters under age 35 are the least worried.

So who is using artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT?

A quarter of voters overall say they have used it, and 74% say they haven’t.

Voters under age 35 (44%), men (30%), Hispanic voters (33%), and Democrats (28%) are more likely than voters over age 65 (9%), women (19%), Black voters (21%), White voters (22%), and Republicans (20%) to have used the technology.

CLICK HERE FOR TOPLINE AND CROSS TABS

Conducted May 19-22, 2023, under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R), this Fox News Poll includes interviews with 1,001 registered voters nationwide randomly selected from a voter file who spoke with live interviewers on landline phones and cellphones. The total sample has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

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Democrats in Nevada have made last minute changes to a bill intended to crack down on the possession of fentanyl by significantly softening the legislation’s threshold of how much someone could possess that would be considered low-level trafficking.

The amended bill, SB35, was presented to the state legislature by Nevada’s progressive Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford last week, just hours before the deadline for it to pass out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee. 

According to Ford, the amendment came as a ‘compromise between the many groups with an interest in this issue,’ and included the drop of the low-level trafficking charge for fentanyl possession from 4 grams to 28 grams.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, 28 grams of fentanyl is enough to kill up to 14,000 people, while 4 grams is enough to kill up to 2,000 people.

A source familiar with the debate over the bill told Fox News Digital that the back and forth between Democrats over the threshold for trafficking charges included concerns over how the state would prosecute fentanyl being mixed with other substances. 

The source added that there was also concern a stricter threshold would be akin to ‘war on drugs’ policies that cracked down on low-level users as harshly as drug traffickers.

The push for the new crime bill comes amid a worsening fentanyl crisis and just a few years after Nevada Democrats, with Ford’s support, passed a 2019 bill that weakened penalties for larger amounts of drug possession, including fentanyl. 

The 2019 bill, AB236, made it possible for a person in possession of fentanyl to only be charged with a misdemeanor unless the amount possessed was at least 100 grams, an amount the DEA says could kill between 300,000 and 500,000 people. Prior to this bill’s passage, the previous low-level trafficking threshold was set at 4 grams, the amount the new bill would have reverted to until Democrats’ last minute changes.

In contrast to Democrats’ push for the softened drug trafficking threshold, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has called for any possession of fentanyl at all to be classified as a felony offense.

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem opened a hotline for complaints about South Dakota colleges and is calling on the state’s higher education governing board to ban drag shows, she announced Friday.

In a letter to the South Dakota Board of Regents, Noem said states have allowed ‘liberal ideologies to poison their colleges and universities.’

‘On campuses across the country, students have been taught the importance of diversity and equity and given access to ‘safe spaces’ instead of learning to tolerate the disagreement, discomfort, and dissent that they will experience in the real world,’ Noem wrote.

She called on the college oversight board to increase graduation rates, remove references to ‘preferred pronouns’ in school materials, cut administrative costs and ensure universities are not accepting any money from China.

An Associated Press request for comment to the regents was not immediately returned Friday.

Noem pitched the hotline to regents as a way to ‘keep our institutions accountable — and ensure that we are all aware of what is happening at our taxpayer-funded colleges and universities.’ She wrote that information gathered from the hotline will guide policy changes.

‘As I work with our Board of Regents and Board of Technical Education to chart our path for higher education, we are giving students, faculty, and parents this tool to help voice any concerns so that they can be addressed,’ Noem said in a statement.

Republican Tim Rave, a former South Dakota House speaker and Noem appointee, leads the Board of Regents. Noem recently appointed two new members to the board: Jim Lochner, formerly of Tyson Foods, and Doug Morrison, the former Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis director.

On Friday, Noem said she plans to make more appointments soon.

The Board of Regents in December ordered a review of university campus events and its policy on minors attending them after a drag show at South Dakota State University faced criticism from conservative lawmakers for being advertised as family friendly.

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Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed Friday to seek a repeal of President Trump’s signature First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that aimed to reduce recidivism, allowed a pathway for non-violent prisoners to shorten their sentences, and reduced mandatory minimum sentences.

‘Under the Trump administration — he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill, it’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison who have now re-offended, and really, really hurt a number of people,’ DeSantis said in an interview with the Daily Wire. 

‘So one of the things I would want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act. If you are in jail, you should serve your time. And the idea that they’re releasing people who have not been rehabilitated early, so that they can prey on people in our society is a huge, huge mistake,’ he added.

DeSantis voted for the first version of the bill as a member of the House of Representatives in 2018, the same year he was elected as Florida’s governor, but had resigned before the final, more moderate version of the bill came to a vote in the chamber.

Trump’s campaign responded to DeSantis by pointing to his original vote, and argued he was basically criticizing his own supporters in Congress who also voted for the bill.

‘Lyin’ Ron. He voted for the First Step Act. Would be a shame if there was video of him praising it in an interview with a local FL television station…’ Trump campaign spokesperson Stephen Cheung tweeted following the DeSantis’ interview.

‘DeSantis supporter [Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.] voted for the bill as well. DeSantis is calling out his own Congressional supporters and throwing them under the bus,’ he later added in a separate tweet.

The slight from DeSantis is the latest in a series of ramped up criticism aimed at Trump after facing near constant attacks from the latter in recent weeks.

On Thursday, the governor torched Trump over the COVID-19-related lockdowns of 2020, and for what he described was Trump turning ‘the country over to [Dr. Anthony] Fauci.’ He also said he understood Trump was going after him because ‘he understands I’m the candidate who can beat him.’

Early polls from before DeSantis launched his presidential campaign have consistently shown Trump with a commanding lead over the Republican field with DeSantis in a distant second.