A Kennedy toils in Mississippi, tracing his grandfather’s path

Joe Kennedy III, the former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, and grandson of Bobby Kennedy, in New York on July 22, 2025. Kennedy, 44, has recently retraced the steps of his grandfather, who toured the Mississippi Delta in 1967 and encountered the kind of hunger and poverty more often associated with the developing world. “I’m proud that my family has spent a lot of their years in office advocating for these people.” (Karsten Moran/The New York Times)

By Robert Draper

Joe Kennedy III, the former Democratic member of Congress from Massachusetts, gazed out his window at endless fields of cotton and soybeans as he drove across the Mississippi Delta one sweltering afternoon last month. He was a long way from home, but in a sense returning to it.

“People living here have been receiving boil-water notices for two years now,” he said, using an expletive. “We should be banging the drums on this every day.”

Kennedy, 44, was retracing the steps of his grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general and candidate for president, who toured the Delta in 1967 and encountered the kind of hunger and poverty more often associated with the developing world. “Those images Bobby took away of children with bloated stomachs and open sores had a huge impact on him,” said Evan Thomas, a biographer of both the elder Kennedy and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy nodded to the history. “I know a bit about my grandfather’s visit to the Delta back in the ’60s, and how it changed and outraged him to see this in the richest country in the world,” he said. “I’m proud that my family has spent a lot of their years in office advocating for these people.”

Kennedy is on a mission to continue the legacy of an American political family that has in recent years lost some of its liberal luster. It angers him that his uncle Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, is a key figure in an administration that is overturning core values of his family.

The health secretary has defended work requirements for Medicaid recipients, “which do not work,” the younger Kennedy said. “The only thing they succeed at is kicking people off Medicaid who need it.”

On the elder Kennedy’s efforts to ban food dyes, his nephew dismissively replied, “It’s not the dyes that are making people obese.”

Still, he shares with his uncle the belief that Democrats are increasingly captive to an urban elite. “I think the Democratic Party has lost touch with this reality,” he said, staring out at the Delta landscape.

Kennedy’s response is not to run for president as his grandfather did and his uncle might, or at least not yet.

Instead he has formed the Groundwork Project, a nonprofit that seeks to develop a network of grassroots resistance in four deep-red states — Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma and West Virginia — that have received little attention from left-leaning organizations. Without any meaningful opposition, Kennedy said, those states have become havens for right-wing initiatives, ranging from the evisceration of the Clean Air Act in West Virginia to legislation in Mississippi that banned abortions after 15 weeks and led to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“The only way to change the power structures in those states is to organize people,” Kennedy said. “That’s not a short fix. But what else can you do?”

The slow grind of organization-building in hostile territory that Kennedy envisions has been done before, mostly by conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity, which was formed in 2004, operates in 35 states and has an annual operating budget of more than $186 million. In contrast, the Groundwork Project operates on a relatively modest $2.8 million a year, much of it disbursed as $25,000 annual grants to about 40 local groups that have fought uphill battles in areas like environmental justice and reproductive rights.

The Oral History of Family Lore

Kennedy was not yet born when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s quest for the presidency was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in California in June 1968. The 42-year-old candidate left behind his widow, Ethel, and their 11 children, among them Robert Jr. and Joseph, Joe Kennedy III’s father, who would go on to serve in Congress from 1987 to 1999.

Kennedy said that he has never read a book about his grandfather, since from infancy he marinated in the oral history of family lore. Inculcated in him were RFK adages such as, “The gross national product can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

His own trajectory followed the meticulously laid Kennedy path of public service merging with political advancement. He spent his childhood in Boston before attending Stanford University and subsequently serving two years in the Dominican Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer. He returned home to Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard Law School and then worked as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County.

It came as little surprise in February 2012 when he announced his desire to fill the congressional seat soon to be vacated by Rep. Barney Frank. Kennedy — an earnest and energetic 31-year-old scion with a genetically distinctive aquiline nose, a toothy grin and wavy red hair that deviated from the family’s physical template — coasted to victory without serious opposition.

The freshman won over many colleagues in the House, several of whom said in interviews that they had been braced for an entitled brat and instead encountered someone who was thoughtful and unpretentious. He set out to lead on mental health issues as his cousin, Patrick Kennedy, had done before retiring from Congress in 2011. But Kennedy said he grew dismayed by the chamber’s partisan divisions and inexplicable lethargy, recalling, “Even in the majority, I couldn’t move my own bills.”

By Kennedy’s fourth term, restlessness had gotten the better of him. In September 2019, he announced his candidacy for the Senate, a body in which three Kennedy legends — his grandfather; his great-uncle, the former president; and his great-uncle Ted — had previously served. He garnered the support of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who was then the minority leader.

But the 73-year-old Democratic incumbent, Sen. Edward J. Markey, outfoxed his younger opponent by recasting himself as a rabble-rousing progressive in the manner of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who endorsed Markey. Kennedy, whose tendency is to speak in carefully constructed paragraphs, struggled to come up with his own pithy pitch to voters.

Markey won the September 2020 primary by 11 points, and Kennedy became the first in his family to be defeated in a senatorial contest. President Donald Trump gloated on Twitter, “Pelosi strongly backed the loser!”

‘You Democrats Think We Don’t Know How to Work?’

Rejected by progressive activists, Kennedy turned to forgotten agrarian lands like the Mississippi Delta, which has only one major city (Jackson), and is therefore difficult to organize. It’s “what I call a hard-to-fight state,” said Charles Taylor, the executive director of Mississippi’s NAACP chapter.

Similar impediments exist in Oklahoma, where Republican legislators have passed severe restrictions on abortion and on what can be taught in public school classrooms about racism.

Alabama, a third Groundwork Project state, benefits from a more urban population than Oklahoma or Mississippi. But Democratic get-out-the-vote organizers have been reluctant to operate in a state where there is no in-person early voting and where absentee ballots must be signed by a notary or two voting-age witnesses.

West Virginia is by far the most challenging for Kennedy. Its overwhelmingly rural and white population was long Democratic, but the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the state have spawned a profound distrust of party elites, Kennedy said. He recalled a visit to West Virginia just after he founded the Groundwork Project, when a bearded young man asked him, “How come you Democrats think we don’t know how to work?”

To every such question, Kennedy’s implicit answer was to organize. “I think Mississippi has so much to teach our nation about resilience, never losing focus and not giving up when your government is actively working against you,” he said at an event in Indianola.

Kennedy is applying the same calm resolve to his own political future. He and his wife, Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, an attorney and children’s advocate, have a 6-year-old son and a 9-year-old daughter. Kennedy laments having missed so much of their infancy while serving in Washington.

“The question is, is what I would get out of going back into elective office worth the sacrifice that I asked my family to go through again?”

For now, Kennedy is content to leave the question unanswered. “I’m 44,” he said. “And at some point down the road, I wouldn’t necessarily rule anything out.”