- I might have mentioned it in this thread much earlier, but I watched this play out in a slightly different way with my FIL.
Dude was a bonafide Bay Area communist hippy back in the day, decided to back-pack the world to avoid the draft, etc. Highly self motivated, generally very intelligent man, but he's got his picadillos.
As an old man he's made a small fortune and is now deeply conservative in a "freedom from government" kind of way. The old hippie bleeds through too, he has said in passing in complete seriousness "your bare feet have to touch dirt every once in a while to balance your energies". He was always skeptical of vaccines, likely due to their "mandated" nature, pushing my wife and I to delay/skip/stretch out our kids vaccination schedule (we didn't, and they're fine).
Obama pushed him to his limits, he evangelized Trump who could do no wrong in his eyes, and Covid straight up broke the man.
Then the other day, when I was picking up the kids, he bellowed out of nowhere "I think I finally found a DEMOCRAT I can vote for! RFK Jr. is talkin' a whole lot of sense!"
And it was at that moment that I knew that RFK was going to steal more votes from Trump than from Biden, despite his name.