Wondering how to compare JDateChooser with LocalNow

So I'm trying to create an if else statement where if a date from the jdatechooser is before today's date, then an error message would occur. From my knowledge, you can get today's date as LocalDate.now(), format it into a string, and then do a try-catch to parse it back into a Date. For the jdatechooser, you can grab that as a Date, format it into a string, and then do a try-catch to parse it back into a date as well. The only issue with this is when you do jdate.before(localdate) an error occurs. Is there another method of doing this? I saw that you could get today's date as an Instance, but I don't have much experience with that yet.

This is the code that I tried:

try{
    //Checks to see if New Due Date is a date set before today's date

    //Grabs today's date, converts it into string, then converts it into date
    LocalDate ld = LocalDate.now();
    SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd, yyyy");
    String tds = sdf.format(ld);
    Date tdd = sdf.parse(tds);

    //Grabs reactivateDateChooser1, converts it into string, then converts it into date
    Date rdc = reactivateDateChooser1.getDate();
    SimpleDateFormat sdf1 = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd, yyyy");
    String rdcs = sdf1.format(rdc);
    Date rdcd = sdf1.parse(rdcs);

    //If the new Due Date is before or on today's date, then error message will show
    if(rdcd.before(tdd)){
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Please select a date after " + tds, "Select Valid Date", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
    }

    //If the date chooser is empty, then error message will show
    else if (reactivateDateChooser1.getDate() == null){
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Please select a date", "Needs Date", JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE);
    }

    //Otherwise, if the new date is after today's date, then the function will happen
    else if (rdcd.after(tdd)){
    changeStatusToActive();
    statusCheck1.setText("");
    refreshClassTable();
    closeReactivateDialog();
    }
    }catch(Exception e){
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, e);
    }

And this is the error that I'm getting:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot format given Object as a Date