Bobby Kennedy Jr. - Trouble In Trump Town
At the Races for President
What do you get when you combine a political dynasty with a conspiracy theorist? Approximately 15% of the vote.
RFK Jr. is an oddball candidate. He is anti-vaccine, was an environmentalist in a past life, supports tax cuts, supports reparations for African Americans and is well liked by former President Donald Trump and other “MAGA” Republicans. His independent candidacy presents a spoiler effect come November 2024 - but who for?
Common knowledge would suggest that the younger Kennedy, who initially ran for the Democratic nomination before switching lanes to run as an independent would draw the bulk of his supporters from both Democrats and Independents. His surname is synonymous with Democratic politics, and independents as a whole are dissatisfied with a re-run of the 2020 election - especially now than both candidates are four years older than they were back then.
However dear reader, as the title of this article eschews, this is not the full picture.
Rather, Kennedy appears to be drawing a great deal of support from Republicans, independents but not Democrats. To understand why this is happening, I will delve into Kennedy’s recent right wing positions and pivot towards the MAGA wing of the nation to suggest that he will operate as a spoiler for the eventual Republican nominee and cite polling data which hammers this point home.
Democrats Fall in Line
It was former President Bill Clinton who once said that, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line,” and post-Trump politics decided to take an axe to that adage. From the Speaker fiasco to the respective Democratic and Republican primaries in 2024, to the 2018 and 2022 midterms one thing has been constant - Democrats really love falling in line.
No modern political message has been as salient as, “vote blue no matter who.” It adorns Democratic users of the site formerly known as Twitter’s bios, and has probably been uttered in every square inch of suburbia since 2016. Instead of feeling sorry for themselves after 2016, Democrats resolved to win every election they could and the manifestation of this is in the sentiment of vote blue no matter who, the concept that any Democrat is better than any Republican, and it is one’s duty to vote for whoever the Democrat in any given race is.
This sensation is pivotal to understanding how a man with the surname Kennedy fell out of favour with Democrats even as he was running in the primary against an incumbent President who up to half of Democrats feel shouldn’t run in 2024. Biden isn’t particularly popular inside the party, but he also isn’t unpopular, and the fear of losing to Trump again in 2024 is enough to placate most Democratic voters. For a great swathe of liberal Americans, they believe that to rock the boat and challenge an incumbent President would assure a second Trump term come 2024, and they might be right. You only have to look back as far as 1980 to see that a competitive primary against an incumbent Democratic President does anything bar help their standing come November.
Alongside this phenomenon, is also the fact that a number of Bobby Jr’s policies are anathema to the core ideals of Democratic voters. He is opposed to vaccines, rallies against censorship and has dropped a number of dog whistles which only those on the furthest right of American politics would pick up on. It doesn’t matter that he has outflanked Biden on issues such as reparations, or once had a squeaky clean record on the climate. His recent political manoeuvres have simply alienated him from the vast majority of Democrats, and it’s unclear that any pivoting to the left would bring them into his fold.
Ultimately, the Kennedy name can only go so far - ask Joe Kennedy III how it went when he ran against Ed Markey for one of Massachusetts’ Senate seats in 2020. Gone are the days where belonging to the Kennedy dynasty would guarantee you any sort of success with liberal voters. After the bitter loss of 2016, we have entered an era where Democratic primary voters care less and less about political clout and more and more about policy positions and electability. If you want to win them over, you need to be able to prove empirically that your candidacy will be viable come November. For Democrats, 2016 cannot be repeated, and this sentiment is perhaps best illustrated by the immortal adage of former Pres. Bush, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me twice — you can't get fooled again.”
Republicans Fall in Love
Traditionally, Republicans were the candidates who presented, loveable “moderate” politicians to the American public to win their support, but 2016 altered that calculus beyond repair.
Now, in contrast with Democrats, it is Republicans who are less interested in the electability of their candidate of choice, but more focussed on policy, persona and finding out who the most conservative candidate in a given race is. This never used to be the case. Recent GOP nominees such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and HW Bush were anything but the most conservative in their given elections but ended up trumping the field either by charisma or convincing voters that they were the best candidate to take the White House come November.
Donald Trump and 2016 changed this strategy, and the 2024 Republican primary contest goes to prove that electability is no longer at the forefront of the mind for GOP voters. Anyone not called Donald Trump is either trying to prove that they’re the furthest right candidate in the field or those like Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum who are trying to pitch themselves as sensible and electable - the latter two can barely break 2% in polling.
All this preamble is to explain why RFK Jr. is drawing a huge amount of his support from Republican voters - and it’s for the exact reason he’s losing Democrats. Kennedy’s beliefs are the fringe of the fringe, but issues like opposition to vaccines are still held by a number of Republicans, but by very few political figures. Arch opponents of vaccination, Coronavirus lockdowns, wokeness, cancel culture and other such fringe issues are flocking to his camp because, despite being entirely unelectable, he speaks their language. Some have even referred to Kennedy as the “Ultra MAGA” candidate, an utterly bizarre thought process when you consider that he is running against Donald Trump, the man who brought Make America Great Again to a modern audience, in the general election.
I hope this has done a good job of explaining why Kennedy draws support from Republicans despite his surname. For a group of voters where purity and arch-conservatism matters most, RFK Jr fits the bill, and this should concern Trump and other Republicans. For Trump to win back supporters from Kennedy, he either has to tack even further to the fringe on issues such as vaccines and censorship, pray for Kennedy to fizzle out or taint him in the view of MAGA voters. Any one or combination of these things may occur, but in an election which will already come down to the wire, it is the last thing that Trump or his team will want to deal with.
Kennedy as a Spoiler?
As of right now, the polling data doesn’t give a clear image of how Kennedy will affect the 2024 election yet, with an aggregate of polls where his name is on the ballot and without his name provides a less than one point difference. (Polling with Kennedy has Trump leading Biden with 40% to 39.5% whereas polls without Kennedy show Trump maintaining a half point edge with 44% to the incumbent’s 43.5%). The empirical evidence would suggest that it’s too early to call who Kennedy’s candidacy hurts more than the other, but I remain thus far unconvinced that his far right policies and cult appeal will hurt Biden more than they hurt Trump, and here’s why.
Kennedy currently enjoys near universal name recognition - something which third party candidates have always struggled with and has been a barrier to them breaking through in any meaningful sense. But this name recognition means that people have heard his name, not that they have any sort of accurate understanding of who he is. Many Americans who know the Kennedy name and vaguely know of RFK Jr know him because he ran in the Democratic primary, leading them to assume that he is of a liberal persuasion - and this is why around 15% of Democrats regularly say they would vote for Kennedy come November. At the same time, around 30% of independents, and roughly 20% of Republicans state that they are also leaning towards Kennedy, but these voters are going to be difficult to bring back to the Republican camp. Once the 2024 campaign gets in full swing, the young Kennedy’s political opinions, which serve as an anathema to those held by mainstream Democrats, will become widely known and will likely turn off a significant number of liberal voters from his candidacy. A good chunk of these liberal voters will also be independents, and while they may choose to sit out of the election rather than vote for Biden, it’s unlikely that they will break for Trump.
Conversely, an attack campaign explaining how right wing Kennedy is will surely only help shore up his support with conservative voters. For Republicans, this should be sounding major alarm bells because, while they can take current polling for granted, RFK Jr seems to me to be a gigantic iceberg which the Trump Titanic currently hasn’t noticed. That being said, I imagine that, should Kennedy still be a threat come Summer or even Autumn of 2024, Republicans will begin dredging up his past such as his previous history as an environmentalist to turn GOP voters away, but that’s unlikely to get him back in the good books of any statistically significant number of liberal voters, although it could swing some of them back toward the GOP. In essence, to nullify Kennedy they will need to try and tie him to old, left wing positions that he has since disavowed.
This phenomenon, whereby Kennedy becomes the target of right and left wing attacks, is what I’m dubbing the Kennedy Squeeze and it’s something which all, serious third party candidates since Ross Perot in 1992 have had to deal with. They emerge at a time where people are unhappy with the choices offered to them, and voters impose their own ideals on these candidates, because they know very little about them. As time goes on, their beliefs and character become apparent and they begin to get chipped away from their left and right until only a core or floor of supporters remains. For some, like Perot, this floor is very high at around a sixth of the vote, but I can’t see Kennedy’s floor being much above 10% - and that’s a generous estimate. Of this 10%, I suspect that they will largely consist of first time voters, independents and Republicans with a handful of Democrats in the mix. Very few of these anti-establishment voters would have ever supported Joe Biden simply because he is the establishment. It was anti-establishment sentiment which propelled Trump to the White House in 2016 and that is why I would bet that, as the campaign drags on, Kennedy becomes a massive thorn in the side of Trump by November 2024.
Wrapping Up
With all said and done, I should caveat that this is speculative based on historical precedent and what I can see coming out of the Kennedy campaign. It is factually a right wing candidacy which currently has Democratic coattails due to his surname and initial run in the Democratic primary. His loudest and most enthusiastic supporters are firmly on the political right, whereas his softest supporters are on the left. This coalition is fragile, and will almost certainly fall of the rails within the next year.
If I’m wrong then I’m wrong, but I’m happy to put my name to this article as I believe it is evidentially sound and little tells me that Kennedy’s campaign is one which will hamper Democrats in any meaningful sense.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading and please let me know what you think in the comment section and consider sharing this with a friend!
I found you when I read your very informative post about Mike Johnson. So I believe you do your research and reach informed conclusions. I’ll continue to follow you and we’ll see what happens.
A Biden-Haley-Kennedy threeway would be an interesting split in the event Trump fails to dodge all of the swords of Damocles: a) medical, b) criminal, c) disqualification or d) some combination. If that were to happen, Kennedy can pick up more of the MAGA vote than Haley can pick up some of the Independent vote. Haley can go as far right as she cares but hasn't shown an aptitude to go fully crass, crazed visceral. And she can't tack far enough left to pick up much Biden support without losing the RINOs. The dynamic, however, may turn on how the crop of swing states might shift.