Robert Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign is in decline. But his presence in the election remains significant, and it looks like he could be a major thorn in former President Donald Trump’s side should he stay in the race through Election Day.
For many months Kennedy was averaging around 10% in national presidential polls that matched him up against Trump and President Joe Biden. After Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as his replacement, Kennedy’s support swiftly halved, and he’s averaging around 5% in the polls now.
A good chunk of Kennedy's decline can be explained by Harris' rise.
Kennedy has been participating in conferences and events, but he has otherwise vanished from the campaign trail for over a month, NBC News reports. And Nicole Shanahan, his running mate, campaign funder and valiant warrior against demonic control of the federal government, has been missing from the campaign stump for even longer.
A good chunk of Kennedy’s decline can be explained by Harris’ rise. One of the key dynamics of the Biden-Trump 2024 match-up was the significant contingent of so-called double haters, voters who hold unfavorable views of Biden and Trump. While Harris is also underwater when it comes to favorability ratings, she’s still significantly more popular than Biden. She’s younger and more energetic than him, she seems less encumbered by some voters’ anxieties about the Biden administration’s economic record, and she has completely transformed the party’s 2024 messaging, giving voters something fresh and new to grapple with. “There’s no doubt that Kamala Harris has picked up some undecided and third-party support since she’s become the nominee,” David Wasserman, a senior editor and an elections analyst for the Cook Political Report, recently told The Atlantic.
While Democrats have targeted Trump world with the insult “weird,” Kennedy has emerged as the person in the race who is most deserving of that label. In May, news emerged that Kennedy said in a 2012 deposition that a worm ate part of his brain. More recently, Kennedy released an utterly bizarre video in which he tells antisemitic conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr that he left a dead bear cub in Central Park and staged it so it would look like it was killed in a collision with a bicycle. In an attempt to share more about his personal life, he told The New York Times that he once lived with an emu that used to attack his wife. While it’s unclear if this kind of news hurt his standing with his supporters, it certainly could not have helped him grow his base of support as an exciting new candidate emerged for the Democratic Party.
But Kennedy’s numbers are still significant enough to play a potentially decisive role on Election Day, and recent polls show that in polls with three-way match-ups he is consistently hurting Trump more than he’s hurting Harris. That makes sense, considering that Kennedy’s campaign has focused most aggressively on a libertarian attitude toward public health and conspiracy theories about race, vaccines and satanic cabals — the kinds of ideas that appeal to many in the MAGA camp. Last week, Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster and a thought leader for millions of American men, praised Kennedy as “the only one that makes sense to me.” (Rogan later clarified that his comment was not meant as an endorsement.) But Rogan’s comments were enough to enrage Trump and his allies, who are already on the defensive after Harris’ rise and aware that the fundamental energy of the race has slipped out of their control, at least for now.
The Democratic Party has figured out a path to mitigate its double haters problem and most likely increased its vote share because of it. But Republicans do not appear to have a plan. They’re banking on a man who has repeated the same white nationalist and authoritarian rants ad nauseam for close to a decade — and only seems increasingly discursive and incoherent while he does it. Unless Kennedy drops out (and possibly endorses Trump, as Trump has reportedly showed interest in), Trump is likely to face some vexing competition from the other crank in the race.
