Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard joined former President Donald Trump’s transition team this week. Trump’s campaign has framed the addition of Kennedy and Gabbard, who are both former Democrats, to its team as proof that Trump has assembled a “broad coalition” that has expanded “across partisan lines.” Kennedy and Gabbard don’t represent significant Democratic constituencies, however. They’re fringe, idiosyncratic political players who’ve long had supporters on the right. Trump's tent didn't necessarily get bigger; in fact, this is a potential narrowing of his coalition, as there’s a chance that, by bringing Gabbard and Kennedy under his wing, Trump alienates more voters than he wins over.
It is standard — and savvy — for parties to point out that they appeal to people across the aisle. At the Democratic National Convention, Democrats attempted to make that case by inviting several Republicans to speak on the main stage, such as former Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan. Having people like Kinzinger speak about how they’ll be voting for Democrats and not Trump’s GOP is powerful because Kinzinger is still a Republican and during his time in office he was aligned with the Republican establishment. He was first elected during the tea party wave — endorsed by Republican former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — and as my colleague Steve Benen has pointed out, Kinzinger’s voting record in Congress was that of a traditional Republican partisan. His strident opposition to Trump, then, has the potential for credibility with certain sectors of the GOP.
Neither Kennedy nor Gabbard is well-positioned to sell the story of how the Democratic Party left them.
Kennedy and Gabbard, a former representative from Hawaii, aren’t analogous to Republicans like Kinzinger. Even when Gabbard was in the Democratic Party, her outlier positions on foreign policy made it an awkward fit. In office, Gabbard praised Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Syria strategy over former President Barack Obama’s, met personally with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and argued in favor of aligning with his brutal regime and insisted Democrats weren’t calling out Islamist terrorism clearly enough. She fared poorly in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, where her value add as a candidate was her idiosyncratic foreign policy views. In 2022, she announced she was leaving the party, and she immediately formed a warm relationship with Fox News. She has evolved into a vociferous critic of Democrats and long been seen as a friend of the MAGA right. Thus, her joining Trump doesn’t come as a shock.
Kennedy’s journey is different, but it similarly clashes with the Democratic Party establishment. Despite his surname and a history of working as an environmental lawyer, he has long been at odds with prevailing norms among Democrats, liberals and even mainstream conservatives with his noncredible activism against vaccines. During the Covid pandemic, he became a superspreader of misinformation and conspiracy theories about vaccines and influenced Republican talking points with his online messaging. When he threw his hat in the ring in the Democratic presidential primaries in April 2023, he did, surprisingly, garner the interest of a surprisingly large percentage of Democrats, sometimes receiving the support of up to 20% of Democratic voters. But before it could be established what percentage of that support owed to Biden fatigue and his name’s being Kennedy, he dropped out of the primaries and launched an independent campaign. Most of his time as a presidential candidate in the public eye has been defined by his appearances in the right-wing media ecosystem. It’s no surprise that, since last year, polling has shown that Republicans hold a more favorable view of him than Democrats do.
In other words, neither Kennedy nor Gabbard is well-positioned to sell the story of how the Democratic Party left them. While both of them are idiosyncratic and hold views that don’t fit into one ideological category, their most salient, reputation-defining views in recent years haven’t had a significant audience in the Democratic Party. For a long time they’ve been seen as not quite belonging to that party. Their defections to Trump not only make sense but have recently even seemed probable.
Will Trump benefit from his newest transition team members? Gabbard has a small, energetic online following, but she’s currently more of a pundit than a politician and has been seen as an adversary of the Democratic establishment long enough that it’s hard to see her moving the dial in any significant way. Kennedy, on the other hand, was putting up significant numbers with his independent presidential campaign until last week, and the behavior of his following remains an open question.
After Vice President Kamala Harris entered the White House race, Kennedy’s support declined to around 5% in three-way matchups among Harris, Trump and Kennedy. It seemed clear he was more of a threat to Trump’s vote share than Harris’. But it’s hard to predict how persuasive Kennedy will be in persuading his supporters to cast their ballots for Trump. It is plausible that a significant proportion of his remaining die-hard followers were disinclined to ever vote for either of the two major parties. It’s also plausible that much of his support was never going to materialize at the ballot box since his campaign hinged on the idea of mistrust of American institutions.
Instead of winning more independents, there’s even a chance Trump takes a ding among such voters for Kennedy’s most extreme views and for lending credence to the Democrats’ seemingly effective attack that the GOP is hobbled by weirdness and creepiness. Kennedy constantly makes news for an unrelenting stream of outlandish conspiracy theories and bizarre personal tales. He has offensively and falsely claimed that Covid was "targeted" to spare Chinese people and Jews. He has told stories about worms eating his brain and about leaving a dead bear cub in Central Park. It has recently resurfaced that in a 2012 magazine story, his daughter said her father once found a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, used a chain saw to sever its head and then tied it to the roof of his car and (potentially illegally) drove it home to New York. In light of Kennedy’s official role in helping form a potential Trump administration, and in light of reporting that Kennedy and Trump have discussed whether he’d have a position in one, Democrats can now pin Kennedy’s strangeness and extremism onto Trump.
Trump might ultimately benefit at the margins from Kennedy’s dropping out and joining his campaign. All signs indicate that this will be an extremely tight race, and so even a small share of votes that might’ve otherwise gone to Kennedy in a swing state could be of help to Trump. But it’s far from a slam dunk. (One additional wrinkle: Kennedy won’t be able to remove his name from ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan, and that fact could theoretically hurt Trump in those states with people looking for a protest vote option.) Ultimately, Gabbard and Kennedy aren’t sirens for Democrats, and Kennedy’s extremely odd behavior could be a liability for Trump.
