According to a campaign fundraising appeal sent out Friday, Robert Kennedy Jr. is expected to announce at a rally Monday in Philadelphia that he will drop out of the Democratic presidential primary contest and make an independent bid for the White House instead. If anybody tells you they know exactly how this will shake up the race, they’re lying.
When Kennedy announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination in April, he immediately put up surprisingly strong polling numbers. In early summer some surveys showed that he had the support of 20% of Democratic voters, and recently he’s been averaging around 15% support. He’s never gotten close to President Joe Biden, who has averaged over 60% support in polls throughout the year, but Kennedy’s numbers have been high enough to raise questions of whether the president has some vulnerability among the Democratic electorate.
If you’ve been following the race or Kennedy’s political views, you’ll know that Kennedy hardly resembles a Democrat.
Kennedy has sounded restless about the party system for months. He has objected repeatedly to the Democratic National Committee’s declining to organize any primary presidential debates that would allow challengers to face off against Biden. (This is not unusual; no incumbent president has taken part in a primary debate since the modern debate system began in 1948.) “The DNC and the Joe Biden campaign have essentially merged into one unit, financially and strategically, despite the promise of neutrality in its charter and bylaws,” Kennedy wrote in an open letter in September. His hints at a third party bid have exuded grandiosity, with a promise to cause “a sea change in American politics” by refusing to play the game “by the corrupt rules that the corrupt powers and the vested interests have rigged to keep us all in their thrall.”
If you haven’t been following the race closely, you might think that an independent Kennedy run would hurt Biden in the general election. If Kennedy is consistently able to attract the support of a nontrivial share of the Democratic electorate, he could, theoretically, inspire some of those voters to defect from the party for him. Kennedy is a former environmental lawyer and has the most iconic surname in Democratic politics — he could be primed to catch the eye of disgruntled Democrats more than former Green Party candidates Ralph Nader or Jill Stein ever were.
But if you’ve been following the race or Kennedy’s political views, you’ll know that Kennedy hardly resembles a Democrat. Some of his policy positions are progressive on issues such as raising the minimum wage, cracking down on corporate union-busting, and making it easier to get rid of student debt. But he also is skeptical of fighting climate change, opposes universal health care and declares “we should have closed borders.”
Over the course of the campaign season, Kennedy has mainly garnered attention in the news for promulgating outlandish and bigoted conspiracy theories. He’s said that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.” He described the Covid-19 vaccine as engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people. He has blamed antidepressants for school shootings.
This conspiracy-mongering is no surprise, given that his longtime anti-vaccine activism has evolved into a central pillar of his political identity. During the pandemic he grew in prominence — and won acclaim on the right — for his rabid criticism of the lockdowns and Covid vaccines. He accused the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, of orchestrating “fascism” during the pandemic, and suggested that public health measures during the pandemic were equivalent to or worse than the Nazi Holocaust.
While this bomb-throwing has not helped him gain more support among Democrats, it’s won him constant attention and praise from the right. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and Infowars host Alex Jones are fans of Kennedy. He’s won the affection of right-wing and libertarian tech moguls such as venture capitalist David Sacks and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. And Republicans invited him to testify before Congress about censorship and Covid-19. Given those developments, it is not surprising that polling over the summer showed that Democrats are deeply ambivalent about Kennedy while Republicans hold highly favorable views of him.
A number of polls that pose hypothetical three-way matchups between Donald Trump, Biden and Kennedy suggest two things. First, that Kennedy could pull in a nontrivial amount of support in a general election — a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll with such a matchup showed that Kennedy drew the support of 14% of voters, Biden had 31%, and Trump had 33%. Past third-party performances suggest that those numbers will change heavily in favor of the major party nominees and are not a realistic preview of a general election showdown. But they do serve as a reminder of the power of Kennedy’s name recognition, and that he might be able to lock down a few more percentage points than a typical third party candidate.
The second takeaway from the polls is that comparisons between a hypothetical two-way matchup and a three-way matchup appear to vary on whether Kennedy’s presence hurts Biden or Trump a little more — and the margins are close. Neither party should feel safe from Kennedy potentially siphoning off their voters.
The combination of Kennedy’s dynastic background with his anti-establishment views makes for a strange cocktail that could be potent — or a flop.
Complicating things further is that another celebrity is pursuing an independent presidential bid — the acclaimed left-wing scholar Cornel West. It’s unclear how West’s presence could further scramble the way voters consider the Democrats or Kennedy.
As of now Kennedy is a true 2024 wild card. In the online world of political punditry, Kennedy seems to code increasingly as a right-winger. But that doesn’t mean voters will see him that way. Many of Kennedy’s views that endear him to the right do have a minor constituency on the left. There are people left-of-center who are skeptical of vaccines and the medical establishment, and who share his skepticism of supporting Ukraine. And he has enough left-leaning views — particularly on the economy — to honestly appeal for their votes.
Additionally, the combination of Kennedy’s dynastic background with his anti-establishment views makes for a strange cocktail that could be potent — or a flop. The recognizability of his name buys him instant trust from huge swaths of the electorate, yet the main themes of his candidacy would appeal to voters who lack trust in the political establishment. It shouldn’t really make sense. Then again neither does the idea that the late John F. Kennedy Jr. would rise from the dead to run for vice president with Donald Trump, but a lot of QAnon people believed it anyway.
Kennedy might soon vanish from our radar once the novelty factor wears off and voters start thinking about the general election more seriously. But neither party should sleep on him. Nobody — seemingly including Kennedy himself — knows where his candidacy is headed.
