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Notes -
RFK Jr announced this morning that he was leaving the democratic party and would continue his campaign as an independent.
I've spent a bit of time reading through articles and hot takes, and the overarching theme seems to be some variation of:
No real democrat would ever vote for him
He's more popular with Trump people anyway
This changes nothing, or maybe even hurts Trump
Taking as a given that Trump will be the GOP nominee as long as he is still alive - and therefore given the inescapable enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic of (Biden vs Kennedy) vs Trump up until this morning's announcement - some might consider this a fairly baffling take. Because it seems self-evident that democrats are less likely to approve of the guy who's mussing up their candidate's hair than the 'other party' would be, especially when that guy doesn't hold and has never held a public position. For me personally, this reaction makes more sense when read as a coping mechanism for what is the latest in a series of fairly not-great developments for the Biden campaign.
But more interestingly, this reaction completely dismisses the possibility that the election may have just changed quite fundamentally. Perhaps Kennedy will quickly fade into obscurity like most other third-party candidates do (anyone remember Lawrence Lessig?), but perhaps he'll be more like one of these guys. Joe Biden and Donald Trump's approval ratings are both hovering around 40% which suggests at least 20% of the electorate open to an alternative. Kennedy is also (relatively) young, spry, healthy, handsome, a household name (kind of), has a beautiful family, and independently wealthy. And the voice thing doesn't take all that long to get used to. This independent campaign could have legs
But even more interestingly, on the heels of Cornel West's announcement that he was ditching the green party to run as an independent, and with the open-secret that No Labels is planning to put up their own independent candidate, there is a chance for this to be an extremely unusual election. With Joe Biden and Donald Trump both unusually unpopular, there is a (admittedly very small) chance for this thing to blow wide open if Kennedy, West, No Labels, Green, and Libertarian all siphon off just a few voters each.
Now, again, this is all extremely unlikely to happen (if for no other reason than ballot access deadlines are all rapidly approaching), but the conditions are there for this to be one of those 'historical realignment' elections. If we stipulate there's a phenomena where voters don't support people they think have no chance, and that I'm about to make up these numbers and they have no probative value, let's imagine just for fun a poll comes out in the Spring that looks something like:
Biden 38
Trump 37
Kennedy 11
No Labels 5
Libertarian 3
West 2
Green 2
That's almost a horse race. It's a few bad bounces for the big guys away from the shape of a European-style election with multiple viable parties. And with some voters as disaffected as they are, maybe 'almost' is enough for some of them to rethink who does and doesn't have a chance. After all, if it's Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or This Guy...why not 'This Guy'? Just a thought.
Is Kennedy really likely to break double-digit polling and yet still leave Biden and Trump nearly tied? His biggest draw seems to be that he provides a face for vaccine skeptics, who are numerous and who are otherwise weirdly comfortable supporting the ex-President who first announced and to this day expresses pride about Operation Warp Speed ... so if Kennedy manages to win them over he's going to be drawing that population away from the Trump vote, not evenly away from both Trump and Biden.
I had my highest hopes in 2016, when Gary Johnson (a good governor, who won reelection 55-45 against a Hispanic Democrat challenger in a 40%-Hispanic blue state) was going up against the most-unpopular and the second-most-unpopular (as measured by opinion polls) major party presidential candidates ever. These hopes don't pan out. The mathematics of voting are complicated, but everybody has an intuitive understanding that a plurality vote for a non-frontrunner "doesn't count", so if someone's not neck-and-neck quickly or doesn't stay that way up to election day then they might as well be out of the race entirely. Kennedy's best chance lies in actuarial tables; an average 77-80 year old male has a 4-6% chance of dying in any given year.
It was the only time I voted in a presidential election. I was hoping Gary Johnson would at least get 5%. Which is a break even for certain legal thresholds in various places.
Otherwise my only motivation for voting is being able to say "I didn't vote for them" whenever the topic of the president comes up.
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