I’m looking at 538’s collection of polls, which on average show Harris up 2%, but the race is basically a toss-up.
Harris tends to be even, maybe slightly ahead, but more so in polls that include Kennedy or other candidates apart from Trump and Harris.
These polls suggest Kennedy has between 2-11% support. People might say anything to a pollster, or they may ask questions in a certain way. But Kennedy seems less popular than arguably better known third party candidates like Perot or Nader. I can understand Libertarians having some degree of popularity in some places, but my understanding is that Kennedy is not the Libertarian candidate (Oliver is).
So, please educate me on 2024 Kennedy. Who is the person who would vote for him? The little I’ve seen suggests he has eccentric ideas and a rich backer. Anti vaccine malarkey. Sued companies over environmental issues. But can Kennedy possibly be attracting such 2-11% votes even in protest? Whose?
Kennedy is pulling from the same, not insubstantial pool of people disaffected by both major parties, or men who won’t vote for a female candidate, anti-establishment types who want to “shake things up”, or conspiranoists who think that Trump is insufficiently wackadoodle. I don’t see “11%” of American voters swinging over to him or getting enough votes in a state to get even a single Electoral College vote but it would not shock me to see upwards of 4% or 5% of the popular vote, most of which wouldn’t vote for Harris in any case (or would do so with great reluctance), so I think this is only going to damage the would-be Republican vote. Of course, there is the ‘name recognition effect’ that might sway “low information voters” who don’t realize that the guy is totally nutballs and his candidacy has been essentially disowned by many members of the Kennedy family.
For more information, here is Last Week Tonight’s recent take on RFK, Jr.:
Thanks. My understanding is his shambolic campaign pretty much confuses both mainstream parties. But it matters a lot which party would be most damaged by Kennedy votes, in the same way Nader may have changed an election outcome.
John…he’s also proposed raising the minimum wage to $15, and making student debt dischargeable via bankruptcy. And if I ended the piece right now, it’d honestly be a pretty good ad for RFK, Jr. But unfortunately, there is a lot more to say. And let’s start with his other policy proposals. Because some are, to put it mildly, underbaked. One of his marquee promises is offering first-time homebuyers a 3% mortgage rate, funded by tax-free government-issued bonds. Here he is describing the plan and see how far he gets into his pitch before you start hearing alarm bells.
RFK Jr.: If you have a rich uncle, um, who will co-sign your mortgage, you can get a much better rate. I’m going to give everybody a rich uncle, all these young people, which is Uncle Sam. Which is going to guarantee your mortgage. So that’ll allow you to get that 3% rate. And if you default on it, you know, we will inherit—the federal government will inherit—this is how Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae operated.
John: Right. He’s suggesting giving low-interest home loans to buyers with bad credit, guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, an idea with no bad historical precedents whatsoever. And if you’re wondering, “Doesn’t that guy remember 2008?” I don’t know, but I should point out, they didn’t find the worm until 2010. So he might actually have an amazing excuse there. But “not fully thinking through” policies is just the beginning.
John:Because you should know—RFK’s also a lot more right-wing on certain issues than you might assume. On immigration, he endorsed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, and pledged to finish the wall.
To say nothing of his other views on foreign policy, vaccines or shady friends…
Name recognition is the bane of American politics. Any lunatic from a political dynasty can count on the 10-20%* of American voters who vote despite complete ignorance of the issues.
The opening minutes of that Oliver segment are illuminating if you have a way to watch it. There’s a montage of clips from a range of supporters expressing their reasons, and they range all over the map. The only thing they have in common is their priorities are not being seriously pursued by the two major parties, which gives RFKjr’s support a strong flavor of “what the hell, might as well be this guy, nothin’ to lose.”
I fail to see what’s so confusing. Literally every time there’s at least one third party nutball, some with more success than others. Like Perot and Nader. Nader is the only one to have an effect. Had he not been around I believe that we would have had Gore in 2000.
H. Ross Perot definitely had an impact on the 1992 election, and had he not dropped out briefly might have maintained a greater proportion of votes, potentially even winning a state or two. As it was, he carried almost 19% of the popular vote, and while he didn’t get a single Electoral College vote he certainly influenced the election overall, certainly enough to garner the interest of GOP operatives who initiated a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against him. Whether he pulled more votes off of Bush or Clinton is debatable, but while Clinton dominated the Electoral College he only carried 43% of the popular vote, the lowest percentage since Woodrow Wilson, and this despite the fact that there was no universal women’s suffrage in the United States in 1912. (I personally he impacted Bush more, but there is analysis showing that he took about 7% of votes off of Clinton, and Nate Silver claims that the practical impact was negligible as the states were Perot took the most votes were otherwise strong toward one or the other candidates by a broader margin, so who knows.)
I don’t think that RFK, Jr. has a chance in hell of pulling double digits in percentage of the popular vote or pulling the vote in a hard ‘red’ or ‘blue’ state, but there is not entirely remote possibility that he pulls enough votes in a swing state where margins are already within a few percentage points to make a difference, so he should be ignored at peril. Hopefully, his ‘Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs’ platform, such as it is, draws more from the disaffected Right and Never-Trumpers who can’t abide to vote for Harris, but it’s hard often hard to account for the radical fringe of angry voters because they don’t tend to be represented proportionally in polling.
Your analysis is tight but what I meant was that although he got a lot of votes, he didn’t sway the election. Interestingly he barely eked out second place in Maine. Florida could have been very different had Nader not been on the ballot
Agreed, there isn’t a clear case that Bush would have won without a Perot candidacy, while Nader unambiguously pulled hard from Gore’s base. But it is often difficult to see how much impact a third party candidate is going to have on the presidential election until the hotwash. There is a lot of possible press for Harris right now but the polling between her and Trump has the difference still almost within margins of error. A little push in the right few states could make or break an election, and RFK, Jr. is just mercurial and off-axis enough that it is difficult to really evaluate what his impact will be.
I will offer this as a datum. I have seen exactly one Kennedy for President yard sign. That is far below ten percent of the yard signs I have seen for Trump or Biden or Harris.
From the John Oliver piece, select quotes from RFK Jr. backers:
Many of them are buying the Kennedy legacy, feeling that because the Kennedy family were largely progressive, that RFK is, too. That’s a fair bit of assumption.
Several state that he’s honest, he tells the truth, he has honor and integrity. They are all going on image and sound bites and self-professed attributes that are not true.
One quoted supporter is citing his support for backing low interest home loans.
That John Oliver segment is hilarious and is a brilliant shredding of RFK.
The idea that he is honest is demonstrated to be a lie. His anti-vax efforts in Samoa alone are demonstative. He traveled there in the wake of a terrible measles vaccine accident. He met with lots of antivaxxers, he met with the Prime Minister, and a few months later after a measles outbreak, he wrote a letter to the PM suggesting the outbreak was because of the vaccine. But when interviewed about it, he states he never went there and didn’t talk to anyone about not taking vaccines.
So most of the people who are supporting him don’t know what he’s really said and done or would do. They just accept uncritically whatever propaganda fits their desire to break from the current political climate.
The Swiss NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) reports that he is off the ballots in New York and about 20 other States because he lied about where he lives (link in German, probably paywalled).
Then they go on to say that it would be ironic if that exclusion, brought in by a democrat judge (?), would hurt Harris more than Trump, because a lot of polls give Harris a bigger winning margin of votes when polled as a three way race (Harris - Trump - Kennedy) than when only Harris and Trump are on the ficticiuos ballot:
On Monday, New York judge Christina Ryba ruled that Kennedy was not actually resident in New York. In her 34-page judgement, she wrote that the New York domicile was a sham address that was intended to make Kennedy’s candidacy possible. Despite moving to California ten years ago, he was still registered as a voter in New York. In addition, his running mate Nicole Shanahan lived in California; according to the US constitution, it is not permitted for both candidates on the presidential ticket to live in the same state. This was another reason why it was opportune for Kennedy to keep the bogus address in New York.
[…]
In polls, Kennedy has lost support in parallel to Kamala Harris’ appearance in the campaign arena; in aggregate polls, he still receives the approval of just under 5 per cent of respondents. This could be interpreted to mean that previously Kennedy-affine Democrats are rallying behind Kamala Harris, while Kennedy-affine Republicans remain loyal to the outsider. This is supported by the fact that Harris performs better in polls that include Kennedy, as the ‘Washington Post’, among others, notes. However, the results are within the statistical margin of error. Translated with DeepL.com out of sheer laziness (free version). A cursory check shows it is acceptably well translated
