FROM THE RIGHT
RFK Jr. Turns Left
April 01, 2024
A couple of months ago, I argued that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might pose a more significant threat to the electoral hopes of former President Donald Trump than to Kennedy’s former fellow Democrat, President Joe Biden.
My reasoning was based on several things, but principally that Kennedy’s only reliable path to ballot access was through the Libertarian Party, whose members Kennedy had been assiduously courting. To win the Libertarian nod at the party’s May convention, the longtime environmental activist would have to play up his anti-government radicalism (e.g. on vaccine mandates) instead of his ecological radicalism.
Kennedy’s other positions, like his unabashed support for Israel in its war with Hamas but opposition to support for Ukraine, line up very nicely with the current mood of the nationalist right. As does his tough stances on border security and access to elective abortions. Anti-vax, anti-Ukraine, pro-Israel, pro-border crackdown, and pro-life? Put this guy in the Freedom Caucus, already.
But Kennedy’s greatest threat to Trump’s support among the MAGA base is on vibes. Where Trump finds himself trying to maintain his posture as simultaneously a transgressive outsider intent on disrupting the system and the maximum leader of a major political party, Kennedy can pretty much say or do whatever he likes. While Trump has to both say that he is too rich to be bought and look to billionaires for bailouts, Kennedy remains the consummate outsider’s insider.
All of that remains true, but the way forward for Kennedy other than the Libertarians is to really try to make a go of winning ballot access in all 50 states. And for many states, an additional hurdle—beyond massive petition drives and onerous bureaucratic requirements—is to have a running mate, something major parties don’t need to worry about for five months or so.
So when Kennedy this week chose his running mate, we got our best look yet at where the presidential nephew is heading. And it sure wasn’t to the right.
Nicole Shanahan, 38, is a lawyer, an environmental activist, and a tech entrepreneur in her own right, in addition to being the ex-wife of one of Google’s founders (who has a net worth of perhaps $130 billion).
She certainly holds some right-wing-sounding positions, like her longtime opposition to in vitro fertilization. But her objections don’t seem so much rooted in concerns about the sanctity of life as in what she says are abuses by the “fertility industry” and its failure to address “the environmental factors that impact women’s reproductive health.”
Not a pick that would warm up the disciples of Ludwig von Mises.
“I think that a lot of Libertarians are a little bit confused over why he chose Nicole Shanahan,” Libertarian National Committee Chairwoman Angela McArdle said in a recent interview with NewsNation. “I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but she doesn’t necessarily fit into alignment with any of our views.”
What Shanahan does have is the ability to bankroll the expensive effort to get Kennedy on the ballot, a willingness she already demonstrated by funding a $5 million ad boosting Kennedy’s campaign during this year’s Super Bowl. Young, rich, lefty, Californian, and Asian-American, Shanahan seems very much the running mate one would pick to go after disaffected Democrats, not mad-as-hell MAGA men.
And that’s a big problem for Biden.
The conventional wisdom among Democrats has been that Kennedy might do well among some older voters because of the longtime attachment to his family’s famous name. But some new polling suggests that’s not the big problem for the blue team.
In the latest Quinnipiac poll, among voters ages 18 to 34, Kennedy got 21 percent of their support in a three-way race with Trump and Biden, compared to 13 percent overall.
That’s echoed by a new poll from Split Ticket that found 23 percent of voters under 30 backing Kennedy, 25 percent backing Trump, and 35 percent backing Biden. Biden won 60 percent of that age group in 2020.
We can take Kennedy at his word that he’s running to win. That’s about as likely as Donald Trump choosing the Easter Bunny as his running mate, but Kennedy believes a lot of wild things. So who knows?
But if Kennedy isn’t going to win, what might his secondary goal be? It seems increasingly likely that the lifelong Democrat and scion of the party’s most famous family might be more interested in forcing change in his own team than pushing Republicans to reform in his direction.
Democrats can be happy that No Labels looks like a mess, but the leftward turn by Kennedy is rightly concerning to Biden boosters. He’s got a long way to go to get enough ballot access, but the chance that Kennedy could play Ross Perot to Biden’s George H.W. Bush looks more and more like reality.
RFK Jr. has qualified for ballot in North Carolina, campaign says
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign has added North Carolina to the expanding list of battleground states in which it has qualified for the ballot in November.
The independent candidate’s campaign says it now has enough signatures to list Kennedy as a White House contender through the “We The People” party, gathering 23,000 pledges of support in the purple state.
“We have the field teams, volunteers, legal teams, paid circulators, supporters, and strategists ready to get the job done,” Kennedy’s campaign press secretary Stefanie Spear said Monday in a statement announcing the news.
North Carolina is considered an important swing state for all parties in 2024, including a potential third-party ticket. Former President Trump won the state by just more than 1 percentage point in 2020, giving Republicans a slight edge and inspiring Democrats to try to win it this cycle.
The addition of the Tar Heel state brings Kennedy’s ballot qualified total to five states so far, including Utah, New Hampshire and Hawaii. In Nevada, he cleared the signature threshold prior to meeting the requirement of having a declared vice president alongside his name, raising questions about whether he will have to regather signatures of support.
Kennedy’s team is hoping the pick of Nicole Shanahan as his running mate will give more voters a reason to lend their names to his ballot access push. Shanahan’s background as a tech lawyer who was once married to the co-founder of Google is seen as a tactical asset to his campaign’s ballot access strategy.
Here’s where the polling stands in a 3-way race with Biden, Trump and RFK Jr.
President Biden and former President Trump are set for a rematch this November after becoming their party’s presumptive nominees, but they’re also facing a relatively notable third-party challenge from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy, the nephew of former President Kennedy, has been trying to gather signatures to get on the ballot in as many states as possible as he mounts an independent campaign for president. Although he has only gained enough signatures in about a half-dozen states so far, early polling shows he may be the most likely third-party candidate to impact the race.
Kennedy has been averaging close to 10 percent in polling from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, making him the highest polling third-party candidate in a presidential race since businessman Ross Perot in 1992. In a five-way race that includes Jill Stein and Cornel West, Kennedy is at 10 percent in the RealClearPolitics national average.
Kennedy took a step toward the general election last month, when he picked Nicole Shanahan, a tech attorney and entrepreneur, as his running mate. That decision came relatively early in the general election calendar, because some states require independent candidates to have a running mate to get on the ballot.
But Kennedy faces long odds to seriously challenge Biden and Trump for the election, or even to get a victory in any state, based on recent history. Perot was the most successful third-party candidate in modern history, but he only received about 19 percent of the popular vote and won no electoral votes.
Still, third-party candidates have influenced the outcomes of elections and hold the potential of playing spoiler for a major-party candidate. Polls have indicated Kennedy’s candidacy may be hurting Biden slightly more, but the difference in impact on Biden and Trump appears to be small, and the results are far from conclusive.
A HarrisX/Forbes poll taken March 25 found Trump leading Biden in a head-to-head match-up by 3 points, 46 percent to 43 percent. But with Kennedy, West and Stein in the race, Kennedy receives 12 percent, and Trump still leads Biden by 3 points.
Meanwhile, other polls have been somewhat concerning for Biden when third-party candidates are factored in. A Quinnipiac University poll taken March 21-25 showed Biden ahead by 3 points when only facing Trump. But Trump took a 1-point lead when Kennedy — who received 13 percent support — West and Stein were included.
The Democratic Party has recently stepped up its efforts to address the risks that third-party and independent candidates pose to Biden’s reelection effort. The Democratic National Committee has formed a team to communicate about and conduct opposition research on potential spoilers.
Biden led Trump by 3 points in a Reuters/Ipsos poll from early March, when respondents were required to choose between them. But Trump led by 1 point when the poll included Kennedy, the other candidates and the ability for respondents to say they were unsure.
Kennedy is the latest candidate to come from his storied political family, which includes a former president, attorney general and an eight-term senator. He could appeal to Democratic voters who are disillusioned with Biden and recognize his last name’s history in the Democratic Party.
But Kennedy’s campaign has been denounced by many members of his own family, who are instead supporting Biden. Many visited Biden at the White House to mark St. Patrick’s Day.
Kennedy’s political views are a bit of a mixed bag, with possible appeal to various parts of the political spectrum. He is a longtime environmental lawyer who has advocated for adding regulations and addressing the wealth gap, but his vaccine skepticism and controversial statements about the COVID-19 pandemic seem more likely to appeal to disaffected Republicans.
Kennedy has rejected the idea that his campaign could only serve to put one of the two major candidates in the White House.
“Our campaign is a spoiler. I agree with that,” he said at his campaign event announcing Shanahan as his running mate. “It’s a spoiler for President Biden and for President Trump. It’s a spoiler for the war machine. It’s a spoiler for Wall Street and Big Ag and Big Tech … and all the corrupt politicians and corporations.”
But Kennedy will have a lot of work ahead of him if he is going to get in range of Biden and Trump, who are far ahead of him in the polls. The Commission on Presidential Debates requires candidates to reach at least an average of 15 percent nationally across multiple polling organizations it selects, so Kennedy would likely need to improve to possibly get on the stage in the fall.
Even now, Kennedy in the race is not radically shifting polling numbers when compared to just a two-person race, but in an election as close as 2024’s is expected to be, a slight change could make the difference.
RFK Jr. says he can ‘make an argument’ that Biden is ‘greater threat’ to democracy than Trump
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said Monday that President Biden may be a “greater threat to democracy” than former President Trump, citing his own legal battle against the Biden administration over social media censorship.
Kennedy said in a CNN interview with Erin Burnett on Monday that he could “make an argument” that Biden is worse, although he acknowledged that Trump is also a threat.
“President Biden is a much worse threat to democracy,” he said. “And the reasons for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech.”
Kennedy is suing the Biden administration over the administration’s request that his social media accounts be restricted in 2021. He posted misinformation claiming that baseball legend Hank Aaron died from complications of the COVID vaccine, which is not true, according to medical experts.
He won an injunction on the case last month, but it was stayed to await a pair of Supreme Court cases ruling on the executive branch’s authority to urge social media censorship brought by GOP attorneys general.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for two social media cases last month, which claim the Biden White House illegally coerced social media companies to censor accounts because they were spreading misinformation about COVID-19.
Kennedy argued that the alleged censorship makes Biden the greatest threat.
“I can argue that President Biden is [the greatest threat] because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” he said. “Adams and Hamilton and Madison said we put a guarantee of freedom of expression in the First Amendment because all of our other constitutional rights depend on it.”
The comments attacking Biden come as the president and Democrats increase criticism of Kennedy, as concerns rise over his possible impact on the 2024 election.
While Kennedy is not in contention to win any states in November, Democratic analysts fear he could take votes away from Biden in key states and lead to a Trump victory.
Kennedy did add criticism of Trump as well, when pushed by Burnett, noting that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election were “appalling” and made the former president also a threat.
The independent has been averaging close to 10 percent in polling from The Hill/Decision Desk HQ, making him the highest polling third-party candidate in a presidential race since businessman Ross Perot in 1992. In a five-way race that includes Jill Stein and Cornel West, Kennedy is at 10 percent in the RealClearPolitics national average.
