A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Winston Churchill’s description of Soviet Russia in 1939 could also apply to the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the presidential election of 2024. What we can say with certainty about RFK Jr. is that, in a year when the American electorate is deeply unhappy about having to choose once again between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, he has the opportunity to win over an enormous number of disgruntled voters.
At first glance RFK appears to outflank Trump along the wackier fringes of US politics
He’s currently polling at up to 15 percent. That makes him the biggest threat to the Republican-Democratic hold over presidential politics since Ross Perot, who in 1992 won some 19 percent and came second in two states.
It also seems certain that, in what looks sure to be another very tight election, RFK will be condemned as a great spoiler by the candidate who comes second on November 5. If Trump wins, the Biden campaign will blame Kennedy for having swung crucial voters away from their man. If Biden is re-elected, Trumpists will say the same.
The riddle for psephologists now is figuring out which scenario is more likely. The concern among Democratic strategists, supported by some polling, is that whereas Trump’s 2020 coalition remains loyal and committed to him, a large number of former Biden supporters are today looking elsewhere. It could be these wandering voters who are telling pollsters they like the seventy-year-old RFK: a recent Quinnapac poll found that he performed exceptionally well among young voters.
These voters might express their discontent at the ballot by voting for RFK — or they might equally protest by not voting at all. Either way, in this analysis, Biden suffers. The Democrats remember how, in 2016, Trump narrowly won in part because the Green Party’s Jill Stein peeled off a few thousand votes in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. They also recall how in 2000 the Green Party’s Ralph Nader’s 1.6 percent of the vote in Florida enabled George W. Bush to eke out his victory in that bitterly contested election.
Sure enough, RFK’s own family has been busy denouncing his “perilous” candidacy as a betrayal of the Democratic “values” of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, the thirty-fifth president John F. Kennedy.
When the Kennedy family starts talking values, the American right instantly smells a rat. There may be plenty of research showing that RFK is likely to take more votes away from Biden than Trump, but conservatives can’t help but notice that the big-picture polls tell a different story. When RFK isn’t included in the question, Trump has a clear national advantage over Biden. When he is, Biden has the slight edge. Kennedy himself says that “57 percent of my voters, if I withdrew, would vote for Trump.”
RFK does appear to outflank Trump along the wackier fringes of US politics. He’s most famous for raising the alarm about vaccines, which gives him considerable appeal among the online masses — or what well-heeled Democrats snootily call the “do-your-own-research demographic.” Trump, by contrast, irritates many of his conspiracy theory-minded supporters by frequently claiming credit for his leadership in the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
Trump says that he wants people “to stop dying” in Ukraine and promises that his deal-making brilliance will end the war within twenty-four hours. Kennedy advances more controversial criticisms of the West, blaming NATO expansionism for triggering a Russian response. His position is all the more striking given that his son Conor, a typical elite darling who once dated Taylor Swift, briefly fought as a volunteer soldier for Ukraine in 2022.
The more Trump and Biden criticize RFK, the more they risk elevating his credentials
Last week, RFK pointed out that Trump had “promised to end the Ukraine war… and [then] colluded to fund it.” That was a reference to Trump’s alleged double-dealing on the $60 billion military aid package for Ukraine which Congress passed last week and a clear bid to win over the Trump-leaning anti-war crowd.
RFK also rails against corporate America while engaging with any and all alternative media, which gives him a certain radical chic that Trump, for all his outsiderism, always lacks. In recent days, he’s appeared on the shows of the beardy “dudebro” George Janko, the Catholic influencer Raymond Arroyo and the Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro. The weekend before last, RFK clashed with the comedian Bill Maher on the subjects of free speech and medical science. The words voters most commonly associate with him are “honest” and “crazy.”
At the same time, Kennedy appeals to a nostalgia for the days when America was younger and more beautiful. His campaign advertisements feature sepia clips of his father and uncle in their prime, promoting the glamorous Camelot myth as a contrast to the ugly and senile realities of Biden and Trump.
American political analysts like to say that “double-haters” — that is, Americans who can’t stand Biden or Trump — will end up deciding who wins this year at the ballot. These voters tend to back change candidates — they swung for Barack Obama, then Trump, then Biden.
That ought to be bad news for Biden as the incumbent in 2024. Yet RFK could soften that risk for him — since a vote for Kennedy is a way of expressing disgust at neo-liberal globalism without having to take on the stigma of supporting the Vulgar Orange Man.
On the paranoid right, there’s a growing sense that, far from being a fellow traveler in conspiracy land, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in fact part of the great leftist plot to hoodwink and destroy America.
It’s no coincidence, some Trumpists point out, that RFK’s vice-presidential pick is Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley billionaire who was formerly a major donor to the Democratic Party. It’s also curious that RFK has refused to join the chorus of condemnation when it comes to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza — an issue that harms the president’s approval ratings among left-wing progressives and Arab voters in the swing state of Michigan. In fact, RFK has been more hawkish than Biden: he calls Israel a “moral nation” and continues to denounce Hamas. Is that a point of principle — or a refusal to go after Biden where it really hurts?
At the end of last week, Trump himself took to his Truth Social platform to denounce RFK as a “Democrat Plant.” He wrote: “A Vote for Junior would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him.” RFK promptly shot back on his preferred social platform Twitter/X: “When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged. President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”
Republican campaign advisors were quick to dismiss Trump’s outburst as the Donald being Donald. Yet such a direct — albeit confusing — hit on RFK does signal some anxiety in Trumpworld. Social media accounts aligned with Trump 2024 have dedicated quite a lot of energy in recent days to exposing Kennedy’s long history of leftism, especially on environmentalist causes and his support for abortion up to birth. Right-wing media groups recently dug up a comic book RFK wrote in the time of Obama in which he claimed that voter fraud doesn’t exist and that voter ID laws are racist.
But these attacks feed into the paradoxical nature of a “double-hater” election in a post-Covid world in which ever-larger sections of the population feel that they are being lied to. The more Trump and Biden criticize RFK as a useful shill for their opponents, the more they risk elevating his credentials as an authentic screw-the-system candidate.
Support for third-party or independent candidates tends to evaporate as elections draw closer. Neither Biden nor Trump would be foolish enough to risk losing points to Kennedy in a televised debate. His campaign, however well funded, will struggle to be heard over the summer as Republican versus Democratic warfare grabs the headlines. Come November, the fear of “four more years” of Biden or Trump will motivate voters far more than any impressive podcast performance they might hear from the gravely voiced RFK.
That touches on the real mystery of twenty-first-century politics. In 2024, despite the widespread apathy about the Biden versus Trump rematch, we may see another election in which record numbers of voters turn out to support the Democratic and the Republican candidates. RFK’s biggest problem might be that, despite being a Kennedy, he is insufficiently hated to be truly popular. Nobody ever really expected him to win. It’s just that, indirectly, he might decide who does.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
