Does RFK Jr. Really Hurt Biden or Trump More?
To a large extent, that's up to Trump and Biden themselves, and there's reason to think Biden can gain more advantage than polls suggest now
Dear readers,
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tries to make his way onto more presidential ballots, reporters and pundits and operatives are all trying to work through a question with a non-obvious answer: How would his presence on the ballot be likely to affect the election outcome? Kennedy is an odd candidate — a conspiracy-theorizing wackadoo with a platform that can’t be easily categorized as right- or left-wing — who appeals to an odd set of eligible voters, most of whom aren’t deeply engaged in politics and many of whom ultimately won’t vote at all. I haven’t been able to form a strong view on how his presence is likely to affect the race in the end.
So I listened with interest to last week’s episode of The Bulwark’s Focus Group podcast with political strategist Sarah Longwell and New York Times reporter Astead Herndon. They discussed Longwell's recent focus groups with voters who are torn between RFK and either Biden or Trump, and Herndon's interactions with RFK’s supporters on the campaign trail. Longwell and Herndon have each formed a view that runs counter to the conventional wisdom: they both guess that Kennedy is likely to draw more votes from Trump than Biden in the end.
Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Longwell: Trump wants him in the race, clearly. But I'm not sure, ultimately, once the education has been done by sort of like the Lis Smith part of the Dem operative world… I felt like the Dems could be pulled back to Biden in a way that the Republicans would still vote for Kennedy.
Herndon: I totally think that if I were placing bets, I would place on him taking more Trump voters than Biden voters, right now. But, it's partially because I remember, like, that Ron Paul-y lane of Republicans that Trump did consolidate.
Longwell: Totally.
Herndon: And I remember being in Arizona and people talking to me about JFK assassination, vaccines… it was just, Ron Paul, that whole world, that crowd, really did line up behind Trump. There is actually a funky relationship he has with those type of people, who have both seen Trump as a vessel, and I think have grown increasingly seeing him as an establishment Republican figure in the last couple of years... And so if I'm the Trump campaign, I would not be encouraging of RFK in this race.
Longwell: Yeah.
Herndon: I don't think they've woken up to that yet. But like, I'm surprised they don’t have a Lis Smith operation too.
As Longwell notes, both major campaigns appear to disagree with her — they are operating under the assumption that Kennedy’s presence in the race is bad for Biden.1 The Biden team is fighting hard to keep Kennedy off state ballots. And as Longwell and Herndon discuss, the Democratic National Committee has retained veteran Democratic communicator Lis Smith to be their point person on Kennedy, and she has been attacking him in the press as a spoiler who is backed by Republican donors and who is in the race to siphon votes from Biden.
The Trump team is more equivocal — Trump has spoken warmly of Kennedy, and according to The New York Times, he has even asked advisers and associates about the possibility of picking him as a running mate. (Kennedy, for his part, claims he was approached about the VP position but declined.) And as Smith likes to point out, some major Republican donors have put big money behind Kennedy, presumably because they think he can be a spoiler. But in recent months, the Trump team seems to have noticed that some Trump voters could be tempted to back Kennedy, and so they have started criticizing him as a left-wing environmental extremist — a message that could help bring Kennedy-curious Trump voters back into the fold while making Kennedy more tempting to voters on the left fringe of the Democratic coalition.
The thing about the question of who Kennedy helps is that it’s a dynamic one: It doesn’t just depend on how voters are reacting to Kennedy right now. Those reactions will change over time in ways that the other campaigns will have much influence over. Longwell notes that many of the voters in her focus groups appear to be using Kennedy as a blank canvas — projecting their own desires for what an independent candidate would be onto him, even when those bear little resemblance to Kennedy’s own positions or experience. The Biden and Trump campaigns will have opportunities to paint those canvasses with arguments about who Kennedy really is.
Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a story on the Trump team’s intention “to elevate third-party candidates in battleground states to divert votes away from President Biden,” which included an anonymous source associated with the Trump team saying they would tell liberal voters that Kennedy is a “champion for choice.” The Biden team has not similarly telegraphed its intentions about messaging aimed at voters deciding between Trump and Kennedy — probably a sign of the Biden campaign’s superior internal discipline — but I have to imagine there will be a similar effort to tell marginal Trump voters who’d never back Biden why they should consider a third-party candidate like RFK Jr. Meanwhile, both campaigns will continue with the messages discussed above that are intended to shore up their own bases from the temptation of Kennedy.
I am weakly inclined to agree with Longwell and Herndon that the Biden campaign is likely to enjoy significant advantages in this process, because of the different kinds of voters Biden and Trump each rely on to assemble a plurality coalition. Biden performs best with the most highly engaged voters — his strength with voters who turn out in every election is the reason that Democrats have performed much more strongly in special elections than polls suggest they are likely to perform this November. His coalition is relatively less susceptible to Kennedy’s anti-establishment, burn-it-all-down ethos than Trump’s is, and is more likely to be ideologically driven and swayed by information about where the candidates stand on the issues. For example, left-wing voters disillusioned with Biden are likely to be less tempted to support Kennedy after they hear that he has repeatedly argued for restricting abortion after the first trimester; or that he has surprisingly hawkish opinions on the Gaza War, opposing calls for a ceasefire and calling Palestinians “arguably the most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world.”
Whereas the sort of voter who’s choosing between Kennedy and Trump… well, I envision someone who thinks all politicians are corrupt, perhaps the kind of “Ron Paul-y” voter that Herndon discusses, or maybe someone like one of the focus group participants that Longwell played a clip of on the podcast, a 2020 Trump voter who’s now considering voting for Kennedy for the following reason:
A Kennedy position that I like is, he says he wants to get pesticides and chemicals out of food. Look at sperm count in men over the last few decades. Look at average testosterone levels. Look at your young American men. It's a problem. You wonder, like, why are young men depressed? Well, before you give them an SSRI, I don't know, check their testosterone level. There's xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens in food and in packaging, chemicals, plastics, whatever.
This sort of voter, from the Joe Rogan/Barstool Sports section of the electorate, has been increasingly Trump-coded in recent years. And unlike a left-wing voter who’s upset about the Gaza War, I don’t think this kind of voter is going to be terribly interested in arguments about Kennedy being in the wrong place on the left-right spectrum, which is the message the Trump campaign deploys when they attack Kennedy as an extreme left-wing environmentalist. Indeed, a manosphere-coded version of environmentalism is what draws this Trump 2020 voter toward Kennedy.
Then there is the elephant in the room: vaccines, and the conspiracy theories about them that Kennedy espouses.
Until a few years ago, vaccines did not seem to be a left-right issue, and there are still quite a lot of vaccine skeptics in both political coalitions. But the issue has significantly polarized in recent years, with Republican voters taking more negative views than Democrats on the COVID vaccines and vaccines generally, and Republicans actually being less likely to get vaccinated than Democrats. While Trump has appealed to voters who feel Democrats went too far with COVID-related restrictions, it was Trump’s administration that devoted vast federal resources toward developing and deploying the COVID vaccines in the first place. So Kennedy has an opportunity to get to both Biden and Trump’s “right” on vaccine-related issues, and if he makes a lot of inroads with voters who have very negative feelings about vaccines, he should tend to draw more voters away from Trump than Biden.
Finally, there’s the question of the skill with which the Biden and Trump campaigns will approach the risks and opportunities of Kennedy. If the Times story on the Trump team’s approach to third-party candidates really reflects the state of their thinking, then that thinking is quite amateurish — abortion is emphatically not Biden’s weak point with his left flank, and “champion of choice” is a ridiculous brand to try to sell liberal voters about an independent candidate who’s been spending the campaign flip-flopping on abortion.
Now, it’s possible the Trump camp’s more sophisticated plans aren’t leaking into the press, and they have savvier ideas about policy issues like the environment where a stronger Biden-Kennedy wedge is available to use on left-wing voters. But I’m still asking myself Herndon’s question — where is their Lis Smith? To a large extent, the Kennedy effect in this election is going to be what the Trump and Biden campaigns make it, which is a reason to bet on the Biden team’s financial and organizational strengths leading them to better outcomes.
Very seriously,
Josh
Political scientist Lee Drutman wrote earlier this month about the polling evidence, which so far does find that stronger results for Kennedy are associated with larger leads for Trump over Biden. He adds, “One possibility is that Kennedy is drawing more from Biden than Trump, which would explain why Trump’s margin of victory is higher when Kennedy’s support is higher. Another possibility is that the polls that weight Kennedy supporters more heavily also weight Trump supporters more heavily, so maybe the correlation reflects poll weighting.” Of course, since third-party candidates’ support tends to fade as Election Day approaches, it’s possible that Kennedy will be drawing votes from Trump and Biden in different proportions in the actual voting than in the polling well ahead of voting.
I sincerely hope Biden's campaign uses the incredible targeting capabilities of Google and Meta to indundate anti-vaxxers with messages about Trump's plan to let pharma companies do what they wanted by waiving excessive FDA restrictions and fast-tracking approvals. (This is what they'll hate the most but also totally Trump's best policy decision.)
I'm convinced he hurts Trump more, but also, it probably won't matter. He's not going to be on the ballot in most states. Where he is on the ballot, he'll be at 1% or less. Maybe hits one point something in his best states. Which means a fraction of 1% nationwide. And when you're down in that ballpark, there's very little spoiler effect because those are mostly habitual third party protest voters who would have otherwise voted for the Libertarian or the Green or whatever other crank is on the ballot. Most were never gettable by either Trump or Biden.
He gets media coverage wildly out of proportion to how many votes he'll get in the end. Between his dismal ballot access, and the usual third-party fade, and how those two will reenforce each other, he's going to be a negligible factor. And while it's possible we get a 2000 scenario where it comes down to a few hundred votes in a single state, yeah he might make that difference, but at that point so would a million other contingent factors including the weather on election day.