For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head matchups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
“Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“’He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine,’Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. ‘I love that he is running!’
“Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.”
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFJ Jr. among Trump defectors. And it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote, as one Republican told Politico:
“’If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,’ Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. ‘They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.’”
One likely reason that Kennedy could be appealing to Republicans is the residual effect from the positive attention he received from conservative media when he was running against Biden in the Democratic primaries; his identification with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories also resonates more positively on the right side of the political spectrum than the left. So it’s in the interest of Team Trump to begin telling the former president’s sympathizers that RFK Jr. is actually a lefty, and that started happening recently, as the New York Times reported: “Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, pointed in particular to Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change and the environment, writing on his social media site that Mr. Kennedy was more ‘radical Left’ than Mr. Biden.”
The idea, of course, is not only to discourage potential Trump voters from drifting toward the independent candidate, but to encourage potential Biden voters to consider a Kennedy vote.
If Kennedy continues to draw votes from both Biden and Trump, each of their campaigns will need to make a strategic decision about how to deal with him: Do you ignore him and count on the usual fade in support afflicting non-major-party presidential candidates as Election Day nears, or do you attack him as too far left (if you’re Trump) or too far right (if you’re Biden) and try to make him a handicap to your major-party opponent? The more aggressive approach has become common among Democrats seeking to intervene in Republican primaries (or in the recent case of the California Senate race, a nonpartisan top-two primary) by loudly attacking candidates they’d prefer to face in the general election, encouraging Republicans to flock to the supposed menace to progressivism. This kind of tactic — if deployed with some serious dollars — could have an effect on Kennedy’s base of support.
Certainly Trump seems to be considering it. With his usual practice of saying the quiet part out loud, Trump opined: “If I were a Democrat, I’d vote for RFK Jr. every single time over Biden, because he’s frankly more in line with Democrats.”
Trying to minimize losses to Kennedy and maximize opposite-party votes for Kennedy could become a routine practice down the stretch. Where and by whom this strategy is pursued will depend in part on where RFK Jr. is ultimately on the ballot. Right now he has nailed down ballot access in just two states, Utah and Michigan. CBS News reports the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is close to securing a spot on the November ballot in a number of other states:
“Kennedy’s campaign says it has completed signature gathering in seven other states in addition to Utah and Michigan — Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska and Iowa.
“The super PAC supporting Kennedy, American Values 2024, says it has collected enough signatures in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.”
Coping with Kennedy could become a game of three-dimensional chess between the Biden and Trump campaigns. But if it begins to look like RFK Jr. has become an existential threat to Democrats or to Republicans, you can bet they’ll go medieval on him without even a moment’s hesitation.
No doubt the American health insurance industry will oppose rigorous regulation even more fiercely than the public option. It seems almost a silly exercise to even consider the prospect. However, I do wonder whether insurance regulation such as that imposed on auto insurance by California Prop 103 might work. As a counterbalance to mandatory auto insurance, the State exerts control over premiums. When the proposition passed in 1988, the auto insurance industry forecast doom, warning that companies would abandon the California market in droves. 20 years later, there are plenty of choices of auto insurance to choose from and most Californias are pleased with the results. California premium rates have dropped from the second highest in the US to 21st (http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/insurance/articles/?storyId=18988). Note that voters, not legislators, imposed regulation in California. Can you imagine Conrad, Baucus, and Lincoln standing up for stiff regulation? I sure can’t. I’m hanging in there for a public option and wondering whether I could ever support mandated health insurance without either a public option or regulation. I think not.
We can’t even bring ourselves to regulate Wall Street immediately after the biggest meltdown in living memory. They’ve taken the bailout money, thank you very much, and jumped right back into derivatives trading. And you’re pinning your hopes on regulating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries?
aggressive government regulation of private health insurers can accomplish a lot of the same things as competition from a public option
Even mild regulation won’t last a decade, if that long; it will be bound and smothered and neglected in a thousand ways, from under-the-radar ‘relief’ for businesses to race-to-the-bottom ‘federalism’ to outright refusal to enforce said regulations,all accelerating as Republicans gain more power. And because most of the ill effects of this non-regulation will be borne by those under the radar for many years (until we reach another tipping point), people won’t care.
A public option’s big advantage is that it’s, well, public— we can see it and will know others who use it and will all have at least some interest in it not being overly corrupt. And one most likely would grow instead of decaying the way regulations inevitably will. Bottom line: American regulation is a joke, because our political system is not designed to protect the common good, no matter what the founding documents say.
Democrats know perfectly well that whenever they build anything benefiting citizens by GOP blueprints, the foundation will eventually fail, and that’s a feature, not a bug. The right can tinker with cosmetics without doing too much damage, but I will never buy anything they helped design (or even influenced) from the ground up.
My understanding of the Swiss system is not that the insurance companies cannot make any profit on policies, but that they cannot make any profit on BASIC policies. Supplemental insurances, boutique policies, the kind (I surmise) where you get a private room and a private duty nurse, etc., or access to the pricier long-term care facilities, can be sold for a profit. It might not change the willingness of the insurance lobby to fight reform, but it’s a point that perhaps should be made.
The chance of passing real insurance reform, like that in the Netherlands, or Germany or Switzerland, all of which have systems based on private insurance, is probably less than that of a public option.
In most of these countries the insurers are regulated like public utilities, and are generally by law required to be not for profit. What is the chance of current insurers going or that? Right, and slim has left town. If you think they are putting up a fight now, wait for a bill that strictly regulates their coverages, premiums and corporate policies and makes them essentially non-profits. Can you say, “Republicans (and all too many Democrats) screaming Government takeover?” I thought you could.
In this political climate the public option is our only option.