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.
Democrats arent losing voters to Republicans because of their superior efforts to spread economic opportunities. Republicans dominate the narrative and are able to get the attention of media. Democrats need to find their own way of doing that which should not involve trying to immitate the Republican focus, style or policies
on what working class was upset about: I thought the post here on ” A Tale of Two Populisms” by Guy Molyneux was pretty accurate. The voters the democrats want back rage is directed at politicians not so much wall street.
There is a problem of being able to trust politicians especially democrats and a belief that the only things that Democrats fight for are what they’re being told (on social media, news sites, commenting sections, newspapers) take down society. How are Democrats going to counter that message?
It feels very military take over out there. Failure in war was because America was too nice to our enemies, failure in society because America was too nice to people who werent “real” Americans and those who made the wrong choices, or so they say. It also explain why working class had to get on welfare, or the biggest shame they can think of. It was the black president’s fault. Its the Jews. Their power is the reason why we’re losing the wars.
White nationalism is supposed to give a purpose to the wars as well.
How are democrats going to change that?
Anyway, the conclusion of that study, which was about the fundmental shift in the geography of opportunity (higher percentage of college educated and economic rate of growth in large cities vs rural) was that Democrats and Republican, including Trump had their differences in who they blamed but both were both at square one in “finding ways to more widely disperse opportunity beyond well-educated workers in a few highly networked urban centers of clustered talent.
I think Democrat party should put the left in their party in charge of finding those policies but the message advertising should be focused on as what is best for all families, if indeed it could be argued that it was.
The left has the energy, they are the fighters. That is what this party needs.
Even so, the democrats are going to be in constant competition with the attention grabbing and dirty fighting of the Republican party, as well as their control of the government and all things media, so creativity is needed as well.
I have to add that there should be some thinking on how can the war industry and our involvement in the world be changed into something that enhances life on this planet rather than destroys it. That involves jobs. The corporations that are profiting from war should be encouraged to do something else in the direction of technological advances. Protecting the environment should be included in that. Star Trek it up.