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.
I agree completely with Neuhauser and Hapin. I would add two points. 1)Since many social and environmental needs are being neglected and even under the so-called “full employment” of the Clinton years, there weren’t enough jobs available, we need greatly increased federal funding for public-service jobs. 2) We need to reverse Clinton’s negation of federal responsibility for basic economic welfare.
The Third-Way’s new report is a far slicker coverage of their thesis than reviewed last summer. But it basically contains the fatal flaws pointed out by John Halpin in Truth-Telling, Populism and Inspirational Politics.
I think Third Way overstates and mischaracterizes what they call the neo-populist position when they make the case for its desrire to “recapture a bygone era” with outmoded solutions. However, that is to be expected since in order to the a “third” way, there must be two other, opposing camps to place yourself in opposition to. (Sort of a tiresome, academic literalness to it all, but not as badly done as the DLC which often resorts to distorted right-wing attacks on the left in order to create a “center” for itself.)
But the fundamental hook they hang their hat on for “de-bunking” the concerns of the “neopopulists” is the graph of the distribution of income by age class. While it does illuminate the age-diversity of income distribution hidden behind a single number of “All Households”, they assert that this very existence proves their point.
But that same distribution would have been true in the past as well.
The question is not just: Is there a spread in 2005? but it is rather: Is that curve significantly different than it was in the past? The curve has always been there, and prime-age earners have presumably always been better off than the average. Duh.
So, does this really tell us anything about their claim that “the middle class is just doing just fine, thanks!”? No.
The other argument they make is that, “Neopopulism feeds off of broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism, but public opinion polls consistently show Americans to be optimistic about their personal finances.” Then they just ignore the “broad economic dissatisfaction and pessimism” because of the “personal optimism”. Futhermore, they ignore studies showing a much greater concern for whether people think their kids will be better off or not — and from personal anecdotes I can tell that concern has reached surprisingly high levels of the middle class.
I think they miss an important issue here — this is the same phenomenon with Congress (they’re terrible, but mine is ok) and schools (the system is bad, but mine is ok). According to Third Way’s methodology, Congress is doing great! Schools are doing great! The middle class is doing great! I’ve got a life jacket, so I don’t know what the dissatisfaction is with the Titanic — cruises are fun!
I don’t buy it and I think they do a disservice to ignore the broad dissatisfaction. There are important things underlying it.
What this Third Way sanguinity leads to is a set of policies that feel extremely incremental as it doesn’t recognize that we are in the midst of a great upheaval as important as the turn of the last century. There are three great global issues impacting everyone in America:
– globalized terrrorism
– global warming
– globalization’s commoditization of work
To be concerned about these issues as a concern for the future well-being of their children and grandchildren is not necessarily to be a Chicken Little. Nor does it require you to assume that the entire system must be chucked for some wild-eyed notion. Nor does it mean that “neopopulists” have no hope or optimism about the future — just that they think there is more to work on and bolder plans to lay.
When I looked at Third Ways solutions, they are basically:
More education
Retrain obsoleted workers
Tweak savings incentives
Give newborns a savings account
Tweak savings incentives some more
Be nicer to families with kids
Be nicer to families caring for their parents
Do more R&D
Have a more efficient healthcare industry
(One of the troubling aspect of the “nicer to family” solutions is that they are purely about more availability of services and tax (money), one the big issues are around time — it can take so much time to care for an older parent that you can’t work as much and so are earning less when your costs go up.)
All of these assume that people can afford to buy all the insurance and education and retraining and other things Third Way thinks they should and furthermore that they already pay enough in taxes to get back some meaningful amount in tax breaks to pay for them.
Which goes back to the core assumption of the Third Way: people make enough money, we just need to incentivize them to spend it more wisely.
But the reason 40M Americans don’t have healthcare isn’t because they they feel they aren’t getting a big enough tax break to justify buying healthcare insurance! The reason is they don’t have a spare $15,000/year to buy it on the open market themselves, no matter what tax incentives you give.
(I would note that this approach is the same thinking behind Bush’s health insurance “reform” pitched at the 2007 State of the Union.)
The reason this “agenda” sounds so paltry is that … it is!. And the reason for it goes back to the beginning — they think the status quo is basically fine, so clearly what is needed is an era of tweaking a few things to make them a little better.
Happy Days are already here!