I’ve been offline for a while, because I happened to emerge from an election watch event in Washington precisely at the moment when the networks projected Obama to win the presidency.
Downtown D.C. quickly became a street party, with cars honking horns, people screaming and high-fiving each other, and just about everyone looking happy. I’m sure there were some Republicans in the vicinity, but if so, they kept a low profile or went along with the excitement as a matter of empathy or protective coloration.
Ir was by far the most exciting election celebration I’ve ever witnessed, and it was one of the few times I was happy to be in Washington.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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April 26: Kennedy Now Taking As Many Votes From Trump As From Biden
Polls are showing a subtle but potentially important shift that I discussed at New York:
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 appreciate your taking note of it. That’s more than Political Wire is doing.
ducdebrabant:
While I don’t necessarily share your less-than-happy assessment of what Barack Obama will do as president, I do share your anguish about the underside of last night’s results. The Prop 8 win was a shock (check out the county-by-county numbers at the LA Times site to see the very limited areas in which it lost), and the Florida initiative was even worse, since it required so large a vote.
We intend to do some analysis on this subject at TDS, with the goal of helping break the back of state-sponsored homophobia in the future. That’s a very small contribution to a big challenge, but we must all do what we can, or every celebration will leave someone on the sidelines, unable to join in.
Thanks for the comment.
Ed Kilgore
At the same time they embraced a black man, voters all over America punished and persecuted gay men and lesbians.
An Obama administration intent on consensus, determined to achieve legislative victories not by majorities of 60 but by majoriities of 80 and 85 in the Senate, cannot be expected to do much for them. The value of the new Democratic majorities will be measured mainly in what they will not do. No Constitutional amendment targeting homosexuals, for example.
And should the Congress bother (in these trying times) to re-enact employment non-discrimination, or add gays and lesbians to hate crimes legislation, Obama will presumably sign the bill. We can expect the White House to issue another executive order forbidding discrimination in the civil service. Gay men and lesbians in the military can probably sit and stew for the next four years unless they roll legislation ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell by their own efforts. Obama may not hinder it, but he won’t expend political capital in his first term to help them.
This centrist administration will make mostly symbolic gestures and get out of the way of the determined advocates of gay and lesbian equality, but it won’t be a determined advocate, or much of an advocate, at all. I accept that. It’s better than the last 8 years, that’s for sure.
But they’re hunting us in California, they’re hunting us in Arkansas, they’re hunting us in Florida, they’re hunting us in Arizona. The most we’ll get from the White House to protect us from the states is a cup of tea and a kind word.
All this election has done for gay people is de-federalize an assault on our citizenship and liberties and return it to the states. This should have been a happy day for all Americans. For some of us, it isn’t altogether that.
In no state where attacks on gays and lesbians were on the ballot did kindness, generosity, or even good sense prevail. America didn’t give up hating this year. It just decided to transfer its loathing from a race to a sexual minority.
Obama’s generation of black men and women may indeed be the Joshua Generation, seeing the Promised Land, but Obama is not even the Moses, let alone the Joshua, of gay men and women and their struggle. Perhaps we have no right to expect that. Perhaps he has enough on his plate.
But if not this President’s plate, then whose? We gay men and lesbians have stood at the threshold of the Promised Land for generations now. Who knows when we will see it? Perhaps when Barney Frank becomes President?