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.
For Democrats there is no path for a Senate victory in 2022 either if things continue as they have.
Biden must go full economic populist from day one:
1. Wages. Bring up a vote on raising the minimum wage, but also establish a new framework for minimum wages in the United States. We need a clear differentiation between regions and inside regions between urban, suburban and rural areas. Bring up the minimum wage for professionals, administrators and executives too.
2. Place based development. Good jobs are concentrating in only a few neighborhoods in a few cities. The federal government must require corporations, starting with federal contractors, to spread jobs so that the working class, both white and non-white, has access to good quality jobs.
3. Follow up on executive action on prescription drugs.
4. Marihuana decriminalization, both legislative and executive-regulatory.
5. Instruct the Department of Justice to continue and expand anti-trust actions in the information technology sector.
6. Instruct the Department of Justice to begin anti-trust actions in the agriculture sector. Expand subsidies to agriculture as a consequence of trade wars, but require more production for domestic consumption.
Biden must also move to the right or center right on several issues:
1. Funding the Police. Get the Party behind a unified legislative and fiscal position that is easy to explain. Make sure this position can be implemented quickly everywhere from the biggest and most diverse cities to the smallest villages that Democrats control. Convince the most radical Democrats that this is the best position to have. Democrats can’t continue with the current messaging cacophony.
2. China. Keep Trump’s framework. Actually, pledge to deepen the decoupling.
3. Support national voter id and other changes to address even the slightest possibility of voter fraud.
4. Authoritarianism in Latin America. As foreign policy is within the President’s primary jurisdiction, develop a policy on how to deal with Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, as well as Brazil, that puts the primary focus on human rights and democracy. Go beyond platitudes and appoint someone with an exclusive focus on this. Reject incrementalism in sanctions (either putting them in place or lifting them) though, it doesn’t work.
5. Immigration. Allow moderate immigrant groups to shape the Party’s position. This will inevitably lead to focus on comprehensive reform and a rejection of open borders. The Party should repudiate the concept of sanctuaries. The Party wouldn’t tolerate sanctuaries for racism, so why support sanctuaries where the law is not applied evenly. Defunding sanctuary cities should be contingent on passing comprehensive reform.
6. Israel, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and the Middle East and East Mediterranean. Keep Trump’s policy objectives. Biden’s original idea of partioning Irak shows he understands that final solutions are important. On Iran the point is basically about making it a better regional actor. No simple return to the previous nuclear framework. On the Middle East Peace Process the pressure needs to be kept up on Palestinians and repudiation of boycott movements against Israel. Palestinians should be both pressured and allowed to hold elections so that they can appoint a legitimate peace negotiator with Israel, which is what has been missing for more than a decade. Lebanon may also be about to flip. Saudi Arabia’s modernization needs to be supported, so no place for sanctions there. The Yemeni peace process is important but secondary to other objectives. The Syrian, Libyan and Iraq stabilization are more important and require real geopolitical vision. The US needs to intervene more on the Cyprus and Greek Aegean conflicts, so that Turkey can be at least partially appeased. The Armenians and Kurds problems need to receive more US attention with the US pressuring both to compromise in relation to their territorial ambitions.
7. Military spending, more and better.
8. Global warming. Push other countries to make more efforts. Continue supporting natural gas at home and its use abroad. Get other countries to stop using coal. Focus at home and abroad on electric cars. Develop a framework for a carbon tax at the border on imported goods just like the European Union is considering.
9. Crack down on higher education cost inflation.
The reason so many Democrats are mad as hell is because not only did the party underperform, but the polls we rely on for deciding things in primaries would also probably be wrong.
Late deciders once again broke for Trump though.
In the most fundamental way this election was an “its the economy, stupid” vote.
Losing with the white moderates in Maine. Losing with the white populists in Montana. Where are the Senate pickups we were promised?
Arizona already went through decades of Trumpism, just like California before it. Doesn’t mean the model is replicable in states with less Hispanic immigration or with immigration from Hispanics from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.
Trump has done well even with Libertarians running pretty good in many states. Meanwhile the Green vote collapsed.
Democrats ran on covid and demeanor. Republicans ran against political correctness and on the economy.
The people who came out for Trump voted because they liked him.
The Democrats who came out again for Biden (many after not voting in 2016) voted for a diversity of reasons. The few Republicans who voted for Biden did it to stop Trump.
The Republican party is the minority party yet is more structurally strong now than in 2016. They have a clear path forward with America First and opposing all the myriad manifestations of toxic wokeness. Their path is clear as in Europe.
Gays will continue voting for Trump. Trump was bad on transgender rights but neutral on gay rights. Transgender rights are stuck because they are choosing the wrong framework to push for an incoherent agenda. More equal protection under the law and less culture wars on pronouns. The bathroom thing is unenforceable and easy to mock but transgender leadership is choosing moralizing.
The left is not anywhere near ascendant in the US.
30% of Puerto Rican in Florida voted for Trump, for example.
Florida voted to raise the minimum wage and to enfranchise ex convicts. It also reelected its Republican Governor, elected a Republican Senator and twice voted for Trump. Floridians who are moderate must have buyers’ remorse with their experience with Gillum. But the state is not reactionary or conservative.
If I was in Florida looking at how California closed Disneyland and Universal Studios taking away the livelihoods of all those Hispanic service workers and still having an epidemic and then considered that Democrats would also close Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando if voters let them I would have to balance competing ethical interests. When it comes to covid old people are voting out of self interest. It doesn’t mean their ethics are superior, as we see in all the other ways they vote.
2018 was overshadowed in 2020 by moralizing about masks and ambiguity over cultural issues.
Is it progress that in order to have the Squad speaking about things that will never become legislation we have to lose seats that are key to getting anything at all done? Loses in congressional and state legislative seats, including in New York, will soon tell us.
If Biden wins and loses the Senate it will be a good reminder that the Electoral College is not the only constitutional problem. Democrats had no ideas beyond filibuster reform (which would be moot) and ludicrous ideas about DC and PR as states.
Encouraging mail vote turned out to be an incredibly flawed strategy when it comes to perception. Even early voting in places like New York that don’t do an early count was a bit stupid.
Neither the Democratic party nor the left have paths forward.
1. The white suburban route requires moving a lot more to the cultural center and that wouldn’t pay dividends for a while.
2. A white working class route would be even more uphill as it would pit the suburban fiscal moderates against the working class populists.
3. The Bernie strategy of turning out disenchanted progressives has been twice disproven.
4. The identity politics BLM agenda doesn’t even have the support of many Black elected officials and is stuck even in the Bluest of cities, yet is incredibly divisive at the national level and in most key battlegrounds.
Black Democratic partisans made Biden the nominee. Dettached Black voters are another thing.
I suspect that the strategies of neither Biden nor Bernie would have worked.
The presumption that covid would only work against Trump I think was misguided. Covid also worked in his favor as people want to get back to work. The media fear mongering over covid may have backfired.
The Black, Hispanic and White working class male vote (including the gay vote) may have tipped further enough towards Trump to make the Republican party even more hegemonic in most of the states of USA.
Democrats’ historic mishandling of deindustrialization and China, silence over authoritarianism in Latin America and the ambiguity over defunding police all contribute to pushing at the margins just enough against Democrats.