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 am with Grok. For example, Zogby predicted Ryan over Blagojevich in Illinois by a wide margin in 2002.
If Sept. 11 never happened, Bush would probably be winning — we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq
Are you sure about that? Even Paul O’Neil would beg to differ.
It’s All Good. He barely won when no one knew who he was, now they do, and if the silence of my conservative friends means anything, it means they are ashamed.
When the GOP won a small number of seats in 2002 (+5 in the House, +2 in the Senate net gains), they won on the back of GWBush, whose approval ratings were 70 approve/26 disapprove (USA/Gallup). Bush now has an anemic 46 approve/51 disapprove (USA/Gallup)! 42% LV want a generic Democrat for Congress, only 37% LV want a Republican (rasmussenreports) and Democrats have been preferred for a solid month! Bush will not have as much time to focus on boosting his congressional colleagues as he HAD TO in 2002. He has his own record to (try to) defend! Many moderate Republican candidates already will have to distance themselves from Bush because he is so unpopular! Even in a conservative district like KY-6, Republicans face defeat if they run on Bush’s record! Winning a Democratic seat by twelve points in a district that went for Bush 55-42% in the 2000 elections, shows just how vulnerable Republicans are in Congress! (dnc website: democrats.org) Democrats are in good shape to pick up another seat for South Dakota’s Representative in a June 1st election! (dnc website: democrats.org, http://www.hersethforcongress.org) Republicans are clearly vulnerable up and down the ballot! Great turnout in November and abyssmal job approval of Republic policies and GWBush means democrats may just be taking back Congress AND the White House!
Why LV doesn’t track RV: One thing people often get wrong is the fact that the SAME sample of 1,000 voters or so produce both the RV and the LV numbers. The difference is, the LV calculation includes one more “weight” for each response. So if, in the pollster’s mostly subjective opinion, a certain percentage of registered R’s is likely to vote in November, and a certain percentage of men, and of older voters, and you are an older R man, your answers get “counted” more than, say, a young D woman. Problem is, this early in an election cycle, you can’t really rely on whether people SAY they’re going to vote, because who the heck knows? Most people aren’t paying attention yet. So you go with past elections as your model. Which is patently silly, since all elections are different (this one, I’m guessing, particularly so).
Just remember that when a poll produces both LV and RV numbers, all that’s happening is the pollster is subjectively multiplying the Kerry and Bush numbers from the RV poll with some factor he/she’s come up with based on whatever ideosyncratic technique she/he wants. We can do the same thing. I, for one, believe loads of Dems will show up this Fall who didn’t in 2000. So my LV poll will take a decent RV sample, say Gallup’s, and “increase” (via weighting by a factor of 1.1) the Dem sample by 10%. So my LV result, which basically has as much credibility as Gallup’s, will show Kerry with a 3-4 point lead among LV’s.
It’s all a game right now. As Ruy says, stick with the RV’s until, oh, about Labor Day.
The latest gallup poll also shows among that national adults (both registered voters and unregistered adults) Kerry is doing better and/or Bush is doing worse on most dates, granted by small margins. But these findings are repeated themselves and show that registering more voters, especially in swing states and in targeted urban/suburban/ideopolis areas is more likely to aid Kerry rather than Bush. This shows that increased effort into voter registration/mobilization efforts will likely pay large dividends for Democrats in 2004. To any and all encouraged by this prospect, I urge you to volunteer your time and energy (or even just donate) to the voter registration efforts like those by America Coming Together or your local Democratic Party or labor union or church congregation. We need all the help we can get and there is certainly good reason to believe that all this help will pay off up and down the ballot. Wouldn’t it be great to give President Kerry a like-minded Congress as well! Republicans are vulnerable! THis is the year we can take back our country!
While Iraq tragedies are taking away from Kerry being able to keep his face in the main stream press, I keep reading that Bush has taken away the economy and jobs as a campaign issue. Not so, I say. I have been skeptical of the last two months jobs numbers and now realize that I am not alone. John Crudele of the New York Post has an interesting article discussing this today. Too bad the rest of the United States electorate does not read this. If the information in this article were known by the public, coupled with the Bush failures in Iraq, plus the failures of his War on Terrorism, this elction would be (as George Tenet would say) a slam dunk.
So what CAN Kerry do about Iraq? Oh politically its all good, but substantively I’m depressed about it.
Zogby was the only one to accurately predict Gore’s 2000 victory, but he’s missed some biggies, too. He’s the Sammy Sosa of polling–when he hits it, he hits it square, but when he misses it’s brutal.
The information on polls given in above posts for ncpp.org and ayresmchenry.com are not available. There are no such web sites unless the wrong information was given. I tried accessing these sites twice and they do not exist nor is there a link at 2.004k.com.
If John Kerry loses this election I’m moving out of the country. If GWB is reelected after all the crap that’s come out in just the past year, I’ll give up all hope. The crazy thing is that there’s so much controversy about GWB’s administration that something like the leaking of Plume’s identity has taken a total backseat. In any other administration, I think this issue alone would’ve dominated the news cycle for a good long time. Forget about how the administration shifted $700mm to prepare for an invasion of Iraq.
It really is unbelievable how much this administration has TOTALLY SCREWED UP everything they’ve tried to do. But even with all the foul-ups, NOBODY has been fired or even resigned! Apparently accountability is only an issue for anyone who is not involved with the Bushies. I wish someone would replay the testimony of Wolfowitz when he testified that Shinseki’s opinion it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq as “irresponsible and way off base.”
This is kind of off topic, but this is a reeeeally good site:
http://home.comcast.net/~gerrydal/
it’s somebody’s allocation of electoral points, but it’s based on recent polls, etc. i am most interested in how competitive states like Maryland, Arkansas, and Georgia are.
Sept 11’s effect on Bush’s popularity is a little complicated.
If Sept. 11 never happened, Bush would probably be winning — we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, budget wouldn’t be such a mess, and most importantly the economy would be doing quite well.
Sept 11 gave Bush a huge boost and at first he deserved it for leadership against Al Qaeda — but the fact is he completely screwed up the War on Terror and created this fiasco in Iraq. This is becoming apparent to more people every day.
Which, by the way, ought to be the basic line of attack for Democrats — not that Bush is a liar or an evil person, but that he simply has made a mess of everything.
Here’s another poll, released today by Ayres, McHenry & Associates:
http://www.ayresmchenry.com/docs/AMA%20National%20Survey%20Packet.pdf
It has results broken down by Red, Blue and Purple states. Kerry seems to be doing better than Bush in the purple swing states.
( link found at http://2.004k.com/latest/ )
A report on the accuracy of various 2000 election-eve polls is available at:
http://www.ncpp.org/poll_perform.htm
Sept 11 was THE best thing that ever happened to gwb…While im dismiissive of the stories that he knew about it, I honestly dont believe he would take
it back if he could. The tragedy provided him with
political capital he otherwise never would have
The most striking thing about Bush’s poll numbers is the steady, almost linear downtrend ever since he took office. The fact that he was able to squander the huge overnight boost he received on 9/12/01 just shows he is a fundamentallly flawed politician. Where would his support be today if it weren’t for Osama and those 20 terrorists?
Why would his RV go up 6 points, at the exact same time as his LV went down 1 point?
My guess is, there’s a little statistical noise there. Probably, if there had been a bigger sample size, both categories would have been up 2 or 3 points.
I believe that the reason Zogby’s final poll
in 2000 was more accurate than the others was
simply that he kept polling on Monday, the day before
the election, while the others stopped on Sunday.
As you may recall, there was a shift toward Gore at
the end, and the other pollsters missed part of it
because of stopping polling on Sunday.
Does anyone besides me find it utterly appaling that these polls show there is a big segment of the voting public out there that is “for war” when it seems we are WINNING and “against war” when we seem to be LOSING?
In other words, this specimen doesn’t care what the purpose of the war is — just that we win. ” Go ahead and glass some towel heads and I’ll see you at Starbucks.” And I am sure when you ask them they think the war was justified — or not — on “principle.”
I need a drink.
Unlike some people I have no interest in an impeachment. The thugs proved in ’98 that impeachment is just a parlimentary strong-arm tactic. What I want is an electoral count of 538-0 come November.
thanks. zogby seemed like the best bet.
In 2000, almost all polls predicted GWB as the popular vote winner by 2 or 3 points. Zogby called it a dead heat, and also made the right call on every state but one. (Never can remember whether it was OR or NM.)
speaking as a horse-race obsessive: anybody have a recommendation of which poll presents the most accurate information?
I know . . . I know . . . polling is an art not a science. but still, it’d be helpful to have a sense of which poll is the best to watch. and obsess over.
woo hoo!!!!! goodbye george bush!!!!
not the most substantive response, but justified.
anyway, I’d agree w/ zogby that this election is kerry’s to lose.
fingers crossed.