What Will The RFK Effect Be?

Just yesterday, the haughty and insufferable "No Labels" party finally admitted defeat, announcing they are no longer planning to field a Presidential candidate in 2024 after an endless parade of "centrist" suitors declined their request to run with the No Labels brand.  No Labels had long ago become a punchline for failing to recognize that, with the pending comeback of Donald Trump, the country doesn't have the luxury of indulging the cocktail party class's preference for neoliberalism.  All of the potential nominees they were courting to run understood that any vote for No Labels would be one vote less for Biden, and at least for this demographic, 2024 is gonna be a binary choice for or against fascism.

But even with No Labels going the way of the woolly mammoth, there remains one gigantic wild card heading into the November 2024 Presidential election, and that's the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a candidate who defies categorization and stands poised to get votes that nobody running on the hypothetical No Labels ballot line would. 

In the abstract, RFK seems uniquely positioned to capture votes from a broad and unwieldy coalition in the way that some of the most effective third-party candidates of the past have.  There's a growing counterculture left, particularly on the west coast, whose politics have largely become defined by RFK's signature issue, resistance to vaccines.  Particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic and COVID vaccine mandates, the Democrats cannot count on the votes of this group, and that would be true even if their cause's leading champion wasn't on the ballot.

The second demographic group that's vulnerable to being poached is the "legacy Democrats", an aging and mostly blue-collar voting bloc that tends to be culturally conservative.  Most of these voters already flipped to Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020 and have realigned to the GOP, but it's a safe bet that there are still a modest cohort of them who've stubbornly hung onto their Democratic voting traditions even though they find today's version of the party to have swung too far to the left.  It's also reasonable to speculate that this group of voters would be nostalgic for the Kennedy surname and the bygone era of the Democratic Party that it represents.  Even if they know little to nothing about RFK's platform, his last name might be enough for them to cast a protest vote against Biden.

The third demographic group that might be inspired to cast a protest vote for RFK is young voters, specifically those who are most appalled by Biden's alliance with Israel in their war against Hamas, a group that I can easily imagine constituting a seven-figure chunk of the electorate.  Those who are the most steadfast in their loathing of Biden's policy toward Israel seem likely to just stay home in November, but a decent-sized faction of them are likely to express their fury with a protest vote.  Some of them could easily go to Donald Trump, but for those unwilling to vote for Trump, RFK could be an enticing third option.

And the last demographic group where I can see RFK scoring an outsized proportion of his support is Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primary.  Ultimately, I think the vast majority of Haley's voters--even those most steadfast in recognizing Trump as an authoritarian and a threat to the American way--will still end up falling in line for Trump.  But there will unquestionably be a faction of Haley voters who can't bring themselves to vote for Biden or Trump.  Even if they don't like RFK, he's a tempting option for those who want to express their disgust.

The bottom line is that Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. is the kind of candidate best positioned to be a catch-all for widespread discontent in an electorate where the majority of voters intensely dislikes both major-party options.  While I can't see him matching Ross Perot's 19% national showing in 1992 even in the most ideal circumstance, I can see him as potentially matching Perot's 8% showing in 1996.  Unfortunately for RFK, there's a significant obstacle standing between him and his best-case scenario, and that's ballot access.

Ballot access is an extraordinarily tough nut to crack for independent candidates in most states, and RFK got off to a slow start since he'd been running as a Democrat up until a few months ago.  In addition to tens of thousands of required signatures in each state, a number of states required that RFK choose a running mate before having ballot consideration.  After floating some high-profile names like Aaron Rodgers or Jesse Ventura that would have given his candidacy some recurring headlines, RFK instead selected Nicole Shanahan, the trophy wife of a Silicon Valley tech billionaire who has zero qualifications for the office but will give RFK direct access to a considerable supply of cash.

The original hot take was that RFK undermined his credibility with such a cynical and unserious selection, but voters determined to cast a protest vote aren't likely to be dissuaded by good government arguments.  If Shanahan's money bomb increases her running mate's ability to keep a sustained spotlight on their campaign and work around some roadblocks unique to third-party candidacies, it may actually serve RFK better in the long run than if he'd selected a known entity with governing experience like Ventura.

RFK is expressing confidence in his ability to get on the ballot in every state but that seems like cockeyed optimism at the moment.  As of now, his ballot presence is official only in Utah, but he seems more likely than not to prevail in at least a dozen other states, including some swing states like Nevada, North Carolina, and  New Hampshire.  With Shanahan's money backing him, RFK's chances can only improve in finding his way onto the ballots in the Rust Belt states, where he'd probably be most likely to act as a spoiler to the national outcome.

And that leads me to the next obvious question.....is RFK more likely to hurt Biden or Trump?  Supporters of Biden and Trump make a case in both directions, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Biden has far more to lose.  Judging by the responses of the two campaigns, Biden's team certainly seems to agree with me that RFK is a bigger threat to Biden as they are working harder than Trump to block his ballot access in state after state and more generally sounding off the loudest about the threat he poses to their nominee.  After all, MAGA voters probably represent a third of the electorate, and we know they're gonna be united for Trump.  The 30+% of voters who aren't MAGA but express disapproval of the incumbent are historically likely to break for the challenger over either the incumbent or a third-party challenger.  With that in mind, perhaps John Anderson in 1980 is an even better corollary for RFK than Ross Perot.  Whatever the case, it's hard to envision a scenario where an ascendant RFK bleeds more voters from Trump than Biden.

With only seven months until the election, it's a bit surprising that so much uncertainty lingers about RFK's capacity to dramatically alter the electoral landscape this November.  The range of his potential threat level is no more or less clear today than it was six months ago.  Let's suppose that his support fades down the stretch as is more common than not for third-party candidacies.  Unless he fails to make the ballot in a decisive majority of states, I still see him as better-positioned to take a higher share of the popular vote than any third-party option in 2020, an election that Biden won by a collective 44,000 votes in three states.  With that in mind, it doesn't seem unreasonable to predict that even in its most scaled-down hypothetical form, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s campaign has about a 25% chance of changing this election's outcome.