Dead Kennedy

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, June 20, 2024

 

“The most dreaded election in modern political history.”

 

That’s how Axios described this year’s presidential contest, citing the freakishly huge percentage of voters who view both candidates unfavorably. Over the last 10 presidential cycles, so-called “double-haters” have typically accounted for between 5 and 13 percent of the electorate. (The number was higher during the 2016 election, as you might expect.) This year, they account for no less than 25 percent.

 

To a historic degree, Americans despise the choice that the two major parties have offered them. Never in my adult life, not even in 1992, has the political climate been more favorable for a heterodox independent with a famous name to enter the race and make a splash. And as it happens, a heterodox independent with a famous name is running for president this year.

 

So why is he losing support rather than gaining it?

 

We’ve been conditioned to expect the unexpected in presidential politics but Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s early decline feels surprising anyway. A new Fox News poll published on Wednesday found him slipping from 15 percent against Joe Biden and Donald Trump last November to 12 percent in March to 10 percent today. He’s gone from plus-3 in net favorability over the last three months to minus-11, with 51 percent now viewing him negatively.

 

That’s no outlier, either. After many months of Americans holding a generally favorable opinion of him, Kennedy slid into negative territory in mid-May in the FiveThirtyEight polling average and has continued to fall. His net favorability now stands at minus-8.7 points.

 

His decline is also showing in head-to-head polling with Biden and Trump. Over the first two months of this year, he reliably averaged 13 percent or better in the RealClearPolitics average. Then, in March, he shed a few points, and shed a few more in June. Today he sits at 7.9 percent in the five-way race. Some surveys have him as low as 3 or 4 percent.

 

Americans have stared into the abyss of having to choose between two plainly unfit geriatrics and decided that one or the other of them would still be preferable to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

 

Realistically, RFK’s only hopes for a rebound are to qualify for next week’s presidential debate and to pile up a mountain of fundraising money as quickly as he can. He needs to introduce himself to voters who haven’t heard of him yet and to improve his image with voters who have—urgently. The obvious way to do that is to perform well at the debate before an enormous television audience and to flood American media with advertising.

 

But as of Thursday morning, both of those hopes have been extinguished. Kennedy will not qualify for the debate, having failed to meet either the polling requirement or the ballot-access threshold. And for the second straight month, his grassroots fundraising has been anemic: He brought in just $2.6 million in May, a month in which Trump raised $53 million in a single day.

 

“Independent presidential candidate disappoints” is a dog-bites-man story in American politics but less so in a year in which the electorate is desperate for an alternative on the ballot. Why has RFK 2024 failed to launch?

 

There are obvious “structural” answers to that, I think, and a few specific to Kennedy that aren’t as obvious.

 

***

 

Every buzzworthy third-party candidate eventually suffers from the fact that he’s a human being, not a political abstraction onto which disgruntled voters can project their preferences.

 

Running against “the system” is a shrewd way to draw interest from antiestablishmentarians on both sides, but “the system” means different things to populists of different stripes. For Bernie Sanders voters, it means capitalism and staunch U.S. support for Israel; for Trumpers, it means the “deep state” and entrenched liberal orthodoxy among American institutions.

 

The less either side knew of RFK early on, the easier it was to assume he was running against “the system” as they specifically conceive of it. As he was forced to flesh out his positions on the trail, those assumptions inevitably gave way to disillusionment.

 

Imagine how a Kennedy-curious progressive must have felt upon learning that he believes Israel’s offensive against Hamas is a “moral war.” Or what a Kennedy-curious conservative must have thought upon discovering that he supports “full-term abortions.” (Or did until very recently, anyway.) Familiarity breeds contempt, it’s said, and that’s never more true than for third-party candidates. RFK’s polling probably had nowhere to go but down.

 

He had another problem in this campaign that independent insurgents don’t normally face. The “anti-establishment” lane is already occupied by one of the major-party candidates.

 

When Ross Perot made a go of it in 1992, he had the advantage of facing two milquetoast centrists in George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. For populists who wanted to shake up “the system,” Perot was the only game in town. Not so for Kennedy, who’s been forced to try to out-populist a figure in Trump who was himself elected to the presidency in 2016 as a radical antidote to “the system.”

 

And unlike most “outsiders” who head to Washington and promptly go native, Trump is loonier today than he was eight years ago. If it’s true that populist voters care less about ideology than about supporting “the craziest son of a b-tch in the race,” RFK faces an all but insurmountable challenge in trying to top the Republican nominee for president. 

 

Kennedy’s fundamental strategic problem as a candidate, in fact, is that he persists in trying to gain traction on both sides despite the obvious difficulty of getting to Trump’s right. That’s led him into some awkward and almost certainly counterproductive panders, such as when he told a right-wing podcast last month that he “viscerally” opposes removing Confederate monuments. Is that going to convince any reactionaries to prefer him to Trump? Nope.

 

Is it going to improve his standing with the progressives he’s courting on the other side? Big nope. It’s the sort of play that might have been interesting if the race were between two major-party nominees who agree that America shouldn’t pay public tribute to a slave regime’s military wing. That is not the race we have, alas.

 

There’s one more reason Kennedy might be in decline. Paradoxically, an election with a huge number of “double-haters” may be less hospitable to third-party candidates than the average election is.

 

Longtime readers know my reasoning about that. The ideal political climate for an independent isn’t a race in which Americans have strong negative feelings about the major-party candidates, it’s a race in which they don’t have strong feelings either way. In a low-stakes election, a disgruntled voter might plausibly risk his vote on a longshot challenger because he doesn’t care which major-party candidate ultimately prevails.

 

Again, that is not the race we have.

 

The 2024 election is the highest of high-stakes campaigns because of the threat Trump poses to the constitutional order and the threat Biden poses to … ushering in a Kamala Harris presidency, I guess. (That, and four more years of unchecked immigration.) By November, many Americans unhappy with their choice will nonetheless develop a reasonably firm opinion of which candidate presents the more diabolical threat to America. And they’ll hear over and over again that the race will be tight, with each vote potentially decisive.

 

Faced with that kind of psychological pressure, few will end up throwing their votes away on a no-hoper like Kennedy. In fact, it may be that the single biggest catalyst in RFK’s decline over the last three months was the end of the presidential primaries and Americans being forced to reckon with the reality that they actually are going to have to choose between Trump and the other guy again. There’s no room for protest votes in an election where disaster is on the ballot.

 

It might not be a coincidence that Kennedy’s June swoon in polling appears to have begun just a few days after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in Manhattan. That’s exactly the sort of thing that might sharpen the minds of disaffected voters who otherwise would have taken a hard look at RFK. Do we want to have a convicted felon in the White House? Do we want to let Democratic “lawfare” decide our elections? Antiestablishmentarians on both sides are now thinking hard about it.

 

In the end, then, the dynamics of the race probably are such that Kennedy never stood a chance.

 

But that doesn’t mean he was doomed to decline as quickly as he has. Some of this is on him.

 

***

 

His insistence on competing for votes on both sides has exposed him to twice the amount of hostile fire he otherwise would have taken from the parties. Go figure that he ended up badly wounded before summer has officially begun.

 

For months, fearing that he might end up winning more support from their side than the other, Democratic and Republican party organs have pummeled him. On the left, most of that dirty work has fallen to the Democratic National Committee and a “war room” led by longtime operative Lis Smith. The wider Kennedy family has also joined the effort, posing for photos with Biden to disabuse Camelot nostalgists of any sense that they owe their support to RFK.

 

But on the right, Trump himself has taken the lead in attacking Kennedy, leveraging his vast influence among the base to undermine the source of his opponent’s core appeal to right-wing cranks:

Again and again since April, Trump has personally derided RFK as a secret vaccine enthusiast and a not-so-secret leftist. A pro-Trump super PAC launched a website dedicated to the subject titled “Radical F—ing Kennedy.” Maybe most importantly, after Kennedy withdrew from the Democratic primary and remade himself as an independent, his fan club in right-wing media predictably soured on him. Propagandists like Charlie Kirk were happy to promote him when he was poised to play spoiler against Biden; once he posed a risk to Trump too, the tone changed sharply.

 

That alone may explain the bulk of RFK’s declining popularity. Remember, from the beginning of his presidential candidacy, he was vastly more popular on the right than on the left because of his hostility to the president and to vaccination. As he’s gradually become anathema to MAGA cultists who fear he might spoil Trump’s chances, his numbers have moved accordingly.

 

A second self-made problem for Kennedy is his choice of a running mate. In a way, picking Nicole Shanahan made too much sense and too little.

 

Shanahan is a lawyer and philanthropist whose claim to fame is having received a very large settlement in her divorce from Google founder Sergey Brin. As near as anyone can tell, that’s the only reason Kennedy put her on the ticket: She’s made of money and he needs a wealthy patron to bankroll his campaign given how disappointing his grassroots fundraising has been.

 

By her own admission, Shanahan had spoken to Kennedy only “a few times” before laying out $4 million to help fund a Super Bowl ad for his super PAC. In late May, after she became his running mate, the Washington Post reported on their arrangement and discovered that RFK didn’t seem to know what she was up to on the campaign trail and that Shanahan didn’t seem to know his position on abortion.

 

She sure can write a check, though. In April, she accounted for $8 million of the $10.7 million he raised. 

 

Choosing her was as rational a decision as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is capable of making. But voters who are looking for “the craziest son of a b-tch in the race” don’t want “rational.” They want gonzo idealism, and a Silicon Valley plutocrat is the opposite of that. Shanahan’s selection was greeted on social media with grumbling about “globalism” from fans who expected RFK to choose someone who would maximize his anti-establishment cred. Instead they got a shockingly mercenary choice. As one Kennedy fan put it, “How do you sell financial support as … inspiring to the general public?” 

 

You can’t have a rich cipher helping to lead a “great cause” candidacy. RFK didn’t grasp that, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

 

There’s one more problem he’s had to cope with. Kennedy is, shall we say, eccentric, and Americans tend not to like personal eccentricity in major leaders.

 

The closest thing to an eccentric among national political figures is Trump, of course, but “eccentric” is the wrong word to describe him. (Well, maybe sometimes.) His cultural tastes—fast food, action movies, UFC—are thoroughly mainstream. And while he’s plainly unwell, his behavior rarely comes off as “odd” more so than boorish and selfish. He acts the way most people would if they convinced themselves that morality is for Boy Scouts and suckers. That’s not “eccentric,” exactly. It’s rotten.

 

Many men seem to view him as an alpha-male role model, in fact. God help us.

 

Kennedy is eccentric. The pet emu, the interest in Aaron Rodgers as a running mate, his diagnosis with literal “brain worms”: All of that might be spinnable in isolation, but the weight of it grows as it accumulates. And it’s all filtered through a reputation for political kookery courtesy of a years-long crusade against vaccination that has amassed a body count and an insatiable appetite for conspiracy theories.

 

Even his voice is eccentric.

 

For the most disaffected populists, that’s all part of his charm. But for normie voters who dislike Biden and Trump and who looked at Kennedy early on as a potentially serious independent alternative, it’s destined to be off-putting. It’s hard not to notice, in fact, that RFK’s favorable rating at FiveThirtyEight began ticking downward not long after the widely publicized “brain worms” story appeared in the New York Times.

 

Better to stick with a guy who’s senile or sociopathic, normies may have concluded, than roll the dice on one who had “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”

 

***

 

All of that said, I don’t think he’ll drop out.

 

Why should he? America will never again pay him as much attention as it’s paying him right now. He has a sugar mama in Shanahan, who seems poised to pick up his tab all the way to Election Day. And the pressure he’s applying to the two major-party candidates on his pet issues could successfully force them toward his position, to our universal detriment:

The fact that Biden and Trump are as old as they are is another incentive for Kennedy to hang in there. If one candidate or the other suffers a crisis before November, a chunk of his populist support could peel off to RFK in despair and resignation about the race’s outcome. There’s still a scenario in which the Democratic and/or Republican candidate stumbles enough to push Kennedy back into double digits.

 

But none of us would bet on it at this point, would we? His likely trajectory is further south as partisans on each side turn more frantic and apocalyptic about the consequences of losing to the other. We’ll be lucky to live again someday in a country happy and stable enough to make a third-party candidate truly competitive, where the stakes of national elections are low. It’ll be a while.