Kennedy Endorses Trump, Does It Matter?

In a stunning development in the 2024 campaign for President, Robert F Kennedy Jr, formerly a Democrat and now an independent, has dropped his bid for President and endorsed former President Donald Trump in what was one of the best speeches of the 2024 campaign for President.

Kennedy’s campaign for President, first in the Democratic Party’s primaries and later as an independent, was handicapped by a relentless campaign of harassment by the Democrats to keep him off the ballot. The Kennedy campaign was attacked in nearly every state, including an unlikely (but successful) lawsuit claiming he wasn’t a resident of New York, the state his late father represented in the United States Senate and where he owns a home.

Prior to Joe Biden’s removal as the Democratic Party’s candidate, RFK Jr was polling as low as 4 percent and as high as 15 percent in a match-up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump. With Biden out of the race and Harris in, Kennedy’s numbers seemed to settle at the lower end of that scale, especially if the other independent and minor party candidates were included in the poll.

Oddly, ABC News reported in recent polling Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats and independents to have a favorable view of Kennedy. And those with a positive impression of Kennedy were more likely to also have a favorable view of Trump (52%) than Harris (37%).

So, in terms of raw numbers, Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement may not move that many voters and it is as yet unclear where his voters might settle on Election Day.

However, Trump wouldn’t have to win a lot of Kennedy’s potential voters to make a difference in key swing states; if the race is as close as it was in 2020, Trump gaining even a fraction of a percent from Kennedy could make the difference.

Despite the relatively small numbers of voters at stake, polls conducted in recent months, including since Biden dropped out of the race, suggest that Trump would pick up more of Kennedy’s supporters. Any margin would likely be small — but potentially significant.

According to an analysis of recent polls by Nicole Narea, senior reporter covering politics and society for Left leaning Vox, several national polls conducted since Harris became the presumptive nominee have also tested a race between Harris, Trump, and Kennedy, as well as a two-way race between Harris and Trump. Trump tends to get a bigger bump than Harris when Kennedy is excluded.

In an August Reuters/Ipsos poll of registered voters, for instance, Harris received 42 percent support, Trump 37 percent, and Kennedy 4 percent, while 15 percent supported another candidate, weren’t sure who they would support, or weren’t sure if they would vote at all. But when voters were pushed to select either Trump or Harris, 49 percent backed Harris and 47 percent Trump — a 10-point boost for Trump.

Trump had a similar edge with Kennedy voters in a July Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. In a three-way contest, Harris earned 44 percent support, Trump 47 percent, and Kennedy 10 percent. In a head-to-head poll, Harris earned 48 percent and Trump 52 percent.

In Arizona, Ms. Narea observed, Kennedy is polling at about 6 percent, according to The Hill’s polling average. Of course, he might not have actually won that large a vote share if he had decided to stay in the race there; third-party candidates tend to poll much better than they actually perform on Election Day, when their supporters are confronted with the reality that their preferred candidate won’t win. But that vote share would have been more than enough to have swung the 2020 results in the other direction.

The same is true in other swing states, concluded Ms. Narea, where polling suggests a very tight race. An early August New York Times/Siena survey of registered voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found Harris leading Trump 46 percent to 43 percent when respondents were given all third-party candidates to choose from. When asked to pick between just Harris and Trump, the gap tightened to 48 and 46 percent, respectively. Those states are likely to be key, given their high electoral college vote count — and in most scenarios, Harris would need all three to win.

We think Ms. Narea is pretty solid in her analysis of the raw impact RFK Jr’s withdrawal and endorsement of Donald Trump has on the race, but it doesn’t account for what may be the most important effect – which is to add another voice to the charges that Democrats are corrupt and anti-Democratic warmongers who rely on the Deep State to get and retain political power.

As Mr. Kennedy said in his endorsement of Donald Trump, "The DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time that our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court, state after state, attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed those petitions. It deployed DNC aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail."

"We've pushed Russia into a disastrous alliance with China and Iran. We're closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than any time since 1962 and the neocons in the White House don't seem to care at all."

"Our moral authority and our economy are in shambles, and the war gave rise to the emergence of BRICs, which now threatens to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency. This is a first-class calamity for our country."

And finally, "We are aligned with ending the childhood disease epidemic, securing the border, protecting freedom of speech, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, getting the U.S. intelligence agencies out of the business of propagandizing and censoring and surveilling Americans and interfering with our elections."

In many respects Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the same kind of old-fashioned Liberal Ronald Reagan campaigned against and whom we could never support for President, but he is spot on in his critique of the destructive results of 12-years of Obama – Biden – Harris government.

Our friend Larry Kudlow may have put it best in his August 23, monologue, “I am in awe of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. whose policy reasons for supporting Donald Trump are so much closer to what Americans are actually thinking. I do not agree with everything Mr. Kennedy said, but we do agree on some issues and for Mr. Kennedy's direct and specific reasons for the Trump endorsement and turning on his undemocratic Democrats. That's why he’s winning the news cycle. That’s why today he's given Mr. Trump a very big leg up to win the election.”

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