RFK Jr.'s campaign is imploding. He can still be an electoral problem for Trump.
This summer has been especially turbulent for a presidential election. So you may have lost track of one of the candidates with no chance of winning but a real chance of influencing the outcome: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
After all, former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a July 13 rally and then promised to campaign with a more unifying tone, which he then quickly abandoned.
Then President Joe Biden, the guy who beat Trump in 2020, dropped his bid for a second term on July 21 amid Democratic Party concerns about his capacity to campaign, and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.
That's a lot of history to squeeze into one summer. And we still have about 13 weeks until the election!
Kennedy had a bumpy summer of a different sort, with a cavalcade of controversy. Still, his no-shot bid for the presidency could shift the race for the eventual winner.
Let's check in on how Kennedy's campaign has fared during what we can call his "season of upheaval."
RFK Jr. has been losing on several fronts for months now
This is a political rule I didn't think we needed – if one of the first things voters think when they hear your name is, "Oh, a worm ate part of that guy's brain," then you're doing it wrong.
But Kennedy, in May, acknowledged to The New York Times that doctors did find that an actual worm "ate a portion" of his brain before dying. (The worm, not his brain. I think.)
As that worm turned, so did polling data for Kennedy, who has long coasted on name recognition and Camelot nostalgia as the nephew of an assassinated president and son of an assassinated presidential candidate.
Kennedy, who started his campaign as a Democrat before switching to an independent run, was polling nationally at nearly 20% last fall, according to a tally of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics. The RealClear average now puts him at just 5.5%.
More voters had held a favorable view of Kennedy than unfavorable, according to polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, until mid-May, when that reversed on him for the first time. His unfavorable rating Thursday was nearly 8 percentage points higher than his favorable rating.
Let's not forget dead bears, questions of his residency and accusations of sexual assault
Kennedy presses on, unfailingly confident that he will win an election he will certainly lose. He seems impervious to recent news stories that have made him more of a punchline than a politician.
A quick run-down:
The New Yorker told the tale this week of Kennedy picking up New York roadkill a decade ago, a dead bear cub, with plans to skin and eat it that went awry, so he instead staged a Central Park scene to look like it was killed by a bicyclist. Kennedy tried to preempt the magazine by releasing a video of him telling the story to Roseanne Barr. As flexes go, this, too, was roadkill.
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Kennedy claimed on election forms that he lives in New York, but his "residency" is a room in a house he started renting after the New York Post reported that he rarely visits the property. He now faces a legal challenge for his status on New York's ballot in November.
A former babysitter, in a Vanity Fair article, accused him of sexual assault. Kennedy responded by texting her this: "If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.” The Boston Globe asked if more women might come forward. "We'll see what happens," he replied.
Do we suppose RFK Jr. will pull voters from Trump or Harris?
Trump has been on every side of Kennedy, excoriating him publicly with criticism but also cozying up to him in private. Kennedy's son last month posted on social media a video of his father talking on the phone with Trump, who sounded open to giving Kennedy a government post if he wins back the White House. They also met in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention last month.
Why is Trump flirting with Kennedy? The 2024 presidential election, like in 2020, will probably be a very close call that depends on the results in seven swing states. Kennedy last week submitted nomination petitions to get on the ballot in one of them, Wisconsin, and is already on the ballot in two more, Michigan and North Carolina. He has also submitted petitions in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. His Arizona petitions are due this week.
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Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, told me that Kennedy's polling has "fallen off a cliff," and that the recent spate of controversial news shows "he has nowhere to go but down."
"Having said that, as we learned in 2000 and 2016, even 1% can make a difference and push the election toward one of the major parties," Sabato said. "To add to the confusion, it is not clear at all whether he’ll hurt Harris or Trump more. It may very well differ from state to state."
A national Marquette Law School Poll released Wednesday shows Harris leading Trump 52% to 48% among registered voters and 53% to 47% among likely voters.
Add Kennedy and other third-party candidates – Jill Stein of the Green Party, Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party and independent Cornel West – and Harris receives 47% and Trump 41% among registered voters. Among likely voters, Harris gets 50% and Trump 42%.
This is not to say RFK Jr. can't still cause problems
That's not much. But in a tight election, it can certainly be enough to tip things one way or the other.
Trump would not be courting Kennedy unless he sensed a threat in the recent polling. He's not alone in worrying about Kennedy's impact.
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Clear Choice Action, part of a group of political action committees aligned with the Democratic Party to defuse third-party threats, used the question of Kennedy's residency Thursday in a legal challenge, seeking to have him removed from the ballot in swing-state Pennsylvania.
That legal challenge, like the New York case brought by Clear Choice PAC, claims that Kennedy really lived in California. That's a problem for his campaign, because his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, also lives in California. The challenge said "Kennedy's deceit is essential to his campaign" because the U.S. Constitution bars member of the Electoral College from voting for a president and vice president who hail from the same state.
Kennedy's campaign told me "he anticipated a challenge in Pennsylvania, the most highly contested swing state of the election." The campaign pointed to a series of legal victories it has won in other states while predicting more of the same for Pennsylvania.
The New Yorker article, which explored much more than just the roadkill bear story, had this headline: "What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want?" It's an excellent read that doesn't quite answer that question but ends with a suggestion that this is all some way for Kennedy to address traumas from his life.
If that's true, a presidential election he can't win but can influence could be a trauma he inflicts on an entire nation.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RFK Jr. is still in this election. Will he take votes from Trump?
