Last week, after ex-Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was suspending his independent presidential campaign and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, MAGA loyalists gleefully concluded they had all but won the 2024 election.
After all, most recent national polls indicated RFK Jr. commanded about 5 percent of the vote nationwide. Many Republicans quickly concluded that most of those voters would now swing toward Trump.
But they shouldn’t be so certain. This is shaping up to be a situation of subtraction by addition. RFK Jr. may be the millstone around Trump’s neck that the GOP nominee will likely regret.
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Harris will likely hold her own in polls after RFK Jr.'s endorsement of Trump.
Statistics, coupled with a dash of political logic, help explain why.
As the Associated Press reports: “Recent polls show that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have a favorable opinion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his presidential campaign on Friday and gave his support to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. ... The developments left relatively narrow room for Kennedy’s presence — or departure — to make a difference in the election outcome. Recent polls don’t give a clear indication that Kennedy’s presence in the race had an outsized impact on support for either major-party candidate.”
Political analysis and data outlet 538, as reported by ABC News, offers evidence that RFK Jr.’s “campaign suspension/Trump endorsement” will benefit Democrats, not Republicans.
Republicans probably expected a “whale” of a swing in the polls in their direction after Kennedy opted for Trump. But on ABC News’ site, G. Elliot Morris and Mary Radcliffe report that 538’s national polling average doesn’t see much of a net gain. “Kennedy’s presence in the race is drawing slightly more away from Trump and increasing Harris’s margin by about 0.2 percentage points on average across the states.”
It gets worse for the Trump-Vance-Kennedy ticket.
In that ABC News article, 538 explores RFK Jr. supporters’ second-choice preferences. A video on that site indicates that Harris gets 32 percent of the RFK Jr. supporters, while only 18 percent favor Trump. Another 34 percent go with “someone else,” while 14 percent claim they won’t vote for a presidential candidate in the 2024 election.
The Pew Research Center numbers back that up: “Far more of those who changed their preference decided to support Harris (39 percent) than Trump (20 percent),” Pew reports.
Let’s pause a moment to remember that, not long ago this year, Trump skewered RFK Jr. on his Truth Social site.
“RFK Jr. is a Democrat ‘Plant,’ a ‘Radical Left Liberal,’ Trump said in a three-part post on his Truth Social website,” USA Today reported earlier in the campaign.
In April, on his X account, Kennedy replied to Trump.
“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged. President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims.”
Later in that post, RFK Jr. added “President Trump betrayed the hopes of his most sincere followers.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former President Trump at a GOP campaign rally at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona, Aug. 23, 2024. (Photo: Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images)
GOP pollster Frank Luntz seemed happy for the first time since President Joe Biden dropped out and Harris surged against Trump. In an interview with NewsNation, Luntz said “It’s probably worth about 1 percent for Trump and that 1 percent could be everything if it’s in the swing states. In the end, the reason why Kennedy was drawing 10, 12, even as high as 14 percent is because he was taking votes away from Joe Biden.”
Luntz’s supposition was not backed by the evidence. As USA Today reported in April: “Recent polls by Marist College and NBC News show Biden benefitting against Trump when other candidates are included on the ballot, including Kennedy and third-party aspirants Cornel West and Jill Stein.” Surveys showed RFK Jr. leeching support from Trump, not Democrats.
In another article by The Hill, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy crowed: “If you’re a Democrat, the Kennedy family is the closest there is to political royalty in that party. And it makes you wonder, would John F. Kennedy be a Democrat today because of his positions were much different than the Democrat Party is today.”
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McCarthy, fresh from his unsuccessful attempt to oust Rep. Matt Gaetz in Florida’s GOP primary, must have been too busy to hear that several members of the Kennedy family blasted RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump, as noted by MSNBC.
RFK Jr.’s rambling Arizona speech showed himself to be further away from John F. Kennedy, his uncle, and Robert F. Kennedy, his father, than ever.
John F. Kennedy, for one, stood up to the Russians, wasn’t a vaccine skeptic, pushed harder for civil rights than Confederate monuments, and would never transition from Democrat to independent to Republican backer in the span of 10 months and surrender his dignity to a candidate who winks at authoritarianism.
As Biden stepped aside and Vice President Kamala Harris stepped up to win the Democratic nomination, RFK Jr.’s remaining support for his flagging presidential campaign suffered even more defections. His poll numbers — at about 15 percent on July 11 — plummeted over the next month, with many of his former supporters trending toward Harris.
As reported in a story by The Hill: “Republican strategist Scott Jennings advised former President Trump to be careful now that he has seemingly joined forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing the independent presidential candidate is ‘kind of a looney tune.’
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asked Jennings Friday if Kennedy’s endorsement could “end up backfiring” on the former president, considering the environmental lawyer’s controversial views on vaccines and embrace of some conspiracy theories.
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In the article on Yahoo about the GOP expert, Jennings said: “There could be some cost on the other side of the algebra. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when RFK was a liberal, you know, conspiracy theorist. Now he’s more of a conservative conspiracy theorist, but the through line is, he’s a conspiracy theorist, and a lot of people think he’s kind of a looney tune.’”
RFK Jr. may try to worm his way back into the election as a kingmaker, but it’s unlikely that most voters can bear it.
Advantage: Harris.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His “X” account is JohnTures2.
