RFK Jr. running as Independent

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RFK Jr. is a rightwingnut who will draw votes away from Trump and not from Biden.

RFK Jr. is a rightwingnut who will draw votes away from Trump and not from Biden.

Unfortunately there are quite a few people who hold at least some "rightwingnut" beliefs while at the same time being liberal/leftist on other issues.

There is a long tradition of wacky right/left hybrids.

It wouldn't be unusual for somebody on the extreme left to refuse to take a vaccine because they think it a plot by Big Pharma.

No sooner had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was running for president as an independent than Republicans and Democrats alike started fretting about the possibility that he would siphon votes away from them in 2024.

Both sides have valid reasons for concern; there's some evidence to suggest that Kennedy would take more votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee, and some evidence to suggest that he might take more votes away from the Republican nominee. But at the end of the day, his impact on the presidential race is probably being overstated. Third-party candidates rarely win a significant share of the vote, and the election would have to be extremely close for Kennedy's presence to change who actually wins.

Why Kennedy could hurt Democrats
Only a few polls so far have tested a hypothetical three-way race between Kennedy, Trump and President Biden, but they've mostly found the same thing: Kennedy's presence slightly increases Trump's margin over Biden. On average, Trump leads Biden by only 0.5 percentage points in national polls when Kennedy isn't included, but that lead grows to an average of 1.8 points in the three-way matchups.

There are a couple reasons why this could be. First, until last week, Kennedy himself was a Democrat, running against Biden in the Democratic primary. He is also a member of the famous Kennedy clan, which has produced titans of the Democratic Party such as former President John F. Kennedy (his uncle) and former Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy (another uncle). Voters who recognize his name and are nostalgic for leaders like them might be inclined to vote for Kennedy — and those voters are probably mostly Democrats.

Democrats are also less enthusiastic about their likely presidential nominee than Republicans are about theirs, meaning they may be more open to voting for an alternative.

Why Kennedy could hurt Republicans
On the other hand, we shouldn't take those three-way polls as gospel. First of all, the shifts toward Trump are tiny — well within the polls' margins of error, which means they could just be noise in the data. (However, the fact that four separate surveys all found roughly the same thing does make us more confident that the pattern is real.) Additionally, even if those polls suggest that Kennedy's support is mostly coming from Democrats today, that doesn't mean that will be the case come November 2024. Polls of the general election taken so early in the cycle have historically not proven very accurate.

In fact, there's one good reason to think that Kennedy could actually hurt the GOP nominee more than the Democratic one: He's a lot more popular with Republicans than with Democrats. In the past month, five pollsters have conducted polls on Kennedy's favorable and unfavorable ratings broken down by party. On average, his net favorability among Republicans is +27 points (55 percent favorable, 27 percent unfavorable) — but his average net favorability among Democrats is -10 points (35 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable).

That's because Kennedy holds a number of beliefs that put him closer to the Republican base than the Democratic one. Most famously, he is a vocal skeptic of vaccines, but he has also said that gun control does not meaningfully reduce gun violence and opposes aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia.

Over the course of the next year, as Kennedy campaigns, voters will become better acquainted with his positions, which may discourage some Democrats from supporting him (and/or encourage some Republicans to do so). We've already seen something similar happen over the course of Kennedy's Democratic primary campaign.

Why Kennedy's campaign may not matter much after all
At first glance, Kennedy looks like he could be a big factor in the 2024 presidential race. In each of the five national polls that tested a three-way matchup between him, Biden and Trump, he got between 12 and 19 percent of the vote. That would make him the most successful third-party presidential candidate since Ross Perot.

But Kennedy will most likely not reach those lofty heights. Support for third-party candidates tends to decline over the course of the campaign, as voters get skittish about casting a ballot that "won't matter" and retreat to their preferred (or least hated) major-party candidate.

Plus, the conflicting data over whether Kennedy might take more votes away from Democrats or Republicans could portend that he will take roughly equally from both parties — which of course wouldn't affect the ultimate winner. And in past elections with prominent third-party candidates, a majority of their supporters told exit pollsters that, if it had been a head-to-head race, they simply would have stayed home.

Add it all up, and the net number of votes that Kennedy would cost Biden or Trump is probably extremely small. For example, let's say that Kennedy wins 5 percent of the popular vote next year — which is pretty generous, considering that no third-party candidate has received that much support in over 25 years. Let's also say that, in a head-to-head race, 30 percent of Kennedy's supporters would have voted for Biden, 20 percent would have voted for Trump and 50 percent wouldn't have voted at all. In this scenario, Kennedy would have cost Biden 1.5 points (30 percent of 5 points) of the overall vote and would have cost Trump 1 point (20 percent of 5 points) of the overall vote. In other words, Kennedy's net effect on the election in this scenario would have been to decrease Biden's margin by 0.5 points.

The race between Biden and Trump would have to have been extremely close for this to change the winner. That's certainly possible in this era of closely contested elections: In 2020, the tipping-point state in the Electoral College (Wisconsin) was decided by just 0.6 points. But most elections just aren't that close.

When analysts and political scientists have investigated the question of whether third-party candidates have affected who won elections, they have almost always found that the answer is no: not in the 2016 presidential race, not in the 1992 presidential race, not in the 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race and not in the 2010 or 2014 Maine gubernatorial races.

The most prominent exception is the 2000 presidential race, which Green Party candidate Ralph Nader probably did spoil for former Vice President Al Gore — but only because that election was so extraordinarily close.

Unfortunately there are quite a few people who hold at least some "rightwingnut" beliefs while at the same time being liberal/leftist on other issues.

There is a long tradition of wacky right/left hybrids.

The latest national NBC News poll finds the third-party vote — and especially independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — cutting deeper into former President Donald Trump’s support than President Joe Biden’s, though the movement the other candidates create is within the poll’s margin of error.

Trump leads Biden by 2 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup, 46% to 44%, in the new NBC News poll.

Yet when the ballot is expanded to five named candidates, Biden is the one with a 2-point advantage: Biden 39%, Trump 37%, Kennedy 13%, Jill Stein 3% and Cornel West 2

The big reason is that the poll finds a greater share of Trump voters in the head-to-head matchup backing Kennedy in the expanded ballot. Fifteen percent of respondents who picked Trump the first time pick Kennedy in the five-way ballot, compared with 7% of those who initially picked Biden.

In addition, Republican voters view Kennedy much more favorably (40% positive, 15% negative) than Democratic voters do (16% positive, 53% negative).

“At this stage, [Kennedy’s] appeal looks to be more with Trump than Biden voters,” said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt, who conducted the NBC News poll with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

That finding, however, contrasts with the conventional political wisdom — as well as the results of other national polls — suggesting that a bigger third-party vote hurts Biden more.

The NBC News poll results on Kennedy’s impact are “different than other surveys,” said McInturff, the GOP pollster. “So there’s always two possibilities: One, it’s an outlier. … Or two, we’re going to be seeing more of this, and our survey is a harbinger of what’s to come.”

The Biden campaign has actively tried to peel support away from Kennedy. Most recently, Biden held an event Thursday with members of the Kennedy family who are endorsing him over their relative.

Alas, I think it would hurt the Democrats more than Trump. The Kennedy name would more likely attract Democrats than Trump supporters. RFK Jr would likely attract the small but (alas) non-negligible minority of Democrats who are anti-vaxxers.