January 15, 2024 - 10:00am
Amid the muck created by America’s two inadequate presidential frontrunners, green shoots are rising. They may not grow to maturity this year, but the basis for the emergence of better political choices already exists and is showing surprising life.
The majority of voters, particularly independents, do not want a Biden-Trump rematch. That’s no surprise, since three-quarters of the population think that Joe Biden is too old, with the vast majority considering him not mentally up to the job. For his part, Donald Trump has consistently failed to gain approval from more than 42% of the electorate. Astonishingly, the most favoured of all the candidates is neither one of these two, but instead independent candidate Robert Kennedy.
This all reflects a deep political despair. Nearly two-thirds of Americans dislike the political status quo, and barely 4% think the system is working well, a Pew survey found, while 75% feel that national leadership has declined in recent years, according to Rasmussen polling from last month. Crucially, independents still form the largest voting bloc in the US, with 43% of adults identifying as such.
But the growing disenchantment could also become a source of hope for a new breed of leaders. In the Republican Party — despite her frankly disingenuous comments about the Civil War — Nikki Haley has emerged as a viable alternative to Trump. Among Democrats, we see the rise to prominence of independent-minded liberals like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, the onetime progressive heartthrob who works closely on issues with conservatives such as Sen. J.D. Vance.
Like a majority of Americans, Fetterman aggressively supports Israel and wants to staunch the open border. Unsurprisingly, he is denounced by the progressive press for breaking the party line. Similar treatment was accorded to Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent. The people are willing, unlike Biden and the party establishment, to take on the lunatic Left fringe that now infects the Democratic Party on anything from Israel-Palestine to the impact of the porous border.
Going beyond the horse race analyses, we see old alliances shattered and future prospects far more unpredictable. Working-class voters, once the prime constituency of the Democratic Party, have been shifting decisively toward Republicans. Minorities, who make up over 40% of the nation’s working class and will constitute the majority by 2032, are now jumping ship in considerable numbers.
The big issue, as usual, is the economy, which only 20% of voters rate as “excellent” or “good”, versus 49% who call it “poor”, according to a New York Times/Siena poll. Americans remain overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future. That is likely why Kennedy’s odd mélange of environmentalism and populism (with an occasionally conspiratorial tinge), have made him the favourite of voters under 35. This likely doesn’t reflect a revival of the old Kennedy worship, as the young barely know who his father and uncle were.
Many of these younger voters eschew both parties. Only 33% of baby boomers consider themselves independent, compared to more than half of millennials and Gen Z, according to RealClearPolitics. This opens the door to Kennedy, but also to more conventional independent politicians not tied to the hive mind of the Trumpian Right or progressive Left.
Worried party functionaries are working overtime to keep any third party, including the centrist No Labels group, off the ballot. Dritan Nesho, a No Labels pollster, says battleground state polling found that between 60% and 70% of voters in swing states are open to considering a moderate, independent presidential ticket if the main-party choice is between Biden and Trump. In one recent poll, almost two in five Americans said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate; if this holds, it would be a larger share than either member of the current deadly duo.
These trends will not please the establishments of the Left and Right, but the defeat of the fraying status quo would be America’s salvation. Kennedy may not be the answer to our prayers, but embracing his rise is more plausible than genuflecting to the existing political elites.
Joel Kotkin is the Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and author, most recently, of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter)
joelkotkin
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIt’s time for an independent.
It’s time for anyone other than Trump or Biden.
However it’s not time for a quack like Kennedy.
How do you form your “quack” opinion of Kennedy?
He will absolutely be portrayed as such by mainstream media, but most conversions/interviews with him I’ve listened to have really impressed me.
He doesn’t sound as crazy as the MSM would like us to believe.
He has some very naive and silly ideas about the environment.
So does John Kerry and he’s a former Dem presidential nominee as well as Biden’s current climate cult leader. If anything, RFK’s “silly” ideas put him in the Dem mainstream.
Kerry has resigned from this post.
To go to work on the doomed Biden campaign. Kerry always shows up when things look bad and then makes them worse. On the upside his plastic surgery is not looking like a good investment.
This is true. Doesn’t make any of them worthy of my vote.
Bobby Kennedy believes, among other things, that WiFi causes a variety of diseases, including breaking down the blood-brain barrier. He says there are hundreds of studies that show that. But there aren’t hundreds of studies that show that. There’s not even one.
Examples?
The imputation Kennedy is a quack comes from the same reputable sources who tell you to Trump is hitler.
…and that Biden is compos mentis.
…and that the covid vaccines are safe and effective.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Not this day
Watch Freddie’s interview with RFK beginning to end. He’s no quack.
The majority of voters, particularly independents, do not want a Biden-Trump rematch.
The people who run the system could not care less what independents, or any other voters for that matter, want. That should have been clear enough in 2020 when the Dem primary field was swept aside for the sake of pushing forth a bumbling fool with a half-century track record of gaffes and grift.
In one recent poll, almost two in five Americans said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate;
What people will consider and what they actually do are very different things. And sorry, but the idea that more than half of Millennials and Gen-Z consider themselves independents is near parody. These are among the most groupthink-driven generations in American history, the ones that brought to fore the tactic of seeing everything through the oppressed/oppressor binary and who can’t identity what a woman is.
Strange how you think that any view that contradicts yours is groupthink. I guess like everyone else here you believe yourself to be an independent thinker.
And your two statements are contradictory (a different kind of free thought…). No mainstream party represents what you state their beliefs to be so why wouldn’t they be independents? It is only in the free-thinking right wing media that the Democrats are the bad party of CRT and trans-tolerance. Many progressives are just as disappointed with Biden and the modern mainstream Democrats as many on the right. They just prefer Biden to the alternative.
Progressives hold their noses and vote Biden in the same way that actual conservatives hold their noses and vote for the fake-tanned fraud sex offender atheist because he shrinks the state, cuts taxes and is pro-white christian.
Are you a racist and atheist? What is wrong with being a pro-white Christian?
What is wrong with being pro-white is that there is no reason to believe that non-whites are inferior.
And what is wrong with Christianity is exactly the same as what’s wrong with Islam. Both give false confidence by telling people that god is on their side.
Pro-white means anti-other? What is your logic? Does pro-black mean ant-other? Makes no sense.
Those who believe in God believe in transcendence. There are no “sides.”
My opinion: Many “Independents” are Republicans who are afraid to state their preference due to repercussions in the woke workforce. Party registration is public info.
Political commentary from someone who cannot help seeing Biden is mentally gone – and his handlers are basically out to wreck the country, yet at the same time are a total ‘Never Trumper’ will have a hard time discussing this election.
”Amid the muck created by America’s two inadequate presidential frontrunners,’
The thing is Trump is the most outstanding candidate in a century – he is the only non-warmongering Patriot in generations. The choice, and about 80 Million voters agree, and that is a huge amount, biggest in history, is if Trump wins – then USA drags its self out of the Self-Immolation Pyre it has built for its self. Or – which ever Democrat wins will commit suttee and light the fire and destroy us all out of sheer hate for the American way.
Haley? She is a Warmonger Uniparty Rino and would be a utter disaster. She wants for ever War – AND Social Credit Scores so we all may be under the thumb of the autocratic dystopia she wishes for us.
You say “Trump is the most outstanding candidate in a century”.
That’s worrying for the rest of the world, for whom it is obvious that he favours a Russian takeover of the whole of Europe. And he’d also result in the USA becoming a laughing stock in the rest of the civilised world (while there is some left of it).
Nonsense.
sigh – the Awaiting for Approval……..
“The Truth! You can’t handle the truth!”
haha
AIPAC control those in contention. RFK lost my support because of his support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I find it all so depressing. Dems preventing other Dems to be on the ballot. How can you not mention that in your article?
When did RFK support anything of the kind such as you claim?
The Palestinians? You mean the people who murdered his father?
I like a lot of what Bobby Kennedy says. We should be doing some things differently in this country. Things that both parties have abandoned.
But Bobby Kennedy should get nowhere near the White House. Not even as a visitor, and certainly not as a resident. He believes that vaccines cause autism. He believes that WiFi causes disease. He believes that the CIA murdered his uncle the president.
Bobby Kennedy says there is evidence to support these claims, but there isn’t. He’s deluded, and we can’t have a deluded president in power.
But we needn’t worry about that. Bobby Kennedy is on track right now to win zero electoral votes. History suggests he will fade as time goes on. No serious politicians support him.
Bobby Kennedy is like Nikki Haley. And Michelle Obama. Someone whose name gets thrown around by commentators who need to write a column but don’t have anything that will grab attention. None of those three are going to be contenders come November.
While his party is trying to mobilize support for getting the electorate engaged on the subject of greenhouse gases, RFK still parrots the Seventies oil company propaganda line about nuclear energy. He also manages to incorporate the antivax talking points of both the left and the right into his platform. Elect RFK, and we lose what remains of out technological edge to China.
There is every chance that Nikki Haley will finish second to Trump in the primaries. If Trump were to die or become incapacitated (he is in his late 70s after all), she could easily be the candidate.
“He believes that the CIA murdered his uncle the president.”
Wait, there are people out there that don’t believe this?
I didn’t until I read The Unspeakable. It’s irrefutable that the CIA killed both Kennedys.
Watch Freddie’s interview with him beginning to end. You have bought into the dnc narrative. Go to the source. The big lie is that he is antivax. He is not.
When no serious politician supports you, you’re on the right track.
As they say in Aberdeen, ah hae ma doots. Not mentioned by Kotkin is Kennedy’s antivaxism and associated thoughts. Once the media spotlight turns on the weirder side of things, electability diminishes.
I think RFK Jr’s weirdness doesn’t need a spotlight to be visible.
Third parties are recurring fantasies no serious people think will happen. The subject keeps pundits and journalists in grocery money so there is that.
If the answer to what ails America is “RFK Jr”, things are dire indeed.
I can say with 90% certainty you have never heard Freddie’s interview with him beginning to end.
65-year-old lifelong Democrat and retired journalist, disgusted by the far Left’s ideological capture of my onetime party and planning to vote for Kennedy. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he is intelligent, well-informed and offers a refreshingly independent, morally principled vision. He is certainly not the delusional conspiracy theorist portrayed by mainstream American media, which are little more than mouthpieces for the status quo. Kennedy appeals not only to the young, but to disillusioned voters of both parties and all ages willing to do their own research and make up their own minds. That’s the remaining option, given that Democratic party machinery obstructed in every way it could Kennedy’s attempt to fairly challenge Biden for that party’s nomination.
Please remember that when you refer to the ” far Left’s ideological capture of my onetime party”, what you call the ‘far-left’ in the USA would be called the ‘centre right’ in the rest of the developed world.
I sympathise with your dilemma. but RFKJr is so delusional about science that he’s surely not fit to run a country that is so dependent on, and good at, science.
Agree. But if he has a shot, he’ll be shot. They’ve tried once already and are withholding secret service protection for the most at risk candidate this century.
I share your concern. Obama got Secret Service protection much earlier the first time he ran, on the assumption his race put him at higher risk for violence. Yet Kennedy — certainly at higher risk for reasons anyone familiar with American history readily understands — has been denied.
Bill Maher said in on one of his shows recently that the one thing that ties both the democrat and republican voters together is that they both hope that their candidate dies before the election. Sums it up neatly, nespa?
I will take RFK Jr easily over a maniac narcissist, and a dead man with sunglasses on any day, any time.
They’re all narcissists and Biden has proven to be the maniac. You guys need a new insult.
The biggest surprise at Thanksgiving dinner was that my two millennial nephews and their woke girlfriends are all voting for Trump. My sister in law nearly fell out of her chair. Me too-except I was laughing!