January 11, 2024 - 7:51pm
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a higher favourability than both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, according to a new YouGov poll.
RFK Jr.s’s current favourability stands at 50% while Biden and Trump’s are 43% and 45% respectively. The insurgent candidate is also far ahead of third-party candidates Cornel West (23%) and Jill Stein (19%), marking him out as a leading challenger to take on the Republican-Democrat duopoly. Respondents were not asked to rate the favourability of Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy.
Kennedy, a former Democrat who is now running as an independent, has drawn attention on both sides of the aisle for his heterodox political stances, including his critiques of American foreign policy and vaccine scepticism.
Despite his high favourability, Kennedy’s presidential bid remains a long shot. In a hypothetical Trump-Biden matchup, only 6% of voters would choose a third party candidate, and of those, 24% would vote for Kennedy, according to the same YouGov poll.
While no third-party candidate has won the presidency in modern history, they have at times successfully pressured mainstream candidates to shift their positions in order to retain votes, and in several elections they’ve attracted enough votes to alter the outcome of an election. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose supporters likely would have voted for Hillary Clinton had Stein not been on the ballot, won more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key battleground states.
It’s less obvious who RFK’s supporters would vote for if he exited the race. A November Quinnipiac poll found that, when added to a hypothetical Trump-Biden contest, Kennedy took eight points from Biden and 10 from Trump. It’s unclear how that would play out in the electoral college, through which candidates can win the presidency while losing the popular vote. Another far-off scenario could play out in which RFK wins enough states to prevent either Trump or Biden from winning the requisite 270 of 538 electors. According to the Constitution, this would send the decision of the next president to the House of Representatives, which currently has a slender Republican majority.
Kennedy has capitalised on Americans’ suspicion of government and the “Deep State”, expressing support for opinions that are dismissed by the authorities but are fairly popular among the public. He supports the theory that the CIA was responsible for killing President John F. Kennedy, which chimes with the opinion of a majority of Americans who do not believe the official account that JFK was killed by a lone gunman. Less popular are his claims that chemicals in the water supply are driving childhood gender identity issues and psychiatric medications are to blame for school shootings.
Kennedy isn’t likely to be the next president, but his candidacy offers an outlet for Americans who feel excluded from the political process because major party candidates dismiss their beliefs. His popularity could serve as a warning to both Democrats and Republicans that they are not guaranteed votes by their partisan bases.
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SubscribeOnly in America can this happen.
If he didn’t have a famous name nobody would be taking any notice
Sad but true, put Bush or Kennedy on an election slip and people will vote for it.
Didn’t help Jeb. In fairness, even his own mother said something along the lines of “do we really need to just have Clintons and Bushes as president,” when he ran.
His name still got him further than his talent deserved though, much like Hilary Clinton. Neither of those would have even made the shortlist if they weren’t from famous families
Why no mention of one of his main arguments? That the covid vaccines are useless and harmful.
I think his argument is that all vaccines are useless and harmful, and that some of them cause Autism (not the COVID ones though).
Most of the stuff with vaccines other than COVID has to do with them changing the safety and quality control regulations around them in either the 70’s or 80’s. RFK Jr. has always implied that was the problem with them.
That’s right. The Covid vaccine causes a rather more sudden and final reaction than autism.
That is a media fabrication, I’m afraid.
That’s not his argument at all. He is sceptical of the safety profile of many vaccines, and considers that many of their presumed benefits can be better ascribed to improvements in living conditions and nutrition, which happened contemporaneously to the introduction of the early vaccines schedules.
However, he does not oppose vaccines, if they are properly tested for safety and efficacy (long term trials, double blinded RCT).
The MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella) has been around for decades and 30 years ago the controversial preservative was removed, yet Kennedy still lobbies against it, claiming it causes autism. Funny he got vaccinated, including polio, but he doesn’t want other children to be. When I was four, the measles was going around. The girl two houses down got it too, and she went deaf. These diseases aren’t harmless, and countless pregnant women lost their babies because they were infected.
30 years, yes. And in that thirty years rates of severe autism have skyrocketed.
The point, though, is these products were NEVER subjected to double blinded RCTs conducted under ethical, neutral conditions. So we simply don’t know whether the benefits (preventing deafness), outweigh the costs (causing autism).
You might have an ideological attachment here. You might even be correct. But the point is that RFK Jr’s argument is not loony. It’s an entirely reasonable and conservative approach.
Trump – Vivek team…MAGA
RFK is sound on a couple policies, but not on most as he is really a Democrat, and that means Anti-American now days. He is a less steep slippery slope to destruction, but still one which can not be made up for as America slides deeper into the void.
Now we need – the whole world needs – to get off the slope, to move up and on to less war, more balanced budgets and so on – BUT – the biggest thing of all is to crush the super Elites of the Globalists; the WEF kinds of Corportocracy and and Financeocracy. Blackrock, Vanguard, Amazon, Lockheed, Pfizer, Microsoft, Rothschild, Soros….
It is either Trump, or Uniparty and continue to Neo-fuedlism.
Kennedy is the one person in the field who makes Trump look sane by comparison.
And you truly think Trump going to tackle exactly the sort from which he comes?
One thing you can certainly say for Trump, he is a genius in mugging off alot of folks.
Silly comment. If Trump was an establishment politician the establishment wouldn’t be trying to jail him. His policy on the borders alone sets him apart from the Wall Street elites, not to mention his trade policies, prison reforms, inner city prosperity zones and, above all, his anti- interventionist foreign policy.
Sure, he’s an autistic egotistical buffoon, but maybe that’s what it takes to challenge the corrupt plutocracy that’s currently in power in the US, and therefore the World.
4 years to build the wall he promised and didn’t do it. Promised to get Mexico to pay and then didn’t. His immigration statements are largely performative. He’s no intention of reducing it greatly if it has any economic knock-on, exactly like the Tories/Brexiteers in the UK. He’ll just major on a view bits that play to the performative aspect and mug as many off as he can.
I think you forget he had 4yrs and did hardly a thing. Can’t blame Covid as that didn’t happen until well into his last year when he’d have spent time campaigning more than changing things. I’m sure some nonsense narrative about how he was blocked will be used as an excuse but it’s rubbish. He’s rubbish at governing.
You’re gonna get Grifted again I fear
Conspiracy nut.
Unless of course you believe that Covid was been targeted to spare Jews and Chinese people from the impact of the disease. I have no doubt that there will be some Unherd readers who violently agree with that kind of lunacy.
You clearly have not read his books and, as usual, speak from utter ignorance.
I heard what he said – that’s good enough.
I’ve heard his interviews. The words “crackpot” and “crank” came to mind on listening.
Cmon CS- You broke a cardinal rule of Champagne Socialism with that attrocious grammatical error “was been targeted.”
I expect more from you in that regard. Tighten it up!
Fair enough.
It should be “wuz bin targeted”.
Judging by the dumber of “dislikes”, it would seem so.
My interpretation of this article is America is ripe for a viable third-party candidate who stands for the issues important to the majority of people and not to the minority of ideologues. In practice, I have no idea if such a candidate could ever win the presidency.
….or if a candidate like that even exists.
Life long Dem really sick of where we are heading. Kennedy is intelligent, refreshing, authentic and not Biden or Trump. Ready for a change.
You forgot “mad as a hatter”.
He may be refreshing and intelligent, but authentic? I’m surprised that anyone can find his obvious political showboating as anything other than a skin deep appeal to the swivel eyed loons.
He is a Kennedy, enough said. I wish that family would just go away, they are a a bunch of rich degenerates who use their money and power to get away with rotten behavior and Camelot was a myth made up by them cover up the great amount of sleaze that was going on, and they are total jerkass to boot. The only reason he is gaining any traction right now is do to the unpopularity of the other candidates, a fading family political brand with a bunch of wishful nostalgia attached to it, and that he has a bunch crank or fringe beliefs that appeal towards other like minded people who are desperate to latch on to something that provide affirmation for their obsessions and ignore everything else he says, and push this guy accordingly to advance pathetic quixotic causes. The guy is nothing but a another failson from a prominent family who did nothing meaningful or noteworthy with his life trying to impose himself on us out of a sense on entitlement and daddy issues. Im just tired of elite families dominating American politics, I wish the Clintons, Trumps, Obamas, and yes the Kennedys would just go away.
RFK Jr. is a crackpot. He has a few unconventional positions that make him appear to be anti-establishment, but when the basis for these positions are examined, they often turn out to be essentially conspiracy theories disguised with faulty data.
Favorability and ability to draw votes in a general election are two very different things. If in the yougov poll RFK is drawing 24% of 6% who would vote for a 3rd party candidate, that’s about 1.5%. Most published polls show him in mid single percentages. Whether he can climb to Ross Perot levels, remains to be seen. For the moment it’s the Biden camp that is working overtime to diminish him. Trump camp seems somewhere between unconcerned or welcoming.
As for how RFK supporters would vote (should he bow out), that’s highly unlikely. The DNC has kicked him in the shins (or perhaps in a higher more painful location). The Kennedy’s have a well earned reputation of not getting angry, but getting even.
Conclusions: RFK will be on the ballot in many states, overwhelmingly blue states (think New England and mid-Atlantic states). My bet is that on the day after the election, the DNC/Biden camp will regret having not allowed Democrats a say in the primary season. His draw is not based on specific policies; his draw is challenging an elite class who care very little about a broad swath of working to middle classes whose concerns are ignored, with no accountability for major policy failures.