02 May 23
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ALSO SEE: RFK Jr. Was Always a Crackpot, He Just Switched Political Tribes
The noted anti-vaxxer is getting significant support in presidential polls. But it may not be what it seems.
“Things have gotten so bad for DeSantis that a recent Fox News poll shows him at 21%,” CNN said, “comparable with the 19% that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed debunked conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, is receiving on the Democratic side.”
Now: Are you all thinking what I’m thinking? Because there’s an eye-catching number in that sentence, and it’s not related to Ron DeSantis.
Kennedy officially launched his Democratic primary bid on April 19, after a month or two of making noise about it. In an April 9 Morning Consult poll, 10 percent of those surveyed said they would support Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The day of Kennedy’s launch, a USA Today/Suffolk poll had Kennedy at 14 percent. The Fox News poll released April 26, referenced by CNN, showed Kennedy at 19 percent. Kennedy was at 21 percent in an April 27 Emerson College poll.
Ten, 14, 19, 21: Each of these is a significant number of percentage points for a primary challenger to an incumbent president! Not nearly enough, of course. President Biden is still earning 60 to 70 percent in all of these polls. Kennedy is not nearly at the point at which Biden and his affiliates would have to consider running ads against him, or for Biden to seriously entertain debating him.
But even if 21 percent ends up as Kennedy’s high-water mark, it does speak to a fundamental problem with Biden’s reelection campaign—a problem that Democrats are still publicly whistling past.
Before we get to that, there are a few reasons why Kennedy is getting some modest traction.
The biggest is that his name is *ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.* and he is the son of one of the most famous Democratic politicians ever. The Kennedy name isn’t quite the golden ticket it used to be—just ask Joe Kennedy III, who is not a senator. But it’s still good enough to spot you a dozen polling points or so.
Kennedy also offers a politics that appeals directly to the small, but existent, left side of the political horseshoe. Once a mainstream Democratic environmentalist, Kennedy has become a far more fringe figure over the past couple of decades. He has been one of the leading figures of the anti-vaccine movement since the 2000s and a proponent of the debunked theory that childhood vaccines cause autism. He was not, to say the least, a fan of the COVID-19 vaccines or mandates, and he accused Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates of teaming up to profit off them. His conspiratorial thinking spreads much further, as he’s also been on a crusade against 5G. In the mainstream, he’s long been cast off as a kook. But kooks have followings too.
It’s not just Kennedy who has a little bit of traction, though. Marianne Williamson, in her second consecutive Democratic primary, is registering in polls as well. In the Fox News survey, Williamson was polling at 9 percent. She was at 8 percent in the Emerson poll.
The main reason these two eccentrics have a surprising primary polling foothold against an incumbent president, then, is because they are the only two warm bodies giving it a go against a president who a supermajority of Americans believe should not run for president again.
An April poll from NBC News (before Biden announced) found that 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, did not believe that Biden should run for a second term. Sixty-nine percent of those who said he should not run cited age as a major or minor reason for the opinion. This was not a one-off. An Associated Press survey in February found that only 37 percent of Democrats felt Biden should run again. In a New York Times poll last summer, 64 percent of Democrats said they wanted another 2024 candidate. The primary reason given is always the same: age, age, age. Biden is 80, certainly doesn’t seem any younger than 80, and—if our understanding of time is correct—is only going to get older as time advances. Democratic voters are telling any pollster who’ll ask them that this is a big concern for them. Democratic politicians are telling any reporter off the record that this is a big concern for them.
The reason Democrats gave up and are basically all Team Biden is that the alternative frightens them more. The alternative would be a messy primary that corners its candidates into unwise ideological commitments and, most likely, ends up with Vice President Kamala Harris winning the nomination. And Democrats feel that Biden, a couple of weeks before his 82nd birthday, has a better chance of defeating Donald Trump in November 2024 than Harris does.
I can’t say I disagree with the calculations here! But Democrats shouldn’t underestimate the amount of work it’s going to take to prove to the country—to its own party’s voters—that Biden has another four grueling years in him. A Kennedy outcast putting up 20 percentage points out of the gate is what we might call a sign of limited confidence in the standard-bearer.
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