Biden Is Not Immune to RFK Jr.

I n accordance with its primary purpose, which is to ensure that the Democratic politicians whom it favors are successfully elected to public office, the American press corps has thus far underplayed the threat that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poses to President Biden’s bid for a second term.

Coverage of RFK Jr.’s bid has been focused predominantly on the question of whether a challenger is likely to succeed per se — that is, on the question of whether RFK Jr. will achieve his goal of unseating President Biden as the Democratic nominee. As most observers have noted, the answer to this question is an emphatic no. Not since 1856 has a sitting president sought and lost his party’s nomination for reelection. Absent an unthinkable cataclysm, this cycle is not going to break that trend.

As a historical matter, however, this is the wrong question to ask. A better question to ask — a question that Joe Biden ought to be asking himself daily — is whether RFK Jr. will end up doing so much damage to Biden that he will help to deny Biden a second term. It remains the case that at no point in the last 50 years has being seriously challenged for the nomination worked out well for an incumbent president. And, at the moment, RFK Jr.’s challenge is, indeed, serious. The first poll taken since he announced showed him taking 14 percent of the Democratic primary vote — an astonishingly high number for a newly declared candidate. Should this level of support persist, it might well prove lethal. No president in the past half-century has won reelection after surviving a primary challenger who got into the double digits. Is there anything about the 80-year-old Joe Biden that makes one think he’d buck that trend?

Since 1973, the rule has been hard and fast. Barack Obama (whose challenger got 1.7 percent of the vote), George W. Bush (whose challenger got 0.1 percent), Bill Clinton (whose challenger got 5.5 percent), and Ronald Reagan (whose challenger got 0.19 percent) did not have double-digit opponents, and they all won reelection. Gerald Ford (whose challenger got 45.9 percent of the primary vote), Jimmy Carter (whose challenger got 37.6 percent), and George H. W. Bush (whose challenger got 23 percent) all had double-digit opponents, and they all lost.

One can grasp fairly easily why this is. By their nature, challengers scramble the narrative. One expects members of the opposing party to explain that the incumbent is doing a rotten job; they have to say that, even if it’s not true. But the people on the same team? Well, then there must be something to it. The “Why?” matters, too. Ronald Reagan’s case against Gerald Ford was that he was insufficiently conservative, that he was weak on foreign policy, and that he had not been elected in the first instance. Pat Buchanan’s case against George H. W. Bush was that he had broken his promises on taxes and had lost touch with the Reagan coalition that had put him in office by default in 1988. As for Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign against Jimmy Carter? That made pretty much the same core critiques as were being made by Carter’s Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan. So potent was Kennedy’s case, in fact, that it was used to great effect during the general election. In the summer of 1980, American voters were treated to nine different commercials in favor of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy, and one of those nine — more than ten percent of the total! — featured Kennedy standing at a podium and making his case against the incumbent. “No more American hostages! No more high interest rates! No more high inflation! And no more Jimmy Carter!” Kennedy shouts, before a voice says, “The time is now for strong leadership. Reagan for president.”

Perhaps our politics have changed since then. Perhaps we are more ideological and more partisan and more disciplined in our voting habits. Perhaps RFK Jr. will enjoy a momentary honeymoon and then disappear into the ether. Or perhaps he will not. Notwithstanding that the Republican Party seems determined to destroy itself, Joe Biden remains an extremely weak candidate whose sole compelling argument for reelection is that he isn’t Donald Trump. Biden inspires nobody, represents nobody, stands for absolutely nothing, and is identified with nothing positive. He is widely regarded as AWOL on the key issues of the day, he’s considered too old to be president  by a supermajority of voters, and seven out of ten Americans do not want him to run again. RFK Jr. is a preposterous weirdo, and he will never be the Democratic nominee. But if he can convince just 15 or 20 percent of the primary electorate that Biden should be replaced, he may end up doing a great deal of harm to the president’s fortunes. There comes a point in every serious primary challenge at which the aspirant begins to believe that all that stands between him and the White House is his willingness to stick in the knife. Should he reach that point, RFK Jr. will happily learn Brutus’s lines — and, once he does and he inevitably loses, he will have foreclosed the possibility of transforming himself into a man who wishes to praise Biden rather than to bury him.