On the menu today: Before we start, remember we’re asking for your support for the summer webathon — or encouraging you to subscribe, if you aren’t already a subscriber. Over on the Corner, you’ll find my thoughts on the weekend’s short-lived coup in Russia, where one brutal maniac failed to depose another brutal maniac. But today’s newsletter turns to the question of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and just what he wants to do in the 2024 presidential-election cycle. He’s a self-described Democrat who mostly appeals to people who aren’t Democrats. So why is he running a long-shot primary bid against President Biden, and looking ahead to winning a pair of early contests that Biden is effectively conceding, when he’s got all he needs to run a relatively big-time independent campaign for president?
RFK Jr. Should Learn from Bernie Sanders
Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. want to be a footnote in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary? Or does he want to win millions of votes and be a major player in the outcome of the upcoming presidential election? If it’s the latter, he ought to seriously consider withdrawing from a race in which he will never overtake the incumbent Joe Biden, and running as an independent instead.
Keep in mind, I’m about as far from a fan of RFK Jr. as you can get. He’s a pied piper of conspiracy theories, and thoroughly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs; American politics has way more than enough crazy people, statements, and behavior as is.
But there’s something odd about Kennedy choosing to run for president as a Democrat, when his most natural bases of support are largely outside of the Democratic Party. If you’re going to run for president, run for president. Don’t settle for a couple of good headlines and wins in rogue primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire that Biden has effectively conceded before they started. Shortly thereafter, the real primaries will begin, and even in his current unpopular state, Biden is on pace to rack up wins of 40 to 60 percentage points in those primary contests.
Once South Carolina, Nevada, and other states start holding non-rogue primaries, Biden will be on a path to win the nomination comfortably, and the media interest in Kennedy will wane. Kennedy victories in Iowa and New Hampshire will be dismissed as irrelevant oddities caused by Biden’s refusal to compete in primaries that violated the scheduling rules of the Democratic National Committee.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking the average cycle-in, cycle-out Democratic primary voter is interested in voting for Kennedy. His signature issue is opposition to vaccines, and Biden’s signature accomplishment is the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines. Generally speaking, Democrats are big fans of the Covid vaccines and have faith in the CDC. In a political environment where just half of Democrats think Biden should run again, only 8 to 17 percent of Democrats are currently supporting Kennedy.
Even if RFK Jr. starts hitting 25 percent in the polls, or even 35 percent, the Democratic Party is not going to reward him with any consolation prize. They won’t allow any primary debates with Biden. Kennedy won’t be allowed any primary debates with Biden. He won’t get a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next August. He won’t get a cabinet position or any position at all in a Biden or Harris administration.
In that light, what does Kennedy owe the Democratic Party?
Kennedy fans, we’ve seen this movie before. Ask Bernie Sanders fans how the Democratic Party treated him and his supporters in 2016. Figures such as Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile agreed afterwards that the primary that year was “rigged” in favor of Hillary Clinton.
RFK Jr. is attracting support from a decent number of people who aren’t Democrats, registered or otherwise. In the last national Quinnipiac poll, 40 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents, and 25 percent of Democrats felt favorably about him. (Perhaps he is running in the wrong primary.) In that survey, he was the presidential choice of just 17 percent of all Democrats, but 25 percent of self-identified conservative or moderate Democrats. Focus groups of swing voters who voted for Biden last time reveal some curiosity about Kennedy.
And Kennedy has a vocal fanbase on the right in figures such as Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones. These figures and other RFK Jr.-curious Republicans are, at least for now, much more likely to vote for Trump in the concurrent 2024 Republican presidential primaries than to vote for Kennedy in the Democratic primaries.
(By the way, if you run around declaring that you would vote for “RFK Jr. over a bunch of neo-conservative and moderate Republican candidates,” then you are quite literally a Republican in Name Only, and should never use the term “RINO” against anyone else ever again. It is also fair to wonder if you should be running a self-described Republican organization.)
As of this writing, roughly half the presidential primaries are classified as “closed” or “semi-closed,” meaning either only registered Democrats may vote in the primary, or only registered Democrats and those not affiliated with another party can vote in the primary. Right now, Kennedy is choosing to compete in a selection process where many of his biggest supporters won’t be able to cast a ballot for him.
A solid majority of Democrats are not interested in buying what Kennedy is selling, and the Democratic Party establishment will pull out all the stops to marginalize him. (The New York Times laments that Kennedy hangs around with Elon Musk and “pushes right-wing ideas.”) Would Kennedy prefer to win two early primaries that will be dismissed as fake victories, or would he rather win millions of votes in November, and perhaps play spoiler?
For those who are thinking Kennedy should run as an independent after losing the Democratic primary, keep in mind, he would forfeit the ability to run in six states that have “sore loser” laws barring scenarios such as this — Arkansas, Alabama, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. That scenario would ensure Kennedy received zero votes in six states with roughly 36.6 million registered voters. There are some who argue that sore-loser laws cannot and should not apply to presidential campaigns, but that would require lengthy legal battles to sort out.
Kennedy says he’s running as a Democrat because he sees himself as a Democrat, and that he hasn’t changed, it’s the Democratic Party that has changed. But even by his own description, he doesn’t really fit in that party anymore. Kennedy laments that “the Biden administration is riddled with Neocons, war hawks, Wall Street people, and former corporate lobbyists. That’s what the party elite has become.” But the average Democrat has no serious objection to this; 79 percent of Democrats approve of the job Biden is doing. Kennedy is waiting for the Democratic rank-and-file to rise up and depose the party’s elites — a similar bet to the ones Bernie Sanders made in 2016 and 2020. Kennedy’s on course to get a result similar to Sanders’s.
Kennedy would be better off in the long run withdrawing from a Democratic primary he will never win than running a repeat of Sanders’s doomed bid against Clinton. Instead, he should run as an independent in as many states as possible, enabling lots of independents and curious Republicans to vote for him in November and giving the 69-year-old a chance to build a lasting political movement.
Note that RFK Jr. does not fit any traditional definition of conservative. He supports abortion and opposes fracking. Kennedy now says he opposes gun control, but in 2018, he stated, “Parkland students are right; the NRA is a terror group.” He wanted to ban ExxonMobil from operating in New York state because he contended that it misled the public about climate change. He has called for the Koch brothers to be tried at the Hague as war criminals, and said he wished there was a law that would allow him to punish climate-change skepticism. He argued that state attorneys general should revoke the charters of the American Enterprise Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute because they were “oil industry surrogates.” He now wishes for voters to see him as a defender of the First Amendment.
In other words, Kennedy is an unhinged hard-left loon who, given the opportunity, would use the power of the state to punish people who think differently from him.
If Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination, would an independent bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hurt his chances in the general election? Trump would probably scoff at the notion that he risks losing a chunk of his support to a member of the Kennedy family. If Kennedy did emerge as a threat to Trump’s support, that would be further evidence that Trump’s appeal has next to nothing to do with his positions on issues, because Trump and Kennedy disagree on so many policy matters. It would be a sign that a portion of Trump’s base is looking for, as Representative Thomas Massie famously put it, “the craziest son of a b**** in the race.” Trump fans who object to an independent bid by Kennedy would be effectively conceding that they are entitled to the votes of the conspiracy theorist.
Those of us who are not fans of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ought to be thankful that he is willing to settle for being a quickly forgotten afterthought in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary. If he chose to run as an independent, he would likely collect enough signatures to appear on a lot of ballots in a lot of states — and who knows where his political ambitions would go from there.
The Titanic Submersible
You know why everybody’s going to be talking about the tragedy of the Titan submersible for a while? Because very few of us could ever afford to take the trip, a lot of us would be frightened to take it even in a state-of-the-art submersible with all kinds of safety features, a lot of us aren’t sure we’d want to take any risk to gaze upon a mass grave, and in light of last week’s disaster, all of those conditions and impulses look pretty wise right now. And I’d like to think most of us, upon seeing that the whole thing was operated by a video-game controller, would say, “Nope, that’s it, I’m out of here, I can almost see the duct tape on this thing!”
We feel sad for those who died, but feel a little better about our own circumstances and judgment after hearing about a tragedy like this.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Noah Rothman and Dominic Pino for filling in for me last week. During last week’s vacation, I found myself writing up items for the Corner on the claim that the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist who began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 in November 2019 died after falling from the building’s roof, Biden’s blasé attitude toward the growing military cooperation between China and Cuba, and why not even Democrats should trust Adam Schiff anymore.