As the presidential campaign enters its final phase with the unexpected ascension of Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket to face Republican Donald Trump, it’s easy to forget that there are actually three, not two, candidates with some notable polling in the race. The third is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who having failed to secure a credible shot at winning the Democratic primary against Joe Biden is now running as an independent, hitting around 5% in national polls.
RFK Jr. has the perfect confluence of characteristics to make him an attractive sideshow; for a certain generation nostalgic for the potency of the “Camelot” myth and the Kennedy heyday, he’s an ideal contender. For anti-establishmentarians on either political side — libertarian-leaning conservatives upset that Trump pushed vaccines during COVID or leftists who consider any U.S. military support or intervention an imperialist transgression — he’s the guy who’s going to buck the powers that be. To the conspiracy-minded, he’s the person who’s long fought the good fight against some globalist Big Pharma plot.
These people don’t constitute a plurality in any state, but they’re enough to register in polls. In swing states like Georgia and Nevada that he has no chance of winning, his presence on the ballot could conceivably shift the outcomes. Kennedy won’t win, can’t win, but he seems aware of who benefits most from his insistence on running this campaign anyway.
Kennedy often talks about playing spoiler to both Trump and Biden (who was the presumptive Democratic nominee until about 10 minutes ago), but appeared to agree with Trump that the Republican would win during a phone call between the two last month and expressed interest in joining a Trump administration. At the RNC, Kennedy reportedly said that Trump was “barely even human” and “probably a sociopath,” but that Biden was “more dangerous to the Republic and the planet.”
If he really believes that — on what basis, we can’t even begin to imagine — then he likely hasn’t changed his mind now that the candidate is Biden’s vice president, Harris.