Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced Monday that he was dropping his bid for the Democratic nomination for president and running as an independent.
He chose Philadelphia as the site of the announcement and framed his candidacy as “a new Declaration of Independence” for “all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful.”
In a speech you can watch for yourself at the candidate’s website, Kennedy24.com, Kennedy said, “Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.”
Back in 2016, the “rigged system” argument for change was made with equal force by Sen. Bernie Sanders and by then-businessman Donald Trump. Supporters packed arenas to hear their speeches, while other candidates struggled to fill five rows of folding chairs. In 2024, will the “rigged system” argument resonate even more?
Kennedy said he intends to become the first independent, non-party candidate elected president since George Washington.
That seems unlikely, but a lot of unlikely things have been happening. So, how likely is it?
A recently released Reuters/Ipsos online poll of 1,005 people found that Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven U.S. voters.” The poll found that without Kennedy on the ballot, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump would each draw the support of 35% of voters, give or take 4 points. About 11% of respondents said they’d vote for somebody else, 9% said they didn’t know who they would vote for, and 9% said they would not vote.
In a three-way race with Kennedy on the ballot, pollsters found that RFK, Jr., would draw 14% of the vote, knocking Biden down to 31% and Trump down to 33%. Once again, 9% said they wouldn’t vote at all, and another 13% said they were undecided.
However, it’s important to remember that the national popular vote is irrelevant. Presidents are elected by electoral votes, which are determined by the election results in each state. How Kennedy’s presence on the ballot changes the vote totals in a few key states could affect the outcome of the election even if he doesn’t win a single electoral vote.
That means the major parties can be expected to take the gloves off and fight bare-knuckled to keep Kennedy off the ballot, or, failing that, to discredit him with whatever negative information they can find or invent.
As both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump said in the 2016 campaign, a rigged system is hard to beat.
Start with ballot access. The Democratic and Republican parties will have their candidate on the general election ballot in all 50 states but that’s not automatic for an independent. Each state has its own rules and deadlines. In some states, it may be necessary to get tens of thousands of signatures on a petition, and there’s not much time to organize that effort.
Another problem for independent candidates is the nasty slant of campaign finance laws. Political parties have a special legal status that allows them to solicit and accept larger contributions than candidates themselves may accept, and the law enables county, state and national political parties to move money around in creative and soapy ways. A candidate without a party is at a financial disadvantage in fundraising.
There is at least one super-PAC raising money to support Kennedy’s campaign. American Values 2024 said it had already raised $17 million before Monday’s announcement and then hauled in $11 million more afterwards. But when you have to buy TV commercials in multiple states for months, it goes fast.
Then there’s the challenge of getting on the stage for the presidential debates. Third parties and independents are not automatically included. In fact, they have been very deliberately excluded. The last independent candidate to appear on the presidential debate stage was Ross Perot in 1992. The Commission on Presidential Debates, dominated by Republicans and Democrats, has protectively fiddled with the criteria for inclusion ever since, even surviving a lawsuit by a nonprofit group called Level the Playing Field, which was joined by the Libertarian and Green parties.
Despite all these challenges, Kennedy has significant, highly unusual advantages that make the race unpredictable.
Start with name recognition. For millions of busy voters who don’t spend their time reading about politics or candidates, the sight of a familiar name on the ballot is welcome and reassuring. How many voters, Democrats in particular, will see Robert F. Kennedy’s name on the ballot and feel that the brand is a good one?
We can already tell it’s a lot of voters by the effort that’s put into twisting Kennedy’s words to try to make him out to be some kind of space cadet.
He is certainly not a space cadet. The candidate is highly intelligent, very knowledgeable and has a surprising sense of humor. He’s making a perfectly reasonable case for the need to clean up corruption in government and corporate capture of federal agencies. He also wants to end “forever wars,” the surveillance state, and the unconstitutional censorship of Americans that has been directed by our government with our tax dollars. Kennedy rightly points out that the Democratic party, which was once against all those things, is now in favor of them.
“Who is liberal now, and who is conservative? Who is left and who is right?” he asked. “These labels make less and less sense. Yet out of habit, we group ourselves around the empty husks of old alignments and threadbare ideologies.”
But not all the husks are empty. Some of them are full of campaign cash and rigging diagrams.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley
