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The good news for President Biden’s just-launched 2024 reelection bid is that, for now, it doesn’t appear as though it will include a serious primary challenger. The bad news is that he’s ceding a significant and potentially embarrassing chunk of voters to an anti-vaccine activist.
Multiple recent polls show Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulling double-digit support in the primary, including a Fox News survey Wednesday that showed him at 19 percent.
That network has frequently covered Kennedy’s campaign and interviewed him more than once over the past week or so, as certain Republicans have made clear they see utility in elevating Kennedy to undercut Biden.
How much might the candidacy actually undercut Biden? It’s probably worth not overselling the early polls, for a few reasons.
The National Review this week published an article suggesting that such a double-digit performance from Kennedy could prove costly for Biden. No incumbent president in the past 50 years has ceded that much of the vote to a primary challenger and won reelection, it noted.
That’s technically true, but it ignores a whole lot of nuance.
The first point is that we’re talking about a small sample size. There have been only three such instances, all more than 30 years ago: Ronald Reagan’s 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford, Ted Kennedy’s 1980 challenge to Jimmy Carter, and Pat Buchanan’s 1992 challenge to George H.W. Bush.
But each of those primary challenges was also more significant than even the early polls suggest Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s is. Reagan took nearly half of primary votes in 1976, Ted Kennedy took more than one-third, and Buchanan won a surprising 37 percent of the vote in the 1992 New Hampshire primary and about one-quarter overall. In the first two cases in particular, there was genuine concern about the incumbent losing the nomination, not just losing a somewhat embarrassing number of votes.
The next point is that, in case you hadn’t noticed, one of those previous primary challengers shared a last name with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The latest Kennedy is Ted’s and John F. Kennedy’s nephew and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s son.
There’s plenty of reason to believe his early poll standing is significantly inflated by his famous name.
A few weeks ago, another poll on Kennedy caught my eye. It was from YouGov, and it tested his image alongside a dozen other political figures. Of the 13 tested including Biden, Trump and congressional leaders, who was the most popular? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nearly half of Americans had a favorable view of him (48 percent), compared to just 28 percent unfavorable.
Is this because Kennedy is actually that popular? Of course not. It’s doubtful many people really know all that much about him.
But there is probably no name in American politics that is more golden, particularly among left-leaning Americans. A Gallup poll last decade found more Americans thought John F. Kennedy was a good president (74 percent) than any other modern president.
When you layer on top of that the fact that half of Democrats don’t even want Biden to run, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a fair number of people who haven’t really considered the 2024 race might go for a name they know.
We should all be skeptical that this will hold, particularly given Kennedy is best-known for his dubiously founded vaccine skepticism and that Democrats are increasingly the party of vaccines. That doesn’t mean losing voters to such a fringe figure isn’t a headache for Biden, and perhaps some voters might like Kennedy’s environmental activism. But the idea that Kennedy will approach even a Buchanan level of support seems unlikely, the early polls notwithstanding.
More likely, it seems, is that this might be a situation akin to 1996. Then, as today, many Democrats didn’t want Bill Clinton to run again, and fringe figure Lyndon LaRouche managed to pull double digits in some primary states. A Chicago woman who reportedly believed that God told her to spend a $120,000 disability settlement to run for president took 11 percent in Oklahoma. (Clinton went on to win reelection easily despite this.)
We’ve actually seen very recently how this precise name can translate into a sugar high in the polls.
The 2017 Alabama U.S. Senate special election featured a candidate by the name of Robert Kennedy Jr. (no actual relation this time). And a late Democratic primary poll showed him with a shocking share of the vote: 49 percent. That was more than 20 points ahead of the national party’s favored candidate, Doug Jones, despite Kennedy not seeming to have run an actual campaign.
“I understand that my name will give me some points,” that Robert Kennedy Jr. said when the poll came out. “But to suggest that my name in that particular poll gave me 49 points is disrespectful to the voters.”
Three weeks later, he received 18 percent of the vote, losing to Jones by nearly 50 points.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/27/robert-kennedy-jr-democratic-primary/