As we all know, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign last Friday and immediately threw his support behind former President Donald Trump. During his announcement at a Phoenix, Arizona, rally, Kennedy said, “In about 10 battleground states, where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name. And I’ve already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me.”
It was reported earlier this week that, despite Kennedy’s efforts, his name will remain on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin. And on Thursday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted to keep his name on the ballot as well.
Unfortunately, Kennedy’s presence on the ballots in these key swing states is likely to help Vice President Kamala Harris. In the X post below, polling firm Echelon Insights illustrates how that could happen.
Echelon asked survey participants which candidate they would vote for if the election were held today. The possible answers to the first question included Trump, Harris, and all third-party candidates including Kennedy: 47% chose Harris; 45%, Trump; 4%, Kennedy; and the remaining 4% chose other third-party candidates.
The possible answers to the second question included Trump, Harris, and all third-party candidates except for Kennedy: Harris and Trump were tied at 48% and 4% chose third-party candidates. Of the 4% of respondents who selected Kennedy in the first question, one quarter broke for Harris while three quarters broke for Trump.
Kennedy’s presence on the ballot (or the lack thereof) clearly changed the outcome. The race shifted from a 2-point win for Harris to a tied race.
The Washington Post cited a New York Times/Siena College poll released in late July that showed “Kennedy supporters favored Trump over Harris, 50-21, in a head-to-head matchup. (The rest supported neither.)”
In the tweet below, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a memo from Tony Fabrizio, the internal pollster for the Trump campaign, that shows how he expects Kennedy’s share of the vote will be divided between Trump, Harris, and undecided voters in the battleground states.
Each state shows a net advantage for Trump. These range from a paltry 2% in Michigan to a whopping 50% in Nevada. Results for the other states are as follows: Arizona, +25%; Georgia, +13%; North Carolina, +36%; Pennsylvania, +13%; and Wisconsin, +30%.
Fabrizio explains, “To put these numbers into perspective, the net vote gained in a state like Arizona based on just a 2020 turnout model, would be over 41,000 votes [or] nearly 4 times Biden’s winning margin, or in Georgia, the net gain would be 19,000 votes, nearly twice Biden’s margin.”
Fowler gloats over the fact that Kennedy will remain on the ballot in “the states where RFK pulls the most from Trump.”
I suppose I’d gloat too if the situation were reversed.
Naturally, the Washington Post’s political reporter Aaron Blake was pretty pleased about this latest twist in what has become the most surreal presidential election cycle in modern memory. He cited two occasions when independent candidates dropped out of races and still won over 1% of the vote.
In the 2014 Connecticut governor’s race, independent Joe Visconti withdrew two days before Election Day and endorsed the Republican. He was polling between 3 and 8 percent — similar to Kennedy — and ultimately took a little more than 1 percent.In the 2020 U.S. Senate race in South Carolina, Constitution Party nominee Bill Bledsoe dropped out and endorsed Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. But Bledsoe wound up getting 1.3 percent of the vote — after Democrats ran ads elevating his name in hopes of diluting Graham’s support.
Blake finally concedes that “a presidential race will earn gobs more attention, which will reduce the possibility that people will go to the polls thinking Kennedy is still actually a candidate.”
Yeah, I think the Trump campaign will probably have that covered.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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