RFK Jr. continues to poll shockingly well for a third-party candidate. He’s in the high single digits or low double digits.
Those are really good numbers for a third-party candidate at this point in time.
Here’s the question: Who is he pulling from: Trump or Biden?
The assumption was that he was pulling from both in equal measure, but now, he has picked a clearly leftist vice presidential candidate: Nicole Shanahan.
That means RFK Jr. is going to be running directly into the Biden campaign apparatus. He’s going to be drawing Democratic votes to himself. That is a genuine threat to Biden. There are a lot of people who are looking at Biden and saying, “I don’t like what I’m seeing here. Maybe RFK Jr. is the moderate. Maybe he’s the ‘not-Biden’ vote.”
The Washington Post published a piece covering Shanahan and Kennedy’s announcement, writing:
In making the announcement, Kennedy said he was looking for someone who shared his “passion for wholesome, healthy foods, chemical-free for regenerative agriculture, for good soils.” He said he was also looking for someone who has a “deep inside knowledge of how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public,” and someone with “strong ideas about how to reverse dire threats to democracy and our freedoms.”
Kennedy said that Shanahan, like him, grew disillusioned with the government and the Democratic Party.
“Our values didn’t change, but the Democratic Party did,” he said.
She also happens to be a big donor to Kennedy’s campaign. She gave about $4 million to pay for the commercial that American Values 2024 ran for Kennedy during the Super Bowl, which was actually quite a clever commercial, calling on the legacy of JFK in order to promote RFK Jr.
When she addressed the crowd on Tuesday, she said it was RFK Jr.’s “commitment to peace and to the welfare of the hardworking people in America that drew me as a person of compassion to his candidacy.”
She’s pretty hippie-dippy, but that’s going to carve into Biden.
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Even RFK Jr.’s sister, Rory Kennedy, worried openly that her brother would take votes away from Biden so Trump would win.
General rule of politics: Whichever candidate is complaining about the third-party candidate is losing. If you’re the one complaining about the third-party candidate, it means you are losing.
What’s amazing for Biden is that all of this would have been perfectly preventable if he had not steered directly toward his hard left, if he had not moved toward Bernie Sanders.
And yet, he continues to steer to his left. His advisers seem to believe if he doesn’t, he is going to lose the election. Joe Biden, like the rest of the Democratic Party, has bought into the 2012 Barack Obama myth that you can steer directly to your left, cobble together a coalition of dispossessed minorities and white college-educated liberal women and win an overwhelming victory despite losing independents.
It didn’t work for Democrats in 2016. It only worked in 2020 because they changed all the voting rules and two-thirds of Democrats voted early by mail.
It isn’t going to work in 2024 either, but Democrats continue to steer in that direction.