RFK, Jr.'s Endorsement Will Amount to Little for Donald Trump
RFK, Jr.'s Endorsement Will Amount to Little for Donald Trump
Independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has dropped out of the 2024 presidential election and endorsed Donald Trump
I do not believe that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. dropping out of the presidential election and endorsing Donald Trump will have a measurable benefit to Trump’s campaign, though it obviously will not hurt him. I think that Trump will gain more votes than he otherwise would have, especially in critical battleground states where Kennedy has said he will remove his name from the ballot, but I don’t see any state in particular with a mass of Kennedy voters to begin with. More importantly, I don’t believe that Kennedy’s voters will simply turn around and vote for Trump in any meaningful numbers simply because Kennedy asked them to.
While I am not myself an RFK voter, his position on Israel was a dealbreaker for me if nothing else, I am the type of person who would vote for an independent candidate with no actual chance to win over a major party candidate if I supported that candidate’s positions. People who always vote Democrat or always vote Republican tend to not understand the mindset of someone who votes the way I and Kennedy voters tend to vote, and may be inclined to believe that simply by having RFK endorse Donald Trump that his voters will largely get behind Trump as well because that’s what they would do in that circumstance. You can see this in action with Biden voters now backing Vice President Kamala Harris and with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley voters now supporting Donald Trump.
That is not how we generally think, however. In 2008 and 2012 I supported Ron Paul in the Republican Party primaries, and there was never any question that I would ever vote for John McCain or Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican nominees in those elections. Ron Paul did not endorse either McCain or Romney for president, and if he had it would have made me think worse of Ron Paul and not better of either McCain or Romney. I suspect there’s a similar mindset with many if not most of RFK’s supporters. So while I expect Donald Trump to get some of RFK’s voters, which is a net positive, I don’t think he will get enough of them to make any difference. If these people were just going to turn around and vote for Trump anyway then they probably would have been supporting him all along even if not enthusiastically. There is a reason they were backing a candidate with absolutely no chance to win a single state let alone the election over Donald Trump, and I don’t see any reason to believe that RFK’s endorsement will change that to any great degree.