A new poll reaffirms what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – or RFK – predicted prior to announcing his independent bid for the presidency. It shows that he takes significant support from former President Donald Trump. Consequently, President Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by seven points.
A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll shows Biden leading Trump by a 44% to 37% margin. Kennedy received 16% in the poll and 3% were undecided.
Campaign Polling Shows RFK Jr. Hurts Trump
Internal Trump campaign polling found that Kennedy similarly harmed its candidate.
“It’s single digits, but it’s enough where it counts to make a difference,” a person close to the Trump campaign told Semafor.
Semafor noted that a second person familiar with the polling confirmed their description. The source noted that Trump’s people were “anxious” about the role Kennedy could play as a spoiler.
The Trump campaign claims it has a lot of things it can use to paint Kennedy as unhinged and as a weirdo.
“We’re gonna be dropping napalm after napalm on his head reminding the public of his very liberal views, dating back to 2012,” another pro-Trump source told Semafor. “We have a lot of stuff on him.”
Semafor pointed to a Daily Caller story that found that Kennedy had made a hyperbolic comment saying that “factory meat integrators are more threatening to democracy than Osama bin Laden.”
RFK Jr. Does Not Appeal to Biden Voters
Democrats have feared third-party bids since Ralph Nader handed George W. Bush the keys to the White House in 2000.
This time, Kennedy is running against a Democratic electorate that has run so far to the Left that it has left its blue-collar values in the dust. White blue-collar voters have gravitated toward Trump and Kennedy.
“Let me point out a couple of nerdy details. One is that RFK Jr. is relatively popular with people who didn’t vote for a presidential candidate in 2020. That makes sense; his views aren’t particularly well-represented in either party coalition. However, this implies that Kennedy would pull some of his votes from the sidelines of the American electorate rather than from Biden or Trump,” electoral analyst Nate Silver writes in The Free Press. “Note also that Kennedy does worse among 2020 Biden voters than among Democrats. What does this mean, exactly? It means some of Kennedy’s supporters are anti-Biden Democrats. However, crucially, those anti-Biden Democrats mostly voted for Trump in 2020 if they voted at all. This is the best piece of evidence for a Kennedy run helping Biden. He may provide an off-ramp for voters who are fed up with Biden but would also like an excuse to not have to vote for Trump.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
