RFK Jr. and the Political Math of 2024

Consider the third-party presidential campaign. Noble at the best of times, unfluoridated and screw headed at the worst, it is always thuddingly, implacably doomed. Anyone betting at home on “Existential Peril: The Horse Race” understands probability and money enough to know who the losers are. 

Still, you might recognize the names: Jill Stein of the Green Party, Dean Phillips (D-Personal Wealth), and the two independents, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Cornel West. The No Labels Party may or may not run someone, but if they do, that person will be a charmless fraud who confirms that the party was named to deflect attention from what they are — Republicans. 

There will be stories about these candidacies, here and there, because you can sell only so many papers with updates on an election nine months away that boils down to a coin flip where tails kills you. 

Our legacy media eschews even committing to that last bit. Because describing Donald Trump as an authoritarian — who promises existential war on transgender Americans, the end of the regulatory state and a 200,000-strong force tasked with scouring noncompliant blue states of “undesirables” — has a way of dissipating the reality-show buzz of “will he, or will he?” horserace coverage. Stating these things plainly would also require explaining why they are bad for democracy and human rights. For many Beltway journalists, the sun still can’t shine until The Sun Doesn’t Exist Party acknowledges it’s up there. Better to launder the choice on offer — between a heavily but legally restricted border and a militarized campaign of ethnic cleansing — with endless observational riffs on how “Biden appears weak” and “Trump appears assured,” flushed through the moral toilet of “does it poll well?”

Whether we start running cattle trains full of people to the southern border is consequential enough to take seriously a recent Reason study of 19 polls showing that third-party candidates are more likely to eat into Biden’s percentages than Trump’s. But if the data merits a brief internal shriek, it also warrants a sober appraisal. Leaving aside the fact that Trump is reliably underperforming against his polling, the polls don’t tell us much. Faced with the certainty of Joe Biden as the eventual Democratic candidate, many of the Democrats claiming allegiance to other candidates are likely voicing their displeasure during the designated part of the electoral cycle when they can safely do that — the primary. Many will come home to the party in November, if not before. Most of the rest were never the Democrats’ to lose. They aren’t going to vote for the Greens or West because they somehow never noticed the existence of the Democratic Party. It will be because they know exactly what the Democratic Party is. 

But, sometimes there’s a man, and it is enough that he is not a party. He appears in the political imagination as a fresh-faced candidate, but freighted with associations and symbolism that identify him as something bigger than himself before he opens his mouth. “RFK” is a trio of letters that precedes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an organism, a celebrity that can trump most everything else, buoying a candidacy otherwise adrift on an ocean of ideologically incoherent narcissism. Which won in 2016, if you’ll recall.

It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but a decent way to get a read on a candidate’s bearings heading into a campaign is to look at media recent clips from just before their announcement. In this case, 2022 headlines like “RFK Jr. apologizes for widely condemned Anne Frank comment” did not bode well; nor did the articles that followed, such as the Politico piece that ended by noting, “In his Tuesday apology, Kennedy did not address his past invocations of Nazis, Hitler and the Holocaust when discussing vaccines.” For many voters encountering him for the first time as a political figure instead of a kind of nostalgic collectible for American tragedy, RFK’s tendency to say things on the Tacky-to-Vile spectrum didn’t suggest a brave independence of mind so much as a roving “check out these severed doll heads in my shopping cart” mania in search of its next fixation. He might have been gearing up for a campaign all along, but he gave off the same effect as any of the multitudes of middle-aged men whose brains exploded into a multitude of errant social-media grievances by pandemic lockdowns.

As of this writing, the RFK campaign is on its third cycle of “remember the RFK campaign?”-style press coverage. It is also entering its most ominous phase: burning money. His early momentum as a potential Democratic saboteur was sapped by growing awareness that his biggest donors are Republicans and by his praise of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. He managed to get the attention of some Black voters — Black Trump voters, specifically — but he couldn’t bring himself to condemn his daddy’s Justice Department signing off on the warrantless wiretapping of MLK. Still, he did  ‘Charlemagne the Great’s [sic]‘ podcast.

Despite ostensibly running a populist campaign and citing growing wealth inequality, his social safety net programs amount to Democratic boilerplate (increase the minimum wage), things Biden is already doing (alleviating student debt, ‘stopping illegal immigration‘), funding them through the magic of ending foreign wars. To the extent that he talks about free-market capitalism, he sounds like a Libertarian: The fault lies not with the free market but with those of us who’ve failed it. It’s not only “the best system,” but if we had “true, free markets,” we could force companies to pay for their own environmental cleanup. No word on whether the predatory private health insurance cartel is worth combating: Medicare for All is not an option, and what’s really wrong with public health in the United States is vaccines. Maybe stuffing the FDA, CDC and NIH with like-minded officials to combat the scourge of vaccination and studying if antidepressants cause school shootings will make other prescription drugs affordable. And maybe burning a New York Jets jersey can stop Patrick Mahomes in the postseason. It’s too early to tell. 

One might wonder who — not just Democrats, but people in general — wants any of this. Beyond “himself,” it is tough to imagine the type of voter a candidate like RFK Jr. is for. His most enduring plank seems to be that tech censorship is worse than the events of Jan. 6. His complaints that you can’’t go on social media to spread dangerously false data about vaccines are not matched by complaints about conservative censorship of school libraries and college curricula, or any basic awareness that voluble supporters like Elon “Hitler was right” Musk and (Musk echo) David Sacks are owners and investors in the same tech platforms he’s castigating, or that both seem unperturbed when wealthy people — including himself — attempt to do censorship. 

RFK didn’t have to make these choices. Up until voters in the Michigan Democratic primary made it clear that it was their idea and sapped him of any feint at a profile in courage, he could have carved out space to the left of Biden by campaigning against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But while he’s broken from the party on Ukraine, his policy on Israel is a rancid gumbo of the last 30 years of hawkish Beltway Zionist thinkspeak. Where his immigration policy isn’t “???,” you’d be hard-pressed to find something like a third alternative. “Seal the border permanently”” creates a little daylight between him and Biden, but saying it while sucking up to the Hitler Was Right guy and supporting Greg Abbott’s implied 50-state war against federal border policy leaves almost nothing at all between him and Trump. It’s a miracle he hasn’t signed onto interstate ethnic cleansing.

Apart from maybe Gabby Giffords, RFK Jr. is the rare American political figure for whom gun control would have been a gimme, but he wants none of it. What he does want to do is destroy the U.S. public health system, spend three hours talking to Joe Rogan about how 5G causes “leaky brain,” and write books that even a reviewer from the Claremont Institute — America’s home for fascism with elbow patches — dismissed as “of very little use to future historians, except as an example of the strain of extreme paranoia that is an ineradicable…part of human nature in response to a crisis.” 

The nicest thing you can say about Kennedy is that he’s a committed environmentalist. Rebecca Traister’s more or less definitive profile of the man is right to credit him for helping claw the Hudson River back from its course toward becoming the new Cuyahoga. But his solutions to climate change were too little too late 10 years ago, and the mechanisms driving those solutions are the same free market forces that have only been accelerating it. Never mind that he’s happy taking funding and free advertising from crypto and AI creeps who have invented two valueless thought experiments optimized for devouring energy and water.

But that’s only all our futures, so you know, no biggie. In the now, however, there is Donald Trump. And while it seems lazy by now to point to Donald Trump and say, “But Donald Trump,” but, Donald Trump. While his potency as an electoral force may be oversold, what he represents — relentless stupidity and corruption, oligarchy, environmental depredation, eliminationism of ethnic groups and people the GOP considers sexually deviant, all abetted by a party and base committed to a gold-plated QVC version of Ian Kershaw’s “working toward the Führer” or Timothy Snyder’s “obeying in advance” — is unmistakable.

Hitherto, third-party candidates have excused their futility beneath the immutability of the duopoly. That the status quo seemed unerringly bound to its perpetuation, an immortal goliath, ennobled the act of hurling stones against it. Acting under the presumption that we still share that status quo is like fighting the next war on the terms of the last, a Maginot Line of the mind, and as was the case with that fortification, our current Nazis will just drive around it and take what they want. If Trump wins, it may be the last election where the levers of government are allowed to be pulled by more than one set of hands. 

Thankfully, Donald Trump will remind voters who he is, and he will make everything, as he always has, about him. He cannot help it. As November nears, his relentless selfness, combined with even the most perfunctory calls from the Democratic Party to defend democracy, will make even the lowest-information voters understand that this election is a referendum. That this is about that man. That, yes, maybe the Democratic Party’s idea of a feast is Pizza Hut delivery 65 minutes after you placed your order, but at least it doesn’t involve the delivery guy showing up empty handed, burning your house to the ground and giving a medal to the cop who headshots your kid when he tries to hose down the building.