The Kennedy name might conceivably attract some confused Democratic votes.
His spoiler candidacy will obviously be targeted at Biden supporters and intended to siphon them away.
But I'm still cautiously optimistic because:
We already have a well-known guy with the last name "Kennedy" in the Senate: This absolute tool, a Louisiana Republican and all-around douchebag that Democrats universally despise. So name recognition effects may be blunted a bit.
RFK's poll numbers in the Democratic primary as a hypothetical alternative to Biden have stayed consistently 45-50 points below Biden. Most Democrats aren't going to jump ship to a hopeless independent candidacy and cede the race to Trump.
RFK is immensely popular... with deranged wingnuts who still believe the COVID vaccines have microchips in them and are the sign of the Beast. These people weren't gonna vote Biden in the first place, and there might be enough of them in the Republican party for RFK's candidacy to be a Trump spoiler instead.
I'm going to be paying really close attention to see which side he siphons from more, but like I said... I'm cautiously optimistic RFK will have a more damaging effect on Trump than on Biden.
If Trump goes after him hard, I'll take that as confirmation that Trump is worried about that.
That's it! JFK is secretly immortal! He faked his own death and assumed the identity of his son! The real RFK is off investigating pizzeria basements to rescue children on behalf of his father!
Rejoice, Q! Your savior has actually already emerged! Vote RFK to support the true Trump, not the holographic impostor he's been replaced with, and the Great Awakening will arrive with the Storm and... fuck, I can't keep this up.
Single-issue anti-vaxxer voters might trust him more than they trust Trump. (and none of them were going to vote for Biden anyway, so probably at worst a wash for Biden)
Well, the D's know the name of the game is beat Trump, that's how biden got nominated, nobody actually liked him. They'll vote for Biden no matter what just to make sure Trump doesn't win.
The target demographic for this guy are Trump independents, that is, the people that won him the election in the rust belt in 2016, people who lean Democrat but were sick of the politicians and their constant bullshitting. So it's likely RFK is a way to spoil Trump, not the D's.
The people so far left that they gulp down conspiratorial propaganda from Beijing and the Kremlin by the gallon. The good news is that those people were never going to make a rational choice anyway.
It's more the lopsidedness than the numbers themselves that concerns me. It would only take an extraordinarily small difference to hand the election to Trump with how close it was last time and is now. But I'll try to use the optimism from this thread to smother my cynicism for now.
41 percent of Democrats have an at least somewhat favorable view of Kennedy
Yeah, no. I'd guess that only a single-digit % of Democrats - mostly Extremely Online ones - have any idea who he is; this is a survey where they pressed for lukewarm responses from mostly-uninformed voters and then pretended that it actually reflected public opinion in a meaningful way.
These debates are going to be wild. Trump and Kennedy just screaming gibberish at each other while Biden stands between them with the quietly desperate look of a pensioner trying to remember his PIN number at the supermarket checkout.
We need to make this guy the poster child for ranked choice voting. With it he'd only be wasting donor money, not endangering our future as a spoiler candidate.