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Nate Silver: Why RFK Jr. Probably Doesn’t Hurt Biden Nate Silver

Published

10 months ago

October 4, 2023

In many ways, RFK Jr. has more in common with Trump than Biden. (Philip Cheung for The Free Press)

It’s been an interesting experience getting my feet wet on Substack. The platform really does seem to attract a more politically diverse audience than my old stomping grounds at FiveThirtyEight. And I’m sure that will be even truer for this story, which is being co-published at Silver Bulletin and The Free Press.

I’m sure I won’t agree with every Free Press reader on everything, and vice versa. (The same is true at Silver Bulletin, frankly.) But one thing I do share with readers of both is a skepticism of mainstream media narratives. Although campaign coverage is much improved from the Boys on the Bus days of a generation ago, politics still begets its share of evidence-free groupthink.

Today’s case in point: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inching closer to a third-party bid. Media coverage has focused on the downside risks for Democrats. A recent New York Times story, for instance, is full of fretting Biden backers:

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, has been helping coordinate Democratic efforts to stop the No Labels [third party] effort. He said the hope in the party has been that Mr. Kennedy would “go away” after losing primaries to Mr. Biden.

“It would be very bad” if Mr. Kennedy runs as a Libertarian, Mr. Bennett said. “We’ve been very clear that third parties in close elections can be very dangerous and would almost certainly hurt the president. That would be true of a No Labels candidate and it would be true of RFK.”

Bennett is overconfident when he says a Kennedy run would “almost certainly” hurt President Biden. I think the evidence is much less clear, and if anything points the other way: toward a Kennedy bid being helpful on balance for Biden.

Maybe Bennett is an overconfident guy in general. “Joe Biden will beat Trump or another GOP nominee in a head-to-head contest,” he wrote in a July 20 email advertising a Third Way strategy briefing. Although it’s too soon to take the polls all that seriously, that’s a strong claim to make about a guy who is struggling as much as Biden has been recently.

There’s a Lot of Mythology About Third-Party Bids

Democrats are primarily skittish about third-party candidates because of two elections, 2000 and 2016. In 2000, Ralph Nader received 1.6 percent of the vote in Florida and 2.7 percent nationally, and probably did cost Al Gore the presidency. But that is mostly just because the election was so close—determined by only 537 votes in Florida. A fair number of Nader voters actually had Bush as their second choice.

Meanwhile, although the 2016 election was also close—coming down essentially to 80,000 votes between three states—the presence of third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein probably did not change the outcome. Stein received only about 1 percent of the vote nationally, and based on survey data, many of her voters would have sat out the race if they hadn’t voted for her. The same survey found that a plurality of Johnson’s voters would have broken for Trump.

Nervous Democrats might also point to 1992. George H. W. Bush wasn’t a Democrat, but like Biden, he was an incumbent who voters were unhappy with for his handling of the economy. In that race, Texas billionaire Ross Perot received 18.9 percent of the vote. However, a strong scholarly consensus holds that Perot did not cost Bush the election. Bill Clinton’s margin of victory over Bush was fairly wide, and analysis of exit polls suggest that Perot took more votes from Clinton than Bush, if anything.

Having looked at data on dozens of third-party candidates in other races (mostly for offices like Congress and governor) when building election models, I’m skeptical that they serve as spoilers as often as their critics claim. Third-party support tends to collapse down the stretch if the candidates aren’t seen as viable. Johnson, for instance, polled as high as 10 percent in polling averages early in the 2016 race before falling to 5 percent in the final polling averages and then getting only 3.3 percent on Election Day.

Third-party candidates typically also get less support in swing states, where voters know a protest vote could be more costly.

Polls Show Trump Supporters Think More Favorably of Kennedy

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Kennedy does prove to be a factor in 2024. Why the widespread assumption that Biden has more to lose than Trump? As my former FiveThirtyEight colleague Nathaniel Rakich has pointed out, polls fairly consistently show Kennedy with stronger favorable ratings among Republicans than Democrats:

Source: FiveThirtyEight

These trends have grown over time as voters have gotten to know Kennedy better, seen how he’s opposed Biden, and come to realize that a lot of Kennedy’s policy positions are actually pretty conservative.

You might also note that there’s quite a bit of variation in Kennedy’s ratings from poll to poll. I have a couple of theories about this: one is that it may depend in part on how polls define who’s a Democrat. Some Kennedy supporters may be lapsed “Democrats in Name Only” who are no longer on board with the current aims of the party. For instance, voters who share Kennedy’s skepticism about vaccines once had more of a home on the left than they now do.

Voters may also differ in their views of Kennedy depending on their level of political knowledge. A voter who hasn’t yet thought much about the campaign might assume from the Kennedy name that RFK Jr. is a standard liberal Democrat, or maybe even a leftist one like his campaign manager Dennis Kucinich. Someone who watches more political news, conversely, might know that some of Kennedy’s positions are heterodox if not outright conservative. Polls of likely voters will capture a more knowledgeable set of voters than polls of all adults.

The July poll from The New York Times and Siena College provides some helpful hints on where Kennedy’s support comes from and exactly how it divides along partisan lines:

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.

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.

The effects of third-party candidates are hard to predict, but Biden could benefit from an RFK Jr. run. (Photo by Celal Gunes / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

RFK Jr.’s Issue Positions Aren’t a Good Fit for the Normie Dem Suburbs

The New York Times/Siena poll also finds that Kennedy—like Trump—does better with voters who did not go to college. That may be because he diverges from Democrats on a series of issues that are cultural touchstones for college-educated progressives:

Kennedy has consistently advanced vaccine-skeptical positions, and this is a well-known part of his public record. Post-Covid, there is a huge partisan split in views of vaccines, and this puts Kennedy on the opposite side of the issue from most Democrats.

Kennedy appeared to endorse a national abortion ban after 15 weeks. He later backed off that position, but there is video of the statement and both the question and answer are relatively clear. Considering how important the Dobbs decision was to Democrats’ overperformance at the midterms, you can be certain that clips like these will be in constant rotation in ads paid for by Democratic groups.

Kennedy has been skeptical of U.S. efforts in Ukraine. Voters generally do not vote on foreign policy, but this is yet another touchstone issue for college-educated liberals; think of all those Ukraine flags in Twitter bios.

Finally, Kennedy has said he doesn’t think it’s realistic to reduce gun violence, that he’s “not going to take people’s guns away,” and that the issue has been “settled” by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Guns, abortion, vaccines, and Ukraine are quite a quartet of issues to defect from the Democratic Party on, particularly from the suburban, college-educated base that Biden and other Democrats have increasingly come to rely upon.

Kennedy has other similarities to Trump. He may not have reached the same level of celebrity as Trump, but he has appeared on his share of magazine covers. And like Trump, he has sometimes endorsed conspiracy theories. I’m sensitive to complaints that what gets labeled a “conspiracy”—just like what gets labeled as “misinformation”—is a subjective question. But Kennedy has expressed a number of views, like on the link between vaccines and autism, that are outside of the scientific consensus. He has also claimed that Covid vaccines are “ethnically targeted” in claims that were denounced by the Anti-Defamation League. Like Trump, Kennedy has even claimed that a presidential election was stolen—only in Kennedy’s case, it was the 2004 election, which he baselessly said was stolen from John Kerry.

Still, Kennedy’s Effects Are Hard to Predict

Now that I’ve explained why I think Kennedy is more likely than not to help Biden, let’s acknowledge some counterarguments.

First, it’s been pointed out that some of Kennedy’s biggest backers are Republican megadonors, who presumably don’t have Biden’s best interests in mind and see Kennedy as a thorn in the president’s side. My general view, as someone who’s spoken with more billionaires than you might think (they come up a lot in the new book I’m working on), is that wealthy megadonors tend to have poor political instincts. Nor is there going to be any shortage of anti-Biden messaging whether or not Kennedy runs. Still, the notion that Biden is being “attacked from all sides” could be harmful to the president.

An argument I find more persuasive is that Trump has a higher floor but lower ceiling on his support than Biden does. In the most recent YouGov polling, for instance, 25 percent of registered voters have a very favorable view of Trump, and 51 percent have a very strongly unfavorable one. Biden views are a pinch less polarized (21 percent very favorable; 44 percent very unfavorable). In that case, then Trump’s die-hards might stick with him—even if they also like Kennedy.

So far, there haven’t been many polls that actually tested the three-way matchup, although one this week from Echelon Insights found that Trump had a 3-point lead that expanded to a 4-point lead when Kennedy was added to the ballot. A poll from a super PAC that backs Kennedy found that Kennedy drew more support from Trump than a typical independent, however. (Although you mostly shouldn’t trust polls put out by campaigns or interest groups.)

Ultimately, the question may come down to what sort of campaign Biden wants to run. If he thinks he can win a referendum on his presidency and the economy—well, in some ways having two challengers to divide the opposition makes that easier. But if Biden wants a campaign laser-focused on Trump, then Kennedy adds a wrinkle to that plan.

It’s also possible that Kennedy would bring about a campaign that, at the margin, is a little bit more focused on the ideological contrasts between the political parties. Biden might actually prefer that to one focused on his age, especially if there’s more discussion on issues like abortion where Democrats’ position is popular.

I don’t want to be too wishy-washy here. If I’m Biden, I’d probably take a 60/40 chance that Kennedy helps me rather than hurts me. But that’s partly because I wouldn’t be all that confident about my chances to begin with.

Nate Silver is a statistician and writer. Subscribe to his Substack, Silver Bulletin.

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Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

10 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Substacks

TGIF: The Week Unburdened by the Week That Has Been Suzy Weiss

Published

17 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather outside of Union Station to protest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States. (Probal Rashid via Getty Images)

Oh, no, it’s the sister again, for another slow news week. Let’s get to it.

→ Biden dropped out: Six years ago emotionally, but technically this past Sunday, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. He did it via X and promptly threw his support (and cash) behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Then he got Covid and hunkered down in Delaware—or depending on what hooch you’ve been drinking, died and was reanimated so he could appear before the cameras on Wednesday to address the nation. Joe’s family, including Hunter, sat along the wall of the Oval Office as he spoke. The president talked about the cancer moonshot, ending the war in Gaza, putting the party over himself, and Kamala’s tenacity, as Kamala’s pistol dug ever-so-slightly harder into his back. Right after, Jill, the First Lady of passive aggression, who apparently wanted to outdo her heart emoji, tweeted a handwritten note “to those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed.” I respect a First Lady who stands by her man and her energetic stepson. A First Lady who sees the high road way up there and says to herself, “If they want us out of here so bad, they can clean out the fridge and strip the beds themselves!”

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk Boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-11. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe. . . well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story.” The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the Boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

Substacks

July 25, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

21 hours ago

July 26, 2024

Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.

Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”

Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.

People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.

Another significant endorsement for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.

“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”

Today the Commerce Department reported that economic growth in the second quarter was higher than expected, coming in at 2.8%, thanks to higher spending driven by higher wages. The country’s changing momentum is showing in media stories hyping the booming economy Biden’s team tried for years to get traction on. “Full Employment is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” was the title of a story by Zachary Carter that appeared yesterday in Slate; CNN responded to today’s good economic news with an article by Bryan Mena titled: “The US economy is pulling off something historic.”

With Harris appearing to have sewn up the nomination, the question has turned to her vice presidential pick. That question is fueling the sense of excitement as potential choices are in front of cameras and on social media advocating Democratic positions and defending the United States from Trump’s denigration. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro listed the economic gains of the past years, and said: “Trump, you’ve got to stop sh*t talking America. We’ve got to start standing tall and being patriotic and showing how much we love this amazing nation.”

The vice presidential hopefuls appear to be having some fun with showcasing their personalities, as Minnesota governor Tim Walz did in his video from the Minnesota State Fair where he and his daughter went on an extreme ride. So are social media users who have dug up old videos of, for example, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg explaining how he would pilot a small starfighter that had lost its auxiliary shields, or Arizona senator Mark Kelly’s identical twin brother Scott pranking a fellow astronaut on the Space Station with a gorilla suit Mark smuggled on board.

That sense of fun is an enormous relief after years of political weight, and it has spilled over into making fun of the Republican ticket, most notably with a false story that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance wrote about—and I cannot believe I am typing this—having sex with a couch. The story is stupid, but worse are the denials of it, which have spread the story into populations that otherwise would likely not have seen it.

Just two weeks ago, Vance appeared to be the leader of the next generation of extremist MAGA Republicans, but now that calculation seems to have been hasty. Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion—the key issue in 2024—and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Republican commentator Meghan McCain noted that Vance’s “comments are activating women across all sides, including my most conservative Trump supporting friends. These comments have caused real pain and are just innately unchristian.” Actor Jennifer Aniston, who tends to stay out of politics, posted: “I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States.” Vance had called out Harris by name in those 2021 comments, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife Kerstin Emhoff took to social media to defend Harris from Vance’s attacks on her as “childless,” calling her “a co-parent with Doug and I. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.” Harris’s stepdaughter chimed in: “I love my three parents.”

Vance also ties the Republican ticket firmly to Project 2025. The Trump camp has worked to distance itself from Project 2025—not convincingly, since the two are obviously closely tied, but it turns out that Vance wrote the introduction for a forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who was the lead author of Project 2025. The book appears to popularize that plan, right down to its endorsement of a “Second American Revolution,” and according to the book deal report, proceeds from the book will go to the Heritage Foundation “and aligned nonprofits.”

Now Vance’s words praising Project 2025 will be in print, just in time for the election. Yesterday, Trump posted: “I have nothing to do with, and know nothing about, Project 25 [sic]. The fact that I do is merely disinformation put out by the Radical Left Democrat Thugs. Do not believe them!”

Trump is clearly aware of, and concerned about, the changing narrative. This morning, he called in to Fox & Friends, saying, “We don’t need the votes. I have so many votes. I’m in Florida now…and every house has a Trump-Vance sign on it. Every single house…. It’s amazing the spirit…. This election has more spirit than I’ve ever seen ever before.” Tonight the Trump campaign proved their worry by backing out of debates with Harris, saying debates can’t be scheduled until she is the official nominee, although Biden was not the official nominee when they met in June.

The larger narrative shift has affected the media approach to Trump, who is accustomed to shaping perceptions as he wishes. Now, 12 days after the mass shooting at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, there is increasing media attention to the fact that there has still been no medical report on Trump’s injuries, although he wore a large bandage on his ear at the Republican National Convention and said at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday that he “took a bullet for democracy.”

Yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that it is not clear whether Trump was “grazed” by a bullet or by shrapnel, words that former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance called “FBI speak for, ‘it’s unlikely it was a bullet.’”

CNN chief medical consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta noted last week that the people need a real medical evaluation of Trump’s injuries, explaining that “gunshot blasts near the head can cause injuries that aren’t immediately noticeable, such as bleeding in or on the brain, damage to the inner ear or even psychological trauma.” But, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has noted, much of the press has kept mum about the story.

Media outlets have reported Wray’s testimony, though, and in a social media post today, Trump called on Wray, whom he appointed to head the FBI, to resign from his post for “LYING TO CONGRESS.” Tonight, he reiterated that “it was…a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard.”

Perhaps eager to get back to their districts, House Republicans canceled their expected votes on appropriations bills scheduled for next week and left town today for their August recess. The House will not reconvene until early September. The government’s fiscal year 2025 begins on October 1.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/opinion/trump-lies-charts-data.html

https://marchforourlives.org/in-a-first-ever-endorsement-march-for-our-lives-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-economic-growth-regains-steam-second-quarter-inflation-slows-2024-07-25/

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/biden-economy-employment-inflation.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/entertainment/jennifer-aniston-jd-vance/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/economy/us-economy-gdp-second-quarter/index.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/jd-vance-wrote-foreword-book-project-2025-architect-kevin-roberts-and-proceeds

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-might-not-shot-1930037

https://people.com/was-trump-struck-by-bullet-or-shrapnel-fbi-director-testifies-8683340

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-wants-fbi-director-resign-immediately-chris-wray-rcna163641