Robert Kennedy Jr pulls out: now what?

Third-party candidates rarely perform well in US presidential elections, and are rarely more than a blip: RFK Jr's campaign has confirmed rather than confounded that

As had been rumoured for some days, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has “suspended” his independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and has decided “to throw my support to President Trump”. He will remove his name from the ballot in 10 states where he feels he might be a “spoiler” for the Republican candidate but will remain a paper candidate in other states where it is unlikely to influence the result. He said of Trump: “There are still many issues and approaches on which we continue to have very serious differences. But we are aligned on other key issues.” Kennedy’s effective withdrawal marks the end of the most significant third-party presidential bid for decades.

Third-party candidates and independents

Party politics in the United States is an immutably binary contest, even more so than in the United Kingdom, and has been more or less since the Republican Party first fielded a presidential candidate in 1856: his name was John C. Frémont, former military governor and then senator from California, and he lost to the Democratic Party’s James Buchanan. In that 168-year period, very few figures from outside the two main parties have made any impact on the consciousness of the electorate or the outcome of the election, although only three presidential elections—1864, 1868 and 1964—have been strictly two-candidate affairs.

The biggest disruption was in 1912, when Republican William Taft was running for re-election. The Democrats, after 46 ballots at their convention in Baltimore, chose the governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, as their candidate, a Southern-born academic who had been president of Princeton University and is the only president in history to have held a PhD. Taft, however, had faced a challenge at the Republican convention from his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States (1901-09), and when his progressive platform was rejected, he left the GOP and set up the Progressive Party. He then contested the election under its banner and beat Taft into a humiliating third position. But it made the election of 1912 a Democratic benefit, as Wilson carried 40 of the 48 states and won 435 votes in the Electoral College to win by a landslide.

Every so often, a third-party candidate emerges, or is rumoured to be running, and there is great excitement among the commentariat about his or her potential to disrupt the two-party status quo and change the established boundaries of politics. In 1948 and 1968, the challenge came from the South. In the first year, Strom Thurmond, governor of North Carolina, ran as the candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, otherwise known as Dixiecrats, a breakaway faction of the Democrats which opposed desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans. Thurmond won four states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina—and collected 39 Electoral College votes, but his national share of the vote was a tiny 2.4 per cent and he did not stop President Harry Truman easing to re-election.

In 1968, it was former governor of Alabama George Wallace, an ardent segregationalist, who mounted a challenge as the candidate of the American Independent Party (although he appeared under various labels in some states). Famous nationwide for his opposition to federally imposed civil rights, he had declared at his inauguration as governor in 1963 that he supported “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”, and he went one better than Thurmond, carrying five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He won 46 votes in the Electoral College, but more significantly he took 13.5 per cent of the popular vote, nearly 10 million votes. But Republican Richard Nixon won the election, narrowly in terms of votes but comfortably in the Electoral College, beating Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

No third-party candidate has won a state since 1968. They have come from across the political spectrum: paediatrician and author Dr Benjamin Spock was the candidate of the left-wing People’s Party in 1972, former Republican congressman Ron Paul of Texas ran for the Libertarian Party in 1988 and attorney and environmental activist Ralph Nader has sought the presidency four times, for the Green Party in 1996 and 2000, the Reform Party in 2004 and as an independent in 2008.

The only third-party candidate to make any serious electoral inroads, however, was Texan billionaire Ross Perot. A hard-to-classify liberal populist who supported a balanced budget, higher taxes for the wealthy, stricter gun controls and protectionism, he announced in February 1992 that he would stand for president as an independent. He initially enjoyed extraordinary support in opinion polls, reaching 39 per cent in June, but as those figures waned into July, he withdrew from the race, to the disappointment of his supporters. However, in September he qualified for the ballot in all 50 states and the following month re-entered the race. When the election was held, he won 18.5 per cent of the popular vote, more than any other third-party candidate since Roosevelt in 1912. In Maine he finished second to eventual victor Bill Clinton, the Democratic candidate, while he came in behind President George H.W. Bush in Utah. But he won no states nor any Electoral College votes: unlike Thurmond and Wallace, who had geographically concentrated electoral bases in the South, Perot performed reasonably well across the whole country, but nowhere well enough to top the ballot.

In 1996, Perot returned, this time as the candidate of the centrist Reform Party which he had founded in 1995. He had hoped that someone else might be the nominee but no-one plausible came forward so he put himself forward, though it led to some members leaving in protest at what they regarded as a sham nomination process. Unlike in 1992, he did not qualify to participate in the televised presidential debates, and, having accepted public funding for the party, he could not use his own resources as lavishly as he had done four years before. On election day he won only 8.4 per cent of the vote, less than half his tally in 1992.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the power of the Kennedy brand

No third-party candidate has scored more than a few per cent in presidential elections since then, but for a while it looked as if 2024 might be different. In March last year, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced that he was “thinking about” challenging incumbent President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy had, of course, instant name recognition: his father, Robert Kennedy, was attorney general and then senator for New York before seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 1968, during which campaign he was assassinated; while his uncle was President John F. Kennedy (1961-63). He filed his candidacy in April 2023, but in October announced that he would run as an independent instead.

RFK Jr is the fifth member of his family to seek the presidency: apart from his father and uncle, his uncle-by-marriage Sargent Shriver bid for the Democratic nomination in 1976 (having been the party’s candidate for vice-president in 1972), while another uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, challenged President Jimmy Carter for the nomination in 1980. His grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, was of course US ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940; his aunt, Jean Kennedy Smith, was US ambassador to Ireland 1993-98; his elder brother, Joseph P. Kennedy II, was a US Representative for Massachusetts 1987-99, and his son Joseph P. Kennedy III occupied the same office 2013-21; his elder sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was lieutenant governor of Maryland 1995-2003; his cousin Patrick Kennedy was US Representative for Rhode Island 1995-2011; another cousin, Caroline Kennedy, is US ambassador to Australia.

Kennedys are expected at least to consider some kind of political career, and RFK Jr had given the idea some thought for years. In 1998, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York decided not to seek re-election, he was described by The New York Times as “an obvious choice for the seat” which had once been held by his father, but decided against it because he had a young family. He remarked, however, “the governor’s seat is up in four years”, adding “if I wanted to run for something, there’s always something to run for”. It was a very Kennedy-esque remark. In 2005, he was touted as a potential attorney general of New York, but again cited family commitments in declining the opportunity, though another likely candidate, and the eventual winner, was Andrew Cuomo, then finalising a divorce from his younger sister Mary. In 2008, he again pointed to his family when he said he did not want to be considered for the Senate seat in New York vacated by Hillary Clinton. Al Gore supposedly considered Kennedy to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality had he won the presidency in 2000, while John Kerry and Barack Obama regarded him as a potential administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

This background is important. For a member of the Kennedy family, especially a nephew of JFK and son (and namesake) of the secular martyr Bobby Kennedy, deciding to run for president is a much smaller leap of imagination than for most people. When he was tapped as “an obvious choice” to be a United States senator, he was 44 years old and an attorney specialising in environmental regulation and protection; although he had over the previous two years brokered the New York City Watershed Agreement, and as a result was described by New York magazine as “the Kennedy who matters”, he would not have had such political eminence and potential without his family background.

Kennedy’s politics

Kennedy had long been regarded as a radical left-winger. In 2020, he spoke out in support of the “Green New Deal”, based on a resolution introduced to the House of Representatives by newly elected Democratic Representative for New York Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and he has been a consistent critic of the nuclear energy industry. He has also raised questions about the validity and reliability of the voting system, writing an article for Rolling Stone in 2006 entitled “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”, in which he alleged that the Republican Party had committed electoral fraud to sustain President George W. Bush in office. Journalist Farhad Manjoo wrote a detailed rebuttal for Salon magazine, remarking “If you do read Kennedy’s article, be prepared to machete your way through numerous errors of interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data”.

His most high-profile campaign, however, which was given additional prominence by the Covid-19 pandemic, has been as an opponent of vaccinations. In 2017, a profile in Scientific American detailed his long record of vaccine scepticism, and in 2021 an article in Vanity Fair dubbed him “the anti-vaxxer icon of America’s nightmares”. This stance against the Covid-19 vaccine, as well as a predilection for conspiracy theories in general, gave him a potent platform and potential support from very dedicated activists.

Although Kennedy has suspended his presidential bid, he is not necessarily quitting the political stage. Donald Trump, who called him a “great guy” and said it was “very nice” to have his endorsement, had indicated that he might offer Kennedy some role in a new administration: last month in a telephone call Trump said “I would love you to do something—and I think it would be so good for you and so big for you”. Kennedy revealed the two men had spoken several times.

I was surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues. In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and seriously, if need be, on issues over which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.

(One might note in passing that Trump has previously said “I think I’ve done more for the Black community than any other president, and let’s take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, cause he did good, although it’s always questionable”, and boasted “With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office”. In 2019, a poll of Republican voters showed that 53 per cent of them considered Trump a better president than Lincoln. By contrast, a ranking by 154 scholars rated Trump 45th and last in a list of presidents.)

Meanwhile, the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, recently told conservative radio host Glenn Beck he was enthusiastic about Kennedy being part of a future administration, perhaps being placed at the head of one of the many federal institutions the Republican candidate wants to abolish.

I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in some sort of major three-letter entity or whatever it may be and let him blow it up. think that’s what we need. And so, I think that kind of unity, even where there may be certain disagreements on certain things, I think he could be a really great asset for that.

In an interview with Fox News in June, Trump indicated he would abolish or substantially reduce the powers of the Department of the Interior and “the environmental agencies” like the Environmental Protection Agency. He has also suggested scrapping the Department of Education.

Trump Jr also mooted some kind of supervisory role for Kennedy. Speaking on Benny Johnson’s The Benny Show, he said:

There’s a lot of places [Kennedy could be appointed]—or like some sort of oversight role over all of those, weeding out the corruption, weeding out the waste… Listen, there’s a lot of places that a guy like that could do sort of a general overwatch. I can see a dozen roles I’d love to see him in.

Whether seriously or not, the younger Trump listed the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services. While it is true that Donald Trump and his son are prone to wild rumour-mongering and regard none of it as making any kind of commitment, it is more than possible that Kennedy could be found in the ranks of a second Trump administration.

The point I would make is that Kennedy’s name and the relative buoyancy he enjoyed in the opinion polls for a time have in some ways distracted from just how odd and non-mainstream a character he is. The fact that he may still have a role to play in frontline US politics means we should not shrug this off.

One minor fact which has understandably been obscured is the Kennedy is 70 years old. When the candidates for the main parties were 81 and 78, as they were until President Biden announced his withdrawal, it was hardly surprising that his age attracted little attention, and from what an observer can see he is fearsomely fit and healthy for a man on the threshold of his eighth decade. Remember: until Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and threw many of the traditional political assumptions out of the window, the oldest man ever to win the presidency for the first time was Ronald Reagan, who was 69 when he won the election in 1980. Only two other presidents, William Henry Harrison and James Buchanan, had taken office aged over 65 (and the former died a month after his inauguration).

Kennedy has also suffered a number of medical issues, some of them very unusual. He has had atrial fibrillation, a common heartbeat abnormality that increases the risk of stroke or heart failure, since his college days, and has been hospitalised on four occasions, although the last incident was more than a decade ago and he believes the problem has gone away. He also has spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary movement of the larynx which can make speech difficult and causes his voice to waver, and had a titanium bridge inserted surgically between his vocal cords to address the disorder. In 2010, he began suffering from short- and long-term memory loss and mental fog, and in a divorce case deposition from 2012 he attributed these problems to two causes: partly it “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”, and it was also due to mercury poisoning brought on by eating large amounts of tuna. However, he claims to have recovered from any mental problems.

In September 1983, after resigning as assistant district attorney for Manhattan, he was arrested and charged with possession of heroin in Rapid City, South Dakota. The following February, he pleaded guilty to a single charge and was sentenced to two years of probation and community service, although the maximum possible sentence was two years’ imprisonment. He had first taken heroin at the age of 15 and had also been a cocaine user. He participated in a drug rehabilitation programme and as part of his probation volunteered with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Earlier this month, in an attempt to pre-empt a story in The New Yorker, he revealed to actress Roseanne Barr a bizarre episode in October 2014 in which he found the body of a six-month-old black bear cub which had been struck and killed by a van in the countryside outside New York City. He put the bear carcass in the back of his own vehicle “because I was going to skin the bear, and it was very good condition… and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator”. However, his schedule that day overran and he drove to New York for a dinner with the bear still in the boot of his car. He had to go to the airport after the dinner and had no time to return to his home in Westchester County, so he took the dead bear to Central Park. Because he also had an old bicycle in his car, he thought “Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike”. The bear was found in the park two days later by two women walking their dogs.

This all happened.

You can argue that a man with strange private habits and a wealth of medical challenges is not unfit for public office. But these quirks merely underpin a mentality, a world view, which is warped and poisoned by conspiracy theories. His anti-vaccine activism and belief that the 2004 election was, to use a Trumpian word avant la lettre, “stolen” are not his only outlandish beliefs. One of the dangers of buying into a conspiracy theory is that it is addictive: if you believe one, you’ll believe many, many more, because you have already persuaded your mind to be paranoid as its default setting, to assume that anything you are told is false and to believe that secret, co-ordinated and malign forces are at work everywhere.

The proposition that vaccines cause childhood autism is a long-standing one which has taken an insidious hold, and Kennedy has championed it. It was pioneered by Andrew Wakefield, a former surgeon now struck off the medical register, in an article in The Lancet in 1998 (now withdrawn). The theory has been thoroughly discredited and disproven, and Wakefield was found by the General Medical Council to have “failed in his duties as a responsible consultant”, acted against the interests of his patients and conducted his research “dishonestly and irresponsibly”. He is a fraud and a quack, but Kennedy is not deterred and has repeated the idea for more than a decade. He has even edited a book on vaccines, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak.

Last year, Kennedy proposed a theory that the Covid-19 virus was a deliberately manufactured bioweapon, and, worse, one designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese while proving particularly virulent among the white and black population. He told a dinner party in New York:

There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.

On social media, he attempted to deny what he had said, despite video evidence, and protested that the dinner and therefore his remarks had been off the record. While there are debates about the origin of the Covid-19 virus, there is a consensus that it was not engineered as a bioweapon, let alone an ethnically targeted one.

Another theory Kennedy has advanced is that the rise in incidence of gender dysphoria in children is due to their exposure to “endocrine disruptors” in the environment.

I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion. These kinds of issues that are very, very controversial today.

There is no scientific evidence for this thesis. Endocrine disruptors are widely found in pesticides and plastics, and studies have shown they can cause some male frogs to become female and produce viable eggs, but sex in frogs is determined by a number of factors including temperature and chemicals in the environment: sex in humans is not.

He has also suggested that mass shootings in schools are linked to the use of antidepressants. He told talk show host Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast:

Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates. It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.

Needless to say, there is no evidence or even what a professor of clinical psychiatry called a “biological plausibility” of such a link. While taking antidepressants can cause suicidal ideation, this means that people who already experience suicidal ideation might admit to their thoughts aloud when undergoing treatment. In addition, there is no evidence that antidepressants cause homicidal ideation.

These are only some of the evidence-free, paranoid beliefs Kennedy nurtures and promotes. It is not so long ago that a politician so in thrall to implausibility would have been an outlier, ignored and ridiculed. Yet Kennedy has been tipped for elected office over more than two decades and was until this week seeking the presidency of the United States. He may yet emerge as a senior member of a Republican administration. So his weirdness should not be brushed aside.

The continuing strength of the two-party system

It is true that Kennedy was never a plausible victor of this November’s presidential race. Last month, before President Biden withdrew from the race, Kennedy asserted that while the incumbent president could not beat Donald Trump, he, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, if nominated by the Democratic Party, could do so. This was a doubtful proposition and one which had no chance ever of being tested. Some thought that the obvious and substantial public dissatisfaction with a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump might create an opportunity for a third-party candidate like Kennedy, and at times his polling numbers were impressive. Last November, a poll showed him winning the support of 22 per cent of those surveyed, which, if sustained to election day, would have given him the best result in the popular vote for a third-party candidate since Roosevelt in 1912. But, like Ross Perot in 1992 and unlike George Wallace and Strom Thurmond before him, Kennedy had no geographical concentration to his support, so was highly unlikely to win any states or votes in the Electoral College.

Some suggested that the race between Biden and Trump was so tight that neither might win a majority of votes in the Electoral College. But this did not open a way to the presidency for Kennedy either: according to the Twelfth Amendment, in the event of no candidate securing a majority, the House of Representatives votes on the candidates, but with only one vote for each state. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats were going to install Kennedy as president under such circumstances.

American politics are experiencing strange times. An incumbent president showing strong signs of cognitive impairment was eventually persuaded, with much reluctance, to withdraw from the election, and his opponent, a former president, is a convicted felon (on 34 counts) currently awaiting sentence, who lies and misleads without apology and denies reality on a regular basis. Even so, it does feel that Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s deep-seated oddness and paranoia were given something of a free ride. Partly, perhaps, his heritage gave him a misleading plausibility, and maybe he looked less weird than he truly is because of the high background levels in this year’s contest.

The dénouement of Kennedy’s campaign will cause relief to many, though its influence on the result in November is hotly contested. His standing in the opinion polls was falling: in April, he had sunk to 8.7 per cent, and by this month that had decreased further to seven per cent. In addition, third-party or independent candidates often perform less well on election day than in opinion polls, when voters are faced with the reality of the two-party system. So the section of the electorate which is now “homeless” may not be very large. All the same, if the race between Harris and Trump is close, those voters could be important.

Recent evidence suggests that would-be Kennedy voters are more likely to tend towards the Republican Party than the Democrats, although some supported Kennedy primarily on the grounds that he was the candidate of neither party. It may also be that some of those voters motivated by disaffection have been won over by Kamala Harris’s entry into the race and so may peel away to the Democratic nominee. The consensus seems to be that any rise in support for either candidate as a result of Kennedy’s withdrawal will be marginal. One thing does seem to remain true: the Republican/Democrat stranglehold on American politics is as strong as ever. It is hard to see that aspect changing in the near future.