Former President Donald Trump was clearly in the lead for the White House. That’s all changed.
Because the GOP has delivered terrible news to the Trump campaign about the 2024 election.
Every election has its own unique atmosphere. That can make or break a candidate challenger or an incumbent seeking another term in office. Just consider how Jimmy Carter was completely blown out of the water by Ronald Reagan largely because of the suffering economy that led to a negative political atmosphere for Carter that was too much to overcome.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was up against a new wave of anti-establishment sentiment from voters as many Americans were growing sick and tired of the status quo that continued to let the political class get away with whatever they wanted while the American working class suffered.
And who can forget 2020? That was a serious whirlwind that made it next to impossible to predict, and it came down to the wire between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and many Republicans and Democrats competing for hotly contested offices.
2024 was going to be a little more normal, by all indications. Joe Biden and the Democrats couldn’t run with the intention to blast their opponents over the pandemic panic. That’s all gone. With this in mind, Donald Trump took a commanding lead in both the GOP primary race and in most surveys of voters asked about a hypothetical but likely rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
One man is throwing a wrench into all of this and plunging the 2024 election into more uncertainty, however. That man is none other than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running as an independent presidential candidate after dropping out from the Democrat primary race.
For the most part, independents don’t have to be paid much attention at all. They are unlikely to get enough votes to change the outcomes of elections, even in battleground districts and states.
The problem for Donald Trump and Joe Biden, though, is that Robert F. Kennedy is seriously shaking things up in the national polls and surveys. Enough that both campaigns are sounding the alarms.
Recently, Republican Party officials shared with reporters that they believe Kennedy is here to stay and may completely throw the 2024 election into limbo more than most may be expecting right now.
“Kennedy has, I think, more lasting impact on this race than most people thought he would,” the top GOP data analyst, Jon McHenry, shared with news outlets in a statement this past weekend.
“All he really needs to be on is Arizona, Georgia, you know, Nevada, a handful of states, North Carolina, maybe Michigan, Wisconsin. He only needs to be on the ballot in five or six states to have an impact on this, because even if he only takes 3%, that’s enough to swing a bunch of states,” the Republican official added.
Another GOP campaign strategist argued that normally an independent would just be a “zero-sum game” issue. However, this time around it’s a lot more complicated. RFK Jr. seems to be having various levels of success in convincing Biden and Trump voters to cast a ballot for himself. It’s all in flux.
“It’s not surprising that he appears to take votes from one candidate and then another, because that’s what’s going on in the electorate in the people thinking about whether they’re going to vote for Trump or Biden or RFK. There’s going to be a lot of movement around those three answers depending on what the news of the day is,” the GOP campaign expert Mike McKenna shared with reporters.
“In a normal election — in a two-person election — you would see the sways go back and forth between the candidates, right? It would just be those two, you know, and it would tend to be a zero-sum game,” the official went on to add. “But now … it’s a little more mathematically complicated.”
As for Donald Trump himself, he seems to be convinced that the nephew of the late, great John F. Kennedy is not going to be hurting his campaign and odds of wining a second term in the White House at all. He’s called RFK Jr. a “fraud” who will be an opponent of Joe Biden. He also said that he “loves” that the Kennedy attorney is running.
“Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! It’s great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot. Expect him, and her, to be indicted any day now, probably for Environmental Fraud! He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine. I love that he is running,” Donald Trump shared on his Truth Social account.
The latest polls are suggesting that it’s true that RFK Jr. is having an odd impact on the 2024 election cycle thus far. Some surveys out of battleground states suggest he has a real shot at winning in certain regions like Michigan. That would be utterly stunning.
Some polls suggest that with Kennedy on the ballot, Joe Biden will perform better. Others suggest the reverse to be true. Like many have noted, no one really knows what type of an impact RFK Jr. will have on the race because it’s not yet set in stone.
Donald Trump will want to keep this in mind as the general election season heats up this summer and fall.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
