Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan in happier times.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
It’s difficult to discern whether the doldrums currently afflicting the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are directly attributable to the evaporation of a Biden-Trump contest that generated support for Kennedy or just the decline that usually afflicts independent candidates as Election Day nears.
But there’s no question things are not looking good for Team RFK Jr. In the FiveThirtyEight polling averages, he was receiving 8.7 percent of the national popular vote when Joe Biden dropped out of the race on July 21; he’s at 4.9 percent now. And he’s been losing ground for a while; in May he was at over 10 percent in the FiveThirtyEight averages, and some individual polls put him in the mid-to-high teens. Probably the best guess for what has happened is that Kamala Harris is attracting a significant number of previous “double hater” voters attracted to Kennedy out of loathing for Biden and Trump, particularly among young and Latino voters. And Trump has eaten away a bit at Kennedy’s support thanks to a favorability boost he received from surviving an assassination attempt. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s own campaign has been hamstrung by a necessary focus on securing ballot access, which has soaked up most of his money and much of his time as well. He’s on the ballot (according to the New York Times) in 19 states, including three battleground states (Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina), and is having legal problems in others (a recent New York court decision invalidating his claimed residence there is having an indirect effect on ballot petitions elsewhere). And right now, his campaign is increasingly dependent on subventions from his running mate Nicole Shanahan’s considerable personal wealth.
Is it possible Shanahan is tired of depleting her fortune on a crusade that’s going nowhere fast? Nobody knows, but this rather shocking admission by Shanahan in an interview suggests she and Bobby are thinking about bagging it all in order to “join forces with Donald Trump”:
There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we draw more votes from Trump.
Or we walk away right now and join forces with with Donald Trump and explain to our base why we’re making this decision.
If you listen to what Shanahan actually says, she’s explaining the two options are staying in at the risk of helping Harris and explicitly or implicitly backing Trump. It’s no secret that during the Republican National Convention Kennedy met with the 45th president to discuss … well, Trump’s camp said they discussed a Kennedy endorsement, and Kennedy said they just chitchatted about “national unity.” Now the cat is fully out of the bag, and a possible endorsement is on the table. Probably the best way to understand this is as a sort of attempt to determine what Trump’s willing to offer to either make the independents go away or join the merry MAGA band.
There is significant evidence that the Kennedy candidacy really is hurting Trump more than Harris at this point in the election cycle, so it’s entirely possible that the famously transactional former president will be willing to practice the art of the deal in this case. Presumably Kennedy and Shanahan are at least open to eating their words about Democrats and Republicans being an indistinguishable “uniparty” of infernal corporate and bureaucratic interests and perhaps emphasize points of agreement with Trump such as hostility to vaccine mandates (and indeed, to the “deep state” where tyrants like Anthony Fauci lurk).
However it goes, Shanahan’s remarks are clearly alienating some people in Bobbyland:
Perhaps Kennedy will ask Shanahan to walk it all back, but for the moment the initiative lies with Trump to make an offer. It’s anybody’s guess what a Kennedy endorsement of Trump would actually do to the presidential campaign, since head-to-head polls still show Harris with a small lead and a lot of momentum. If Kennedy and Shanahan do stick it out, the future doesn’t look that great: Kennedy is far from the kind of poll showings that would get him onto a Harris-Trump debate stage, and that was probably his grand strategy for a late revival before Biden dropped out and changed everything. Does RFK Jr. really envision himself as occupying a subcabinet post or becoming executive director of a Presidential Commission on Conspiracies in a Trump administration? We may soon find out.
