Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is polling as high as 16% in some national presidential surveys. While not enough to win the presidency, it’s certainly enough to spoil another candidate’s bid for the White House.
What’s not immediately clear is which candidate.
Nationally, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are neck and neck, both polling at 46%, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released Wednesday. When Kennedy is added into the mix, both candidates lose the same percentage of votes, with Biden and Trump polling at 37% and Kennedy at 16%. A Decision Desk HQ poll, which averages 130 presidential polls, shows the same thing: a dead heat between Trump and Biden when Kennedy is in the race.
A well-documented lack of enthusiasm for a potential rematch between Biden and Trump has pushed some voters to look for a third option. And while a small number of third-party or independent candidates have joined the race, Kennedy is the most prominent of them.
It remains to be seen which party’s standard-bearer will be affected more by Kennedy if he’s on the ballot in November. A lifelong Democrat turned independent, his environmentalist background and legacy last name could pull Democrats from Biden. But the noted vaccine skeptic who has publicly advanced a number of conspiracy theories could very well appeal to members of the same anti-establishment faction that have thus far cast their lot with Trump.
In the political website FiveThirtyEight’s collection of favorability polls, 37.7% of Americans polled have a favorable opinion of Kennedy, compared to Trump’s 42.1% and Biden’s 39.9%. Of course, no level of support matters if Kennedy can’t get on the ballot – and some states aren’t making it very easy.
Ballot criteria differ by state, but Kennedy estimates it will cost $15 million to gather the 1 million signatures in order to put his name on the ticket in all 50 states. It’s something he refers to as a “massive challenge” and a cost that the other two candidates don’t have.
In battleground states, the states where he can have the most impact, Kennedy faces short signature-collection windows, early deadlines and high signature quotas. For example, an independent candidate in Michigan needs a minimum of 12,000 signatures. Of those signatures, at least 100 must be from at least half of the congressional districts in the state. The signatures also must be less than 180 days old.
In Arizona, an independent candidate needs signatures from a minimum of 3% of the registered independent voters. The candidate can’t start filing signatures until July 28 and needs to have all signatures filed by Aug. 17 – less than a three-week window.
The challenge isn’t an accident, says David Richards, chair of the international Relations and Political Science Department at the University of Lynchburg.
The Best Political Cartoons on Joe Biden
“It is a complicated process, and it’s complicated on purpose because the two parties – Democrats and Republicans – control all of the statehouses and have, of course, for most of U.S. history,” he says. “So they get to set the rules and they don’t want third-party competition.”
Too much competition – especially in a swing state – could cost a candidate the election. Green Party candidate Jill Stein – who is running again in 2024 – earned just 1% of the popular vote in 2016, yet some Democrats insist that her presence in the race drew support from Hillary Clinton in states that the Democratic nominee lost by razor-thin margins to Trump like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Currently, Trump is ahead in swing states Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Trump and Biden are tied in swing states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Richards says Kennedy seems to be pulling votes from both candidates. Regardless, Kennedy has the potential to cause either candidate to lose a swing state by a narrow margin, he says.
“In swing states, as few as 10,000 votes or fewer are going to be the difference between the two major parties,” he says. “Kennedy may not win any electoral votes, but all he has to do is deny either Trump or Biden one or two of those swing states and then the election is going to shift toward the other candidate.”
Richards says it’s unlikely that supporters of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley – who is still collecting a healthy share of protest votes in GOP primaries more than a month after exiting the race – will end up backing Kennedy, as she appealed to more traditional Republicans who might view Kennedy’s platform as “a lot to take.”
Another group unlikely to support Kennedy: the other Kennedys. More than a dozen members of the Kennedy family endorsed Biden last week during a campaign stop in Philadelphia. Kerry Kennedy, the candidate’s younger sister, said, “Nearly every single grandchild of Joe and Rose Kennedy supports Joe Biden.”
The Kennedy campaign announced earlier this month it gained ballot access in Michigan, a state that Trump won in 2016 but Biden won in 2020. Officially, Kennedy has only been added to the ballot in Utah, a traditionally conservative state. But his campaign said it also met criteria to appear on the ballot in Idaho, Iowa, Hawaii, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
Kennedy gave a glimpse into what might be his strategy for collecting signatures when he held a political convention earlier this month in Iowa. Rather than spending months collecting signatures, the campaign said it was able to collect them all at once, in under two hours. The signatures have not yet been verified by election officials.