A lot of Democrats and perhaps even some Republicans were relieved when the nonpartisan No Labels organization decided against running a presidential “unity ticket” this November after the group was turned down by a reported 30 potential candidates. No Labels had secured ballot access in 19 states and threatened to attract some of the voters disgruntled with a rematch of the Biden-Trump contest from four years ago.
But the threat to the Democrat-Republican duopoly isn’t over. Several additional non-major-party candidates are still running, and one of them is showing some potential game-changing strength: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent who recently added fellow ex-Democrat Nicole Shanahan to his ticket. The fiery conspiracy theorist is securing an average of 10 percent of the vote (per RealClearPolitics) in polls testing a full field of five candidates (Biden-Trump plus Kennedy, fellow indie Cornel West, and Green Party prospect Jill Stein). And while polls show Kennedy helping Trump to some extent by taking more votes away from Biden, his appeal is unusual enough, and the task of polling his support difficult enough, to make his candidacy a real wild card.
Traditionally, non-major-party candidacies fade as the general election approaches and voters either focus on the more viable options or choose not to vote at all. But as Lee Drutman observes in a deep dive on RFK Jr.’s appeal, the candidate may be tapping into sentiment with a bit more staying power than usual:
All impactful third party presidential candidacies have had two important things in common.
First, impactful third party candidates have captured an issue that both of the major parties were ignoring, either because the issue split both of the parties, or because neither party thought the issue was important.
Second, impactful third party candidates have found a slice of the electorate that doesn’t care which of the two parties wins the presidency, and cares more about making a statement on that issue than cares about which party is in the White House.
Kennedy largely fits this profile, though his issue is more of a diffuse anti-system distrust than a specific policy demand.
Fortunately for Kennedy, there is a lot of anti-system distrust in the air right now, making his lack of single-issue focus potentially a virtue rather than a vice. His argument that a corrupt alliance of corporate and government power pervades every area of American life has a pretty large audience these days. An annual Gallup survey of public trust in 14 different major American institutions has shown “historically depressed” levels of trust the last two years. Here’s what the pollster said about the July 2023 findings:
Most of the institutions rated this year are within three points of their all-time-low confidence score, including four that are at or tied with their record low. These are the police, public schools, large technology companies and big business.
Only four institutions have a confidence score significantly above their historical low: the military, small business, organized labor and banks. However, the lows for these institutions were recorded more than a decade ago, while the recent trend for each has been downward.
And it’s not just Biden and Trump suffering from low public opinion: it’s also the two major parties, as Drutman noted in his essay. So along comes a presidential candidate who views Biden, Trump, the Democratic and Republican parties, government, big business, the scientific community, the medical profession, the food and pharmaceutical industries — and on and on — as fundamentally suspect and working together to deprive Americans of their health, their privacy, their prosperity, and their right to self-determination. He also happens to have one of the most famous names in political history. There’s a lot to vaguely like among Americans who intensely dislike one or several aspects of contemporary American life. And his message is sharp enough to make I-hate-everybody voters perk up:
It’s this respect in which the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket differs crucially from the constituency No Labels tried vainly to organize into a candidacy. The career politicians No Labels attempted to deploy via their “unity ticket” are just not the kind of people who motivate voters to beat on each other with big sticks. And the implicit No Labels model of an ideologically centrist majority spurned by “base”-dominated Democrats and Republicans may miss the very nature of those who feel politically dispossessed, as Drutman points out:
In 2022, my New America colleague Oscar Pocasangre and I examined the “undecided voters” who might swing the election. We concluded that they were all over the place ideologically. If anything unified them it was disengagement with the existing system — just the kind of voter who would gravitate towards an anti-system outsider. They were not really moderates.
Potentially, they are Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voters, not Joe Manchin or Larry Hogan voters. So Kennedy’s candidacy may have more staying power than we expect, particularly since the mistrust of institutions so pervasive today may well extend to the opinion leaders telling I-hate-everybody voters that RFK Jr. is not viable and that they must choose between Biden and Trump.
But here’s the thing: Even if Kennedy is the rare non-major-party candidate whose support won’t just automatically fade down the stretch as voters get serious, his support won’t even matter if he cannot get on the ballot. And where No Labels succeeded pretty impressively, RFK Jr. has a long way to go, as Politico reported last month:
His campaign is officially on the ballot in one state so far — Utah. But it says it has collected enough signatures to also qualify in Nevada, Hawaii and New Hampshire. American Values 2024, a pro-Kennedy super PAC, says it has collected enough signatures to get him on the ballot in Michigan, South Carolina, Arizona and Georgia….
But it’s important to keep in mind there’s a big difference between meeting signature requirements and actually getting a candidate on the ballot. Every state has different ballot access laws, creating a minefield of legal minutiae and statutory levers that those opposing ballot access can use to try and keep a candidate off the ticket. It’s a long and circuitous process.
This is also a point of extreme vulnerability for any non-major party (except for those like the Libertarians with a long track record of meeting ballot requirements). The major parties have the wealth and expertise to wage guerrilla war over ballot access on a state-by-state basis and may win more often than they lose. The struggle to gain ballot access helps explain Kennedy’s choice of the little-known but very wealthy Shanahan as his running mate; she can spend all she wants on that effort. It’s also probably the reason he’s at least thinking about a push to win the Libertarian nomination at that party’s national convention next month.
So it’s unclear at this juncture whether Kennedy can succeed where No Labels failed in posing a serious challenge to the major-party duopoly. If he can get on the ballot in enough battleground states to force his way into the Biden-Trump conversation, things could get weird and interesting. The odds remain high that Kennedy-Shanahan will fade into insignificance by the time the weather turns cool. But the proliferation of I-hate-everybody voters may keep despair alive.
