In a three-way contest, RFK Jr. wins the support of 16 percent of the registered voters surveyed.
In the months leading up to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement that he would drop his Democratic presidential campaign and instead mount an independent bid for the White House, the polling suggested that Kennedy’s candidacy appealed more to Republicans. Indeed, Kennedy had been embraced by MAGA-flavored media venues not just because his candidacy represented an explicit critique of Joe Biden’s presidency but because he articulated a level of paranoid hostility toward established wisdom and polite convention that even Donald Trump could not achieve. Now, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, the suspicion that Kennedy might draw more from Trump’s pool of voters than Biden’s has some substantiating evidence.
In a head-to-head matchup, that poll found that Biden edges out Trump by just three points at 49 to 46 percent. But in a three-way contest, RFK Jr. wins the support of 16 percent of the registered voters surveyed. Biden loses five points in that hypothetical situation, but his 44 percent of the vote dramatically surpasses Donald Trump’s meager 37 percent.
It doesn’t get any prettier for Trump from there. In a race in which RFK Jr. manages to secure ballot access in all 50 states, Trump wins just over eight out of every ten registered Republican voters. Eleven percent of self-identified Republicans back RFK. Indeed, Trump secures the support of just 79 percent of Republican men. Only 83 percent of voters who describe themselves as Trump backers in 2020 stick are sticking with their candidate. The RFK effect is rendered starker by comparing Trump’s performance against Biden in a two-way race, in which the former president wins nine-in-ten Republicans, nearly a majority of the independent vote, wildly outperforms Biden among white voters, men, and voters without college degrees. That’s still a losing coalition, but at least it’s a race.
Each of the candidates in the trilateral scenario wins roughly one-third of independent voters, ensuring any advantage Trump might enjoy among less partisan quarters of the electorate is all but neutralized. The same could be said of Trump’s advantage among voters without college degrees, among whom he wins just 42 percent of the vote to Biden’s 37 percent. White voters are split evenly in this scenario, with Biden winning 42 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. And while Trump still wins a majority of white non-college voters — his bread and butter — RFK Jr.’s 15 percent of this demographic imposes a ceiling on Trump’s support.
It’s easy to rationalize these results away. RFK Jr. will likely struggle to get his name on the ballot in every state. He will probably find it difficult to fund a national campaign. He will be bombarded with negative messaging by the Trump campaign, increasing the number of GOP voters with a negative impression of him and his candidacy (though that effort will divert even more of the scant Trump campaign resources it isn’t devoting to the former president’s legal-defense fund). It’s a safe bet that Trump’s fans in the Republican primary electorate will commit themselves to those very rationalizations. After all, what’s a few more?
But these data clearly indicate that Trump’s support among the broader electorate is weak and conditional. Campaigns are long, grueling, hard-fought affairs, and much will change between today and Election Day 2024. But that fundamental fact of Trump’s appeal to the broader electorate — one that has typified his entire political career — will not.