The buzz at the moment regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launching a third-party campaign is around his impact on the general election. If the parties nominate the 78-year-old Donald Trump and the 81-year-old Joe Biden, each with enough baggage to sink a container ship, they deserve to face a third-party challenge, even one by a man of arguably lower character even than Trump and Biden who is running on the goodwill of a name from over half a century ago. It’s entirely plausible that there may be at least three significant third-party campaigns — Kennedy as the avatar of left/right populist fusion, Cornel West running to Biden’s left, and a No Labels ticket headed by someone such as Larry Hogan or Joe Manchin aiming at upper-middle-class centrists. Who knows? With that many candidates, it’s even possible that some party might nominate a conservative.
Republicans are clearly at least as worried as Democrats about Kennedy, as evidenced by the party chair going after him right out of the gate. In spite of his decades-long association with the Democrats and their media and Hollywood ecosystem, RFK Jr. has cast his campaign in terms that appeal more to the populist Right than to the Left, and his style of populism has more in common with Trump’s approach than it does with Biden’s, notwithstanding the fact that Biden has spent more than half of his life trying to be a Kennedy.
But don’t sleep on the impact of his withdrawal on the primaries — specifically, the New Hampshire primary. Back in June, I walked through the reasons why he might suck independent voters out of the Republican primary, likely hurting Trump but also potentially hurting Ron DeSantis, given the overlap between DeSantis’s strong identification as an opponent of the Covid medical-security state and RFK Jr.’s brand as an anti-vaxxer. As much as 40 percent of the Republican primary electorate could be independents, so their size and composition could be a big deal. Moreover, with the New Hampshire primary unsanctioned by the Democrats and Biden perhaps not even being on the primary ballot, some New Hampshire Democratic voters were considering re-registering as independents to vote on the Republican side. Whether they are an organized force is debatable — some may try to strategically stop Trump by supporting his strongest opponent, some may follow the lead of their party and back Trump, and some may vote for whichever Republican candidate sounds the most moderate or the most anti-Trump. Color me skeptical that this will be a big force by itself. But it adds to the overall dynamic in which independents deciding which primary to vote in — a factor in every New Hampshire primary — now have a strong incentive to focus on the Republican side.