The conventional wisdom is that the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and its apparent traction with a segment of the electorate (as much as 20 percent in the latest national CNN poll), reflects a combination of three things. One is generic discontent with Joe Biden, for which Kennedy is an available vehicle.
The second is the attraction of RFK Jr.’s conspiratorial populism (ranging from stolen-election theories to anti-vaccines to a broader suspicion of technology and finance) to the sorts of left-populists who backed Bernie Sanders in the last two elections.
The third is name recognition, including the residual power of the Kennedy name. Marianne Williamson, the third Democrat in the race, shares many of these characteristics, although she is not a Kennedy and not identified to nearly the same extent with, say, the anti-vax cause. She’s also consistently pulling about eight percent of the Democratic electorate in polls.
Kennedy may be a burr in the saddle of the current president unless and until someone more credible gets into the race. But the Democratic race may not be the only one he affects — especially in New Hampshire. In addition to the particular proclivities of the Republican and Democratic electorates in the state, the New Hampshire primary has two defining features that work together. One is that it’s a modified-open primary: independent voters are permitted to vote in either party’s primary. The other is that New Hampshire has a lot of independent voters (tradition requires us to call them “flinty” independents), who make up north of 40 percent of the state electorate. While some of those voters, like independents everywhere, are really reliable partisans of one side or the other, they nonetheless constitute a somewhat unpredictable X factor not present in the closed Iowa caucus. Because the two parties have (until now) always held their primary on the same day, the fluidity of independents means that one party’s primary dynamics can influence the other’s.
Consider the last time there was a genuinely contested New Hampshire primary in each party: 2016. Using exit poll estimates, which show independents as 40 percent of the Democratic primary and 36 percent of the Republican primary, we can come up with a back-of-the-envelope calculation:
While the Republican primary had higher turnout, only a little over half of New Hampshire independents voted in the Republican race. More than a third of all independents voted for Bernie Sanders, and just under a fifth for Donald Trump. That’s almost 56 percent of the independent vote for the two anti-establishment populists. By contrast, the two most moderate candidates, John Kasich and Chris Christie, combined for around 13 percent of the independent vote. In 2020, with only a nominal Republican race, there was higher Democratic turnout and the share of independents in that turnout rose to 45 percent. If we do a similar back-of-the-envelope calculation, a broader Democratic field cut the Bernie vote among independents to around 36,000 votes, roughly half of what it was in 2020, with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar each earning over 30,000. That may partly reflect a shift away from 2016’s populist mood, but it also reflects a larger field and a greater focus among Democratic primary voters on ousting Trump.
The question with RFK Jr. is whether he might actually draw votes away from some of the Republican candidates. That may seem irrational to those of us who think in consistent ideological terms, but in 2016, political reporters often encountered people who were deciding between Trump and Sanders. This is where things get interesting. What is the dominant attraction of RFK Jr.? If it’s left-populism, he will draw voters only away from Biden and Williamson. For voters who embrace a wider thematic populist mistrust of institutions and enthusiasm for conspiratorial thinking, he may draw voters away from Trump. But a big part of the current RFK Jr. brand is his mistrust of vaccines and Big Pharma. Voters focused specifically on those issues might end up choosing between Kennedy and Ron DeSantis, who has built a large part of his own public identity on fighting Dr. Anthony Fauci, lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates, and has been courting voters who are more bluntly anti-vax. If Kennedy draws a critical mass of those voters, it could end up actually helping Trump in New Hampshire at the expense of his chief rival.
The wild card of the wild card is when the two parties will hold their New Hampshire primaries. The Democrats, eager to aid Biden and punish states that are deemed unrepresentative of the party due to their high concentration of white voters, have demanded a revised calendar that moves South Carolina, Nevada, and Michigan up in sequence and moves down Iowa and New Hampshire. Republicans, however, are apparently planning to stick with the traditional order of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and Michigan. This is complicated by the fact that primaries are conducted by state elections officials, so changing the date requires changes to state law — and both Iowa and New Hampshire jealously guard their position on the presidential calendar. We may not know for some time exactly when all the early states are scheduled. If there somehow ends up being two New Hampshire primaries on two different dates, that could further scramble the dynamics.