As some of you may have heard, current third-party candidate and former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Republican Donald Trump. A summary of his statement, and a link to the actual speech, may be found in this column by Ward Clark, one of my RedState colleagues.
Throughout the campaign, the Republicans and Democrats fought long and hard about which candidate, Biden/Harris or Trump, would be hurt/helped by RFK Jr. My two cents has always been that RFK Jr. would (eventually) hurt the Democrats more, since his Kennedy family is intrinsically connected to the Democrat Party, and he was a more left-leaning candidate. (Anyone ever heard of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, or RFK Sr., or Teddy Kennedy?)
But now, the question is, how does RFK Jr.’s suspension of his candidacy and his endorsement of Trump play out?
The Trump campaign has produced a memo stating that RFK Jr.’s suspension and endorsement will help Donald Trump. The memo concludes: “Well, the data speaks for itself… in every single state RFK Jr.’s vote breaks for President Trump.”
I am sure the Harris campaign will disagree with the findings of this memo.
As always, I am more interested in looking back for examples in our political history. Most political endorsements have not meant that much, in modern times. But there were a few unusual ones that could illuminate this conversation.
In 2001, immediately after the September 11 attacks in New York City, then Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani was stepping down because of term limits. The Republican candidate to succeed him was a long-time Democrat billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, who had switched parties. In that race, Mayor Giuliani’s endorsement was crucial. “Before the Giuliani endorsement, Mr. Bloomberg was 16 points behind Mark Green, the New York public advocate who was his Democratic rival.” But after the endorsement on October 27, “combined with more than $50 million in campaign spending,” voters moved towards Bloomberg, responding to the fact that:
Bloomberg is running Giuliani’s endorsement commercial so often on TV that the mayor joked yesterday that even he’s tired of seeing it. A Bloomberg source said many voters have been telling the media mogul they’ve seen the Giuliani ad – and like it. “Everyone on the street is telling him about the [Giuliani] ads, the mail, the phone calls,” the source said, referring to Giuliani’s recorded phone calls on Bloomberg’s behalf.
In the end, on November 6, 2001, Bloomberg won 50.4 percent of the vote, to Democrat Mark Green’s 47.4 percent.
Meanwhile, in the 2008 Presidential election, there was another big endorsement – the former Democrat Vice-Presidential nominee from 2000, Senator Joe Lieberman, gave a cross-party endorsement to Republican Senator John McCain on December 17, 2007. This endorsement was very early in the political season; it happened three weeks before the New Hampshire primary, which McCain won in a comeback. However, unlike in the 2001 New York City race, the Lieberman endorsement was not played up in election ads leading to the elections, and as it was before a primary, it may not have been particularly helpful in that specific race. Lieberman did speak at the RNC that year, but he was not chosen as the vice presidential nominee, and any impact he may have had faded, with McCain losing the general election to Democrat Senator Barack Obama by 53 percent to 46 percent.
I think we can generalize a little from these two historical examples. First, it is unlikely that RFK Jr.’s endorsement is going to move great numbers in this election. Giuliani’s endorsement helped Bloomberg tremendously only because Rudy was universally considered a hero right after the 911 attacks, and Bloomberg was an unknown. Bloomberg also had a huge funding edge that he was able to use to advertise the endorsement. None of this is true in the case of Trump and RFK Jr. Second, this race is likely to be close, unlike 2008, when everything went wrong for the Republicans. And in a close race, the smallest things might matter. Third, in 2008, it was already well-known that John McCain was the “Maverick,” who was more of an independent Republican. So, Lieberman’s endorsement of McCain really didn’t change any perceptions with swing voters. However, in 2024, Donald Trump is universally depicted by the MSM and the Democrats as a hardcore conservative (despite my contention that he is actually a moderate, Nixon Republican).
Thus, having a prominent Democrat like RFK Jr. endorse Trump could help him, marginally.
But that is not all RFK Jr. can do for Trump. RFK Jr. can be used as a way to blunt the MSM/Democrat attack against him as a “threat to democracy.” In fact, he could help turn this attack back against the Democrats. RFK Jr., a longtime Democrat, was legally abused by his own party for daring to challenge Joe Biden. As he explains in his speech, and as he could expand further in commercials, the Democrats did everything they could to obstruct his Democrat primary campaign, and then, when he switched to run as an independent, to obstruct his campaign for the general election. And he could also compare these legal attacks to those launched by the Democrats against Trump.
The Democrats have long thought that the key to the 2024 presidential election was to campaign on the “threat to democracy.” As a result, they have gone to extreme lengths to make sure that Trump is always painted as a wannabe dictator, and that he be convicted of as many imaginary felonies as possible. Wouldn’t it be ironic if that very same attack rebounded and gave Donald Trump a second term as president?
