Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't see himself as a spoiler for Democrats or GOP

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he is the 2024 presidential candidate of hope. Not, as many people have accused him of, a spoiler.

In a race where many voters aren’t excited for a rematch between the same two White House contenders as four years ago, Kennedy, a long-shot, third-party candidate, sees himself as the alternate they are looking for.

“I think it's important that Americans feel that its potential for democracy to work for them, and they don't have to vote the lesser of two evils. They don't have to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they don't like because they hate the other guy worse,” Kennedy said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY. “I think it's important to give them an alternative where they can continue to have hope for our democracy and vote out of inspiration rather than fear.”

Kennedy, 70, said he draws support from both Democrats and Republicans, perhaps proving that his appeal is best summed up in how he is neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump. Yet an independent candidate has never come close to winning the presidency, and most polls show him significantly tailing the front-runners.

Instead, candidate of hope or not, his presence in the White House race is most likely to come in the form of a spoiler.

So far, Kennedy will be on the presidential ballot in Delaware, Oklahoma, and Utah in November. He is also expected to be on the ballot in Hawaii, Michigan and Texas. He is in the process of getting on the ballot in Nevada, New York, North Carolina and South Carolina, though he faces legal and residency challenges in several states.

Kennedy’s campaign has said he is on the ballot, or in the process of getting on the ballot, in several other states, but those states were unable to confirm his status due to not yet receiving or completed verifying the signatures. Some would not confirm until the candidate list is confirmed closer to the election. Kennedy said in some states, such as New Hampshire, his campaign is holding signatures for “strategic reasons,” but he expects to be on the ballot in every state.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Brookings Institution fellow who is an expert on presidential elections, said election rules were changed over time by the two major parties to stymie the minority party candidates. It will be extremely difficult for Kennedy to get on the ballot in every state, she said.

“The cards were sort of stacked against RFK from the beginning if he was unwilling to pick one of the major parties. So he's basically climbing uphill all the time,” she said

Whether he can get on ballots in all 50 states, which have varying requirements, doesn’t change the fact that he “can't get on enough ballots to be a threat to win the presidency,” said Josh Blank, the director of research for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

“Ultimately, he can do no more than act as a spoiler,” Blank said.

The Ross Perot and Ralph Nader examples

But even Kennedy Jr.'s potential to be a spoiler is not yet clear. It’s early to be relying on polls, and Blank is skeptical because of the near-equal support he’s received from both parties. But Bob Shapiro, the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, thinks that the closeness of this election is important to consider.

“Based on past experience given the closeness of the elections, in particular key states, a third-party candidate that gets, you know, on the order of 1% of the vote could make a significant difference in the outcome,” Shapiro said. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is getting a lot more than 1% of the vote. So he can make a difference in the close races.”

Shapiro pointed to Ross Perot, who won 19% of the popular vote in the 1992 race against then-President George H.W. Bush and then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, leading to claims that his presence is what caused the Republican incumbent to lose.

Similarly, the just 1.6% that Ralph Nader received in Florida in 2000 is believed by experts to have been enough to have caused Democratic nominee Al Gore to lose the presidency to Republican George W. Bush.

An average of national polls compiled by fivethirtyeight.com on Friday shows Kennedy receiving support from 9.3% of voters, Trump averages 41% and Biden averages 39.9%.

While Kennedy isn’t polling as well as Perot did, he “is closer to Ross Perot than to the more fringe third party candidates that we’ve had.” Plus, Shapiro added, he has the name value of Kennedy – the closest the United States has to a royal family.

But unlike Perot, Kennedy’s campaign doesn’t have a unifying message, but a “grab bag of issues” that pulls from the extremes of each major political party, says Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University.

Kennedy has a long history as an environmental activist, he is against the war in Ukraine but has defended Israel’s right to respond to Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, and he is famously anti-vaccination.

While Kennedy says that he’s not anti-vaccine in his campaign materials, he rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to the vaccine, spreading misinformation that they were linked to several deaths. His nonprofit organization, Children’s Health Defense, also promotes falsehoods about vaccines for children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the COVID-19 vaccine is “safe and effective,” and diseases like measles can easily cause outbreaks in communities where people are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.

Kennedy also recently changed his position on abortion. After years of believing there should be no restrictions on abortion access, he told USA TODAY that he wants to go back to the status quo of Roe v. Wade when abortion was protected in early months but states could set laws determining if it was available past the point of viability.

He also spoke about reducing the national debt and making housing more affordable.

Kennedy said he’s focused on the issues Americans are “deeply concerned about” and that his biggest appeal is that he’s a candidate people actually want to vote for; his “challenge,” he said, is to persuade them to vote out of “hope rather than out of fear.”

“They need to inflame their base. They need to get people frightened. They need to keep people angry,” Kennedy said of Trump and Biden. “I'm trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to bring people together.”

An alternative

Susan Ulin, a 72-year-old New Hampshire resident, said one reason she is supporting Kennedy in 2024 is because she doesn’t want to vote for either Trump or Biden. A registered Independent, she voted for Biden in 2020.

“This is the first time in my voting history that I actually want to vote for somebody, who’s not just like, well, he’s the least of the worst,” Ulin said.

Ulin also said she likes Kennedy because of his stance on vaccines. But in general, Blank, the research director for the Texas Politics Project, questions how much of his appeal reflects a positive reaction to Kennedy’s policies.

“How much of it is in response to a negative reaction to the two major party candidates and Kennedy being the most well-known alternative?” asked Blank.

Kennedy said that a “big bulk” of his supporters are those who had “withdrawn from the political process.” He also said that he draws more support from Republicans, and an NBC News poll from late April backs up these findings.

Blank said he thinks that the support is likely to tilt more Republican as the campaign goes on, posing more of a threat to Trump. But that assumes Kennedy remains a threat at all. The least engaged voters who are supporting Kennedy right now are also those who are the least likely to turn out on Election Day.

It’s also common for voters unhappy with their choices to say that they’ll vote for another candidate this far out from the election. But as Election Day nears, many will return to their original party as the reality of a two-party race becomes clearer and they begin seeing a vote for a third party as potentially useless.

“He offers himself as an alternative, but it isn't really very clear what a Robert F. Kennedy administration would look like. Clearly, he's been used as a protest vehicle for people who, quite understandably, are displeased with the choice by the two major parties,” said Baker. “But I think that some of the things he has said or some of the causes that he's embraced don't even make him a very attractive person to throw away your vote on.”

Kennedy points to an April John Zogby poll that his campaign paid for that he says shows he would win a head-to-head race between him and either major party candidate, and in a three-way race he would most hurt Biden. He called on Biden to exit the race to help Kennedy defeat Trump.

But there are major flaws with the poll that make it unreliable, including sampling concerns and an “unrealistic and totally hypothetical scenario” that all voters would switch to Kennedy if their candidate dropped out, said Blank.

No other reliable poll shows similar results.

“If Kennedy's support were really so strong, and a driving force in these results, he wouldn't be underwater nationally in his favorability ratings, and those ratings wouldn't continue to be (in) decline,” Blank said.

What's in a name?

The attempt to take up the mantle of the Kennedy name is propelling what support he has in this race, said Tenpas. Without it, Kennedy Jr. would have an even lower chance of getting on all the ballots. He is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, and son of Robert F. Kennedy, a former U.S. attorney general and New York senator who was assassinated in June of 1968 during his own run for president.

Fifteen members of Kennedy Jr.'s prominent family endorsed Biden at a press conference this spring. Yet, Kennedy Jr. said he thinks his father would “strongly support” him and his campaign.

“I can’t think of a single issue that my dad felt strongly about that, you know, I wouldn’t check the same box,” he said, such as ending war, protecting the environment, stopping corruption and limiting corporate power. The Democratic party, he said, has changed from the one he grew up with.

Barbara Ann Perry, an expert on the presidency who has written several books about the Kennedy family, said the late Robert F. Kennedy never would have tried to weaken or split the Democratic vote; instead, he knew he needed to win within the party.

“Robert Kennedy Sr. is the antithesis of Robert Kennedy Jr. He didn't split the party by running against it,” said Perry. “The last thing he says when he says farewell at the podium at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just before he is shot is, ‘So it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.’”

Kennedy was 14 when his father was killed on the night he won the California and South Dakota primaries, the momentum that many predicted would lead to the Democratic presidential nomination. He said he’s spent years reading about his father and hearing stories about him.

“Americans are entitled to have their own version of who my father and my uncle (were), of what they would do on certain issues. And I enjoy hearing those debates all the time,” Kennedy said. “I think I have a really clear understanding of where he came down on issues. And I'm very grateful that I believe I share his beliefs. And I share his values. And, you know, I've tried to live my life with the same kind of commitment to the same values.”

Baker said Kennedy’s views of his father and uncle, who was assassinated while president in November of 1963, don’t match the public perception of what the family dynasty stood for. He called the argument self-serving.

“We think we know what our parents would have done and thought,” said Baker. “If a vote of the Kennedy family were taken, I don't think he gets a single vote.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RFK says dad would be proud of his 2024 presidential election campaign