The Scene
FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. — The Kennedy for President office was closed on Thursday. Opened in May, it took over a stretch of suburban strip mall between a sandwich spot and a comic book shop. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s books (“American Values,” “The Real Anthony Fauci”) and campaign merchandise were displayed in the window, along with ways to volunteer.
One day after Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally near Detroit, Kennedy’s campaigners just didn’t have a reason to be there.
“I never thought it was a big deal that we had an office,” said Walter Kristy, 69, one of Kennedy’s Michigan organizers, who did his campaign work from the home he was renting nearby. The campaign could do its work anywhere, and it was still adjusting to a new Democratic ticket. “I watched that rally last night, and she sounded pretty good,” Kristy said.
Kennedy’s Michigan campaign launched at a high point for his candidacy, and for interest in third parties. Three months ago, a majority of voters told pollsters they were unhappy with the Biden-Trump rematch. A deal with the Natural Law Party gave Kennedy instant ballot access in the state. Independent Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein were both speaking to Arab-American voters here, urging them to abandon a flagging Biden and cast a pro-Gaza protest ballot.
Then Biden ended his candidacy, Harris took over, and everything changed. Polling for third party options has crumbled since the vice president began leading the Democratic ticket. So has overall voter dissatisfaction with the options, as both Harris and Trump — her since the candidate switch, him since a failed assassination attempt — have enjoyed their highest favorable ratings of the campaign.
“The biggest factor that was unique to this election cycle was a deep distaste of both candidates, which opened the door to elevated third-party voting even in a time of record polarization,” said Lakshya Jain, an elections analyst at Split Ticket. “Kamala Harris’ ascension seems to have completely changed this dynamic.”
Kennedy’s support took the hardest hit. Before Biden dropped out, he was polling as high as 22% in a three-candidate test. Post-switch polling has put him in the mid-single digits nationally and in swing states, at the same time that a Democratic campaign to remove him from state ballots was scoring wins. On Monday, a New York judge ordered Kennedy off the state ballot, ruling that he maintained a “sham” address in the state; Kennedy said he’d appeal and file a separate federal lawsuit, which he hoped would “preempt” ballot challenges.
But the Kennedy campaign had benefited from having Biden and Trump to run against. “We have 341 million people in this country, and the two political parties produced two men who bickered over, really, irrelevancies,” he told Fox News after the Biden-Trump debate in Atlanta. Democratic excitement about their new ticket took both Republicans and third party campaigners by surprise, though some Kennedy advocates said they hadn’t seen it yet. (“The methodological fraud that goes on in polling is truly astounding,” Kennedy campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy told supporters in a call last week.)
“We’ve seen a lot of buzz around her campaign,” said Damian Younger, 38, a volunteer for Kennedy in Michigan. “All of a sudden her numbers are going through the roof, which is a little surprising. But we haven’t had one on one conversations with people saying they actively support Harris.”
Kristy, the Michigan Kennedy organizer, said that some of Biden’s detractors were worried about supporting a “senile” president. In the short term, they might at least look at Harris, but Kennedy could win them back.
“I’m still for Kennedy,” he said. Then he joked: “I don’t think there’s anything that would change my mind, unless he took a bear cub, brought it to Central Park, and pretended it was hit by a bicycle.”
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The View From Third Party Candidates
The Biden-Harris swap affected each alternative candidate differently. West and Stein were polling lower than Kennedy before the change, and reaching out to voters frustrated by the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war, who they believe Harris will still struggle to win over.
“Even these few short weeks have shown that there is no change of direction on the genocide in Gaza, and no overall policy change regarding AIPAC or the general fealty of the Democrat Party to their corporate overlords,” said Jason Call, Stein’s campaign manager.
In a weekend TV interview, West called Walz “a very decent man in a corrupt party,” and suggested that the ticket’s debut and early rallies had been promising. But it hadn’t changed his own plans.
“It’s a beautiful thing to see people expressing a certain kind of joy. I like to see human joy wherever it is,” said West. “But what is the moral content of the joy? What is the spiritual substance of the joy?”
Democrats said they were still worried about losing Gaza-focused voters to the Stein and West campaigns, though neither was seeing the support that Stein enjoyed in 2016 while feeding on discontent from Bernie Sanders supporters upset over the party’s primary process. Stein had raised just $1.5 million and West had raised $1.2 million, with new donations slowing down last quarter.
Chase Oliver, the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, said that Biden’s exit removed the age issue, but nothing else about his strategy needed to change.
“Kamala Harris is certainly younger and a little bit more coherent,” Oliver told Semafor. “But as school gets back in session, we’re going to be reaching out to students all across the country and letting them know that they have more than two options on their ballots. Many of them are opposed to what’s going on in Gaza. And as the only presidential candidate who’s going to be on the ballot across the country and can speak out forcefully against this stuff, I’m hoping they see me as an option.”
Stein was making her own play for that vote, vetting Palestinian-American candidates for vice president to raise the salience of the Gaza issue. Noura Erakat, a law professor who’d been in touch with the Stein campaign about the second slot, said that a Harris-Trump choice meant “voting for genocide with niceties or genocide without niceties.” But Biden had no opening with Gaza-focused voters; Harris had one, she said, and seemed ready to close it.
“I believe, sincerely, that Harris had felt differently about the war since the beginning, and that she’d been sidelined,” Erakat said. “But she’s far too concerned with maintaining the legacy of her president.” She pointed to how Harris handled a meeting with “uncommitted” delegates in Michigan, who said that they were pushing her to support an arms embargo against Israel. Later that day, Harris “backed away” with an advisor saying the embargo was off the table.
David’s view
The unprecedented Biden-Harris switch added a frisson of chaos to this race, while also making it far more normal. Every third party candidate expected to benefit from voter dread about the unpopular red and blue choices. And much of that dread is just gone.
What the major parties see now is a small third party vote that hits differently in different swing states — Stein/West as a Democratic problem in Michigan, Kennedy as a Republican problem in the rest.
That’s where the money’s going. West’s gotten some GOP help in securing ballot access, and a new super PAC has been sending mail to Pennsylvania voters, “warning” them that Kennedy is a “pro-choice, progressive Democrat” who “wants to raise taxes on the top 1%.” That’s happening because Kennedy, who was embraced by conservative media during his brief Democratic primary campaign, is now mostly drawing voters whose second choice is Trump, not Biden.
Notable
- For NBC News, Alex Seitz-Wald reports on Stein’s effort to find a Palestinian-American running mate, and how both Stein and West are “scheduled to attend the National Arab-American Convention in Dearborn in September.”
- In the Wall Street Journal, Natalie Andrews, Jimmy Vielkind, and Elizabeth Findell look at whether Kennedy’s “window is closing” now that Harris has replaced Biden.
- For the Pew Research Center, Drew Desilver looks at the polling swoon that often hits third party candidates as the election draws closer.