Donald Trump goes all in on the ‘weird’ vote

In 2016, the Trump campaign shocked the world by embracing people and ideas that made official Washington shudder. In 2024, it’s retooled that message for a former president with an actual record. The argument this time is that it’s Trump — hardened by lawsuits and impeachments, unbowed by the deep state — who can deliver for the anti-establishment voter, and the old GOP can’t stop him.

Selling that has meant absorbing anti-establishment voices who hate the Democrats for a wide range of reasons, in the hope that their supporters will come along. The goal is to appeal to everyone from relatively apolitical Joe Rogan listeners to pro-Bitcoin tech reactionaries to Green Party leftists raging against neoliberalism and “forever wars.” (Biden’s drawdown of drone warfare and withdrawal from Afghanistan have not mollified people who want to end all military support for Ukraine.)

As soon as Kennedy walked onstage in Phoenix, framed by Turning Point Action’s booming music and pyrotechnics, the Trump campaign released polling that predicted an instant boost. In the seven closest swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — most of Kennedy’s remaining voters said that Trump was their second choice. In Michigan, the difference between Trump and Harris was marginal; in Nevada, Kennedy voters broke for Trump by 50 points.

“The net vote gained in a state like Arizona based on just a 2020 turnout model would be over 41,000 votes, nearly 4 times Biden’s winning margin,” wrote Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio. “In Georgia the net gain would be over 19,000 votes, nearly twice Biden’s margin.”

The Trump campaign saw the Kennedy effect (and later, the Gabbard effect) as purely positive, with no potential votes being lost by embracing him. “It’s the unity party versus the uniparty,” TPAction’s Charlie Kirk told radio listeners on Monday.

The loudest cheers for the Kennedy endorsement came from online commentators who’d been on the same ideological journey as him — from liberalism to a denunciation of that statist “uniparty,” accelerated by the government response to COVID.

“This was not a simple endorsement of Trump,” said Bret Weinstein, an academic who frequently appears on anti-establishment podcasts, in a Monday interview with Patrick Bet-David. “This was an endorsement of retaking the White House and using that position to restore the republic to its proper course.”

On Rumble, the YouTube alternative that Vance invests in, actor and podcaster Russell Brand said that Trump had transformed the election. “What we are focused on is the creation of an anti-establishment alliance,” he explained. “How can you argue that anything other than a Trump-Kennedy presidency will lead to further dictatorship, further technological feudalism? This is an opportunity for mass disruption.”

On his own YouTube show, comedian Jimmy Dore played clips from the Kennedy/Trump rally, marveling at how Trump’s base was already embracing Kennedy’s concern about chronic disease and corporate power. Dore had risen to prominence in the Biden era by attacking figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the left for not forcing votes on Medicare for All.

“He’s talking about taking on the regulatory agencies and fighting big corporations, and they’re cheering it, at a Republican presidential rally!” said Dore. “Let that sink in, how it has flipped, and how immediately Donald Trump is miles to the left of Kamala Harris.”

These were the views Trumpworld craved, as they connected the candidate to audiences that didn’t usually vote Republican. One Trump strategist said that the campaign now had six people who could credibly talk to anti-establishment podcasters with more viewers than nightly network news: Trump himself, his eldest sons, Vance, Kennedy, and Gabbard.

And they could do it without losing support from more traditional Republicans, as shown by Nikki Haley getting over her objections to Trump and endorsing him at the RNC. More evidence: Kennedy’s support for abortion rights, attacked by conservatives when Trump (and Ron DeSantis) first suggested they could put him in their administrations, got little attention in conservative media after the endorsement.

But Sarah Longwell, a pollster and founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, said that there was a risk. By the time Kennedy quit the race, Harris had already captured the frustrated Democrats who were cool to Biden because of advanced age. And the more voters got to know Kennedy during his campaign, the worse his polling looked.

“The embrace of RFK does have an incredibly negative rating among swing voters,” Longwell said. “Bring up his name and they go, Ugh! That guy’s insane!”

The Harris-Walz campaign is trying to build on one of the Biden-Harris’s 2020 legacies: A permission structure for moderate Republicans to reject Trump, just one more time. They see figures like Kennedy and Gabbard as just another nudge to those voters to support Harris, or at least reject Trump.

In that regard, they view Kennedy’s stances (vaccine conspiracies, antisemitic COVID theories) and personal history (where to begin) as obvious liabilities. Nor do they see the crossover appeal to him and Gabbard. During Trump’s first transition in 2016, both Kennedy and Gabbard met with the incoming president about jobs that never materialized. Since then, they had enjoyed support from Republican donors and speaking slots at conservative conferences. Their ties to Democrats were frayed (Gabbard quit the party two years ago) before Trump snapped them.

“We have always recognized what the RFK Jr. campaign was: a MAGA front designed to help Donald Trump win in November,” said MoveOn Political Action Executive Director Rahna Epting in a statement. The Harris campaign has tread more carefully, releasing a statement on Friday that urged Kennedy voters to support the vice president, but not commenting after Trump added Kennedy and Gabbard to his transition team.

Democrats were also proud of their own outreach to frustrated Republicans. At their convention, they gave considerable stage time to Republicans who warned against supporting Trump — some of whom had worked for his White House. As Kennedy and Gabbard campaigned for the GOP nominee, the Harris campaign touted a list of 200 former Republican staffers who now supported her, urging “moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states” to reject Trump, as they had in 2020.

Dennis Kucinich, who managed Kennedy’s Democratic primary campaign but quit when the candidate went independent, said that the voters who were attracted to Kennedy tended to have Trump as a second choice.

“They were people who wanted to stop the endless wars, close the border, cut the deficit, stop government censorship, stop government spying on Americans — people who were concerned about the Twitter Files, anything that smacked of government intrusion in Americans’ private affairs,” he said.

Still, Kucinich believed that by refusing to take Kennedy seriously as a Biden primary challenger, then by refusing to hear him out when he wanted to exit the race, Democrats created a problem for themselves.

Andrew Yang, who ran for the 2020 nomination and was contacted by Kennedy during his search for a running mate, said that his old party shouldn’t be dismissive about Kennedy’s issues: “Last I checked, politics is about addition, not subtraction.” Even if they found his solutions to be crankish, they didn’t need to forfeit these debates to Trump.

“There are many traditional Democrats who are genuinely concerned about the uptick in autism and other conditions among American children, and that isn’t conspiracy theory stuff,” said Yang, who discussed his son Christopher’s autism diagnosis on the 2020 campaign trail. “That’s a non-political, human issue. I think Democrats, instead of dismissing this, should tackle it and say: Hey, we too are very concerned about our children’s health and development. Who do you actually trust to take it up? Mr. Deregulation, or us?”