Dem
51
GOP
49
For a long time, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was riding a wave of support from the double haters. In the polls, he was as high as 15% a month or two ago. That now seems like a year or two ago or maybe a decade or two ago. A YouGov national poll released yesterday has Kamala Harris at 46%, Donald Trump at 44%, Kennedy at 3%, Jill Stein at 0% and Cornel West at 0%. The rest are undecided.
Kennedy is clearly struggling. He is running out of money, he is having trouble getting on the ballot in many states, his family is actively opposed to him, and since the Democrats swapped candidates, he is cratering in the polls, as well.
Finances are a huge problem, as they always are for marginal candidates. He spent $1 million more than he took in last month and his campaign is already $3 million in debt. His biggest super PAC took in only $228,000 in June. He could self-finance the next couple of months if he wants to throw away his money, but if the goal of his backers was to pull votes away from Biden to help Trump... well, guess what, Biden is no longer running. How long will Kennedy keep up his campaign? Maybe he doesn't mind throwing away his money, but for what? To get maybe 1% of the vote and humiliate himself?
What doesn't help is that Kennedy hasn't changed his campaign much since Harris got in. It has always been mostly about attacking Biden, and occasionally Trump. He is still doing that. It is as if he didn't notice that Biden isn't running anymore. Attacking Biden all day isn't a way for him to get a lot of votes.
There is already speculation about Kennedy making a deal with Trump. In return for an endorsement, Trump would give him some plum job in his administration, or at least an ambassadorship to some country with a pleasant climate. Kennedy has already contacted Trump, but he hasn't said what they talked about or whether any deal was made. The danger for Kennedy is that he could discover that Trump's idea of a plum assignment and his don't align well. For example, Trump could offer ambassadorships to Nauru or Tuvalu.
Nauru is an island made of bird poop, and when the mining of the bird poop became uneconomical in the 1990s, the country decided to become an illegal tax haven. Trump might consider that a plum assignment.
Tuvalu is a volcanic archipelago and doesn't have any bird poop to speak of. However, its official ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code is TV. So if you want the URL of your Website to be xyz.tv, you have to register it in Tuvalu. In 1996, a Canadian company paid the government of Tuvalu $50 million for the right to license domain names with extension .tv. The contract was resold several times, but Trump probably sees making money from licensing your ISO 3166 country code as a great business deal, so being ambassador there would also be a plum assignment in his eyes. (V)