May01

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

New Poll Says Kennedy Is Helping Trump in Swing States

Yesterday saw the release of the latest The Hill/Emerson poll, and if you accept their numbers, the message is clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an asset to the Trump campaign in key swing states.

Here's a rundown of the numbers; the first column is the result when respondents could only choose Donald Trump, Joe Biden or "undecided"; the second column is the result when respondents could choose from those three options, along with Kennedy and other independent and third-party candidates:

As you can see, with Kennedy and the other non-major-party candidates added in, Trump holds steady in two swing states and picks up ground in five.

This said, let's look at the numbers a different way, taking the "third-parties included" numbers from the new poll, since the actual election will include third parties, and comparing them to the 2020 actual results:

In 2020, and in 2016 for that matter, Trump had a pretty hard ceiling of around 49% in the swing states. In this poll, and in others, he is approaching that cap, checking in around 45% or so. Is he likely to improve on this ceiling, in his third election, with his various looming criminal matters, and with the clear existence of a disaffected Republican minority, as reflected in the 15-20% of the vote that Nikki Haley keeps getting? Readers may reach a different conclusion, but we think 49% (or so) is not only his ceiling, but that he might even struggle to climb back to that particular plateau. A ceiling of 47% or so would not surprise us one bit.

If you accept that supposition, then the primary question is how many of the third-party/independent/undecided voters will stay that course when it comes time to cast their ballots. Maybe the great majority of them will. Maybe 2024 will be like 1992, and the winning candidate will only collect a share of the popular vote in the low-to-mid-40s. Certainly, there are plenty of people who think Trump is a sleazeball, and who are also loath to vote for Biden because of his age, or because of the economy, or because of what's going on in the Middle East.

That said, elections don't usually follow the 1992 pattern. Usually, the people who say they are going to vote third-party/independent think better of that once it comes time to cast their ballots, and decide to support the lesser of two evils. As you can see above, in 2020, the actual percentage of voters who stuck to their non-major-party guns was around 2%, and not the 15-20% that the polls currently predict. And not the 15-20% that polls predicted at this point in the 2020 cycle, incidentally.

So, we think that's the real question this year: Is this going to be a black-swan election or a white-swan election? In general, voters start to achieve firmness on their plans after the conventions, so the polling should be much more instructive once we hit mid-September. Until then, however, the future is hazy. And since Donald Trump continues to bash Kennedy, you know that the Republicans' in-house number-crunching is telling them that RFK is not going to help Trump, once all the dust has settled.

Oh, and one other thing, while we are at it. On or around August 1, we will reach a point where Kennedy literally cannot win the election because he won't be on 270 EVs' worth of state ballots. Will he keep going? And how will he answer the obvious question: What is your goal here, since you cannot be elected president? (Z)