Impact of the RFK Jr endorsement of Trump
At around 8pm on Friday August 23rd , in front of an overflow crowd of 17,000 (with 6,000 turned away) at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale Arizona (a huge indoor ice hockey rink often used for concerts and located in one of the suburban cities of the Phoenix area), the son of assassinated Kennedy administration Attorney-General Robert (Bobby) Kennedy and nephew of assassinated US President John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Junior (RFK Jr) emerged onto the stage and, backdropped by perfectly timed indoor fireworks, shook the hand of former President Donald Trump in one of the most consequential political endorsements in the modern Presidential era!
What are the impacts of such a momentous political event in the midst of one of the most eventful Presidential election seasons in decades?
1 – Impact of RFK Jr’s Evisceration of the Democrat Party
At 11am the same day, at a hotel in downtown Phoenix, as the perfect entre to the Main Course served at the Glendale Arena later that evening, RFK gave one of the most masterful discourses on the state of modern US politics and in it, he utterly tore apart his former party in one of the most damning and devastating eviscerations of the Democrats, Biden and Harris you will ever hear. In 47 minutes, he laid bare:
- Harris’ consummate incompetence and unsuitability for office “I do interviews every day. Everyone who asks gets to interview me. Sometimes I do 10 a day. President Trump also does many interviews. How could the Democrat Party choose a candidate who refuses to do an interview?” Yes, finally Harris did one …. a softball, edited, scripted faltering interview on the most Democrat friendly network with her ‘chaperone’ VP nominee Tim Waltz.
- What the modern Democrat Party has become: “It became the party of war, censorship, corruption, big Pharma, big tech, and big money.”
- Detailing the vicious lawfare that was waged against him to first shut him out of the Democrat Primary and then to keep him off the ballot in as many states as possible once he announced his run as an Independent: “In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win in a fair election at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself.”
- His speech culminated in his endorsement of Donald Trump and some of his reasons for the endorsement: “Last summer, it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government, or to defy the neocons and their agenda of endless military adventurism. And now one of the candidates has adopted these issues as his own, at a point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration. I’m speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.”
Whilst the legacy corporate media tried to muddy his message by either talking over his speech, cutting away from it or not covering it at all, RFK’s Twitter link to his speech was shared by Trump, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson across their hugely popular accounts on various platforms where tens of millions viewed his speech. The subsequent attempts at undermining Kennedy by Democrat talking heads have mostly fallen flat.
2 – Impact on the DNC
Vice President Kamala Harris’ bloodless coup on President Joe Biden and her ascension as the official Democrat nominee for President in the November 5, 2024 Presidential election without a single Primary vote cast was predictably met with fawning sycophantic MSM media coverage. This culminated at the Democrat National Convention held in Chicago from August 19 to 22. Harris gave a slick, well-choreographed but largely vapid and substance-less speech on the final night of the DNC to what was expected to be days of MSM hype and uncritical praise. Conventions are worth anything from a 5 to 10% bounce in the polls post-convention. Hillary enjoyed a 5% bump over Trump in late August 2016 and Biden got a 7% bounce in 2020. The RFK endorsement wiped Kamala and the DNC off every front page and lead broadcast and dominated the media news cycle for the following week as Trump and RFK gave substantive interviews fleshing out more details of their 16 months of discussions that led to this unique alliance.
Whilst most of the MSM aligned and promoted polls have been screwing the polling scrum somewhat since Harris’ ascension in the race by reducing Republican turnout and increasing Democrat turnout models giving Harris artificially high and often conflicting polling leads, if you factor in the two or three least biased and most historically accurate polls (Rasmussen, Democracy Institute and Des Moines Register), it is clear that Harris emerged from the DNC with no discernable bounce largely thanks to the RFK endorsement leaving her and Trump statistically neck and neck in both the national popular vote and the battleground state polls. Given that Trump over performed in the MSM aligned polls by about 5% in 2016 and 2020, the truth is Harris exits their huge weeklong DNC promo likely behind Trump as we enter into the real meat of the campaign post US Labor Day weekend (this weekend).
3 – Impact of RFK’s campaign suspension
RFK has not formally ended his campaign rather he has indicated he will be taking his name off the ballot in 10 battleground or swing states (AZ, PA, GA, WI, MI, NV, FL, OH, NC and IA). He will stay on the ballots in so-called Blue states (Democrat) and also in whatever strong Red states (Republican) where he might have managed to get on the ballot. This means that the presence of RFK on the ballot in the key states Trump needs to win is no longer a possible distraction whilst RFK reserves the right to try and split the vote in the less strong blue states like say Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia where Biden did win in 2020 but by under 10% in the hopes of triggering a Trump upset in states no longer considered pure swing states. This a very cunning and savvy strategy. It’s unclear how successful he will be in extracting his name off the ballot in all of the swing states as planned. He has succeeded in doing so in PA, GA, NV and AZ but in WI, NC and MI, local Democrat election officials are standing in the way of his name removal.
4 – Impact in battleground states
RFK’s polling in battleground states varied between 4 and 7% with 5% being the average. On paper that doesn’t sound much but the dynamics of the race since Biden stood down is that the switch to Harris almost halved Kennedy’s polling numbers. This is because he was mopping up Dem voters who were either anti Biden or, post Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, were despondent that the Dems could win with Biden at the top of the ticket and so voting for RFK was a kind of small protest vote. With the temporary sugar high of the Harris campaign fueled by over-the-top uncritical media fawning, some of the despondent or disgruntled Dem voters flirting with RFK came home. This meant that the residual 5% of RFK’s vote was much more likely to be Republicans not comfortable with Trump and seeing RFK as a better option that voting Democrat. Indeed, surveys done by the Kennedy and Trump campaigns and some early post endorsement polling indicates that 67% to 75% of that residual RFK vote will now go to Trump which means an up to 2 to 3% bump for Trump in key battleground states. In a tight race where some polls still have Harris up and others have Trump up in these key states, even a small percentage of new voters arising from the endorsement is only going to benefit Trump rather than Harris.
5 – Impact on women voters
One of the most interesting aspects of the endorsement has been to read literally dozens of Twitter monologues of the political journey of anti-Trump ‘soccer moms’ for whom RFK’s endorsement of Trump and the planned roles have excited them and caused them to overlook what they saw as Trump’s negative traits. Trump has polled poorly amongst college educated suburban women due to his aggressive persona, mean Tweets, presumed racism and his frat boy alpha male image. Kennedy’s championing of child health has resulted in a sizeable minority following of very influential health oriented female social media influencers and their excitement about what Kennedy may be able to achieve in Trump’s new administration is bring many of them over to publicly saying they will vote for Trump. RFK’s endorsement, and the mutual goals he and Trump are setting in the public health space, is softening Trump’s image with one of the few demographics that he is still struggling with. RFK doesn’t just bring his direct supporters over to Trump, but he gives permission for hundreds of thousands of former never Trump women, many of whom are moderate Republican, Libertarian or old school socially conservative Democrats but who were stuck on Trump’s personality negatives.
6 – RFK’s likely role in a 2nd Trump Administration
This marriage was many months in the making and in recent days, RFK in particular has given a lot more detail on the process he went through to get to the decision he made. It was a decision not made lightly and Trump’s willingness to more fully embrace some key planks of the things that drive Kennedy only came after his own brush with death at the Butler, PA rally on July 13th. Kennedy has become a very vocal opponent of Big Pharma to the point that social media companies blocked some of his commentary during Covid over the lab leak origin, Dr Anthony Fauci’s role in gain of function research and the C19 vaccine efficacy and side effects and indeed RFK has become a more prominent critic of vaccines in general. In more recent years he has widened his attacks on Big Food over addictive chemical additives in American food and the deleterious impact on obesity and child health. Expats in the US all attest to the poor quality of mainstream food available in the US and how we have to carefully read labels and hunt for niche suppliers to find the quality of food we take for granted in NZ. In his speech, RFK set his sights firmly on the corruption he sees in all the big regulatory and government research agencies seen to be in the pocket of Big Pharma, Big Food and chemical companies. It is highly likely Trump will appoint Kennedy as his Health and Human Services Secretary with oversight over the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the CDC (Centre for Diseases Control), the NIH (National Institute of Health – a health research funding clearing house) and other agencies. This prospect was the main driver for RFK accepting the new relationship with Trump as he would have real power to clean shop in these agencies.
Whilst Trump announced this at the Glendale rally with RFK by his side, this appointment got limited media attention, but Trump will appoint Kennedy to a role investigating US Presidential assassination attempts. With this comes the promise of a full declassification of the JFK assassination files, a step Trump was talked out of by the intelligence agencies in his first term. Kennedy has been on the public record in his belief that CIA connected operatives were responsible for the murder of his father and uncle, a view hitherto viewed by the establishment and for a long time many Americans as a conspiracy theory. With so many questionable and multiple lapses in security under the administration of the US Secret Service over the attempted assassination of Trump, on this issue these two men are both of a mind to really get to the bottom of what happened to the Kennedy brothers and at Butler PA that day. This portends some tantalising new material likely to excite the growing minority of Americans who see nefarious ‘Deep State’ fingerprints all over these assassinations.
Conclusion
The mood of the country and even the elite chattering classes can be summed up in this iconic New York Post front page. The story of the Kennedy clan and their travails still captivates America all these decades later and they were lions and icons of the Democrat party for a generation. That one of their favoured sons would endorse a man like Trump is a political earthquake the impact of which is only just now beginning to be felt.
