RFK Jr. can't win. But he and Cornel West could put Trump back in the White House.
In a race certain to be close, third-party candidates are not only a problem for President Joe Biden, they may pose his biggest hurdle to reelection.
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They run this same story about third party candidates every election year. The problem is they never show that the people who voted for the third party candidate would've definitely gone to one party or the other. People know what's at stake, why do you assume people voting for RFK Jr would've voted for Biden? There's nothing about his platform that is very left leaning. The most left leaning thing about him is his last name.
Edit: Just as an example, I voted for Nader in 2000. I'm someone who would've voted for Gore otherwise. But guess what? I was voting in a state that wasn't in close contention at all, so I could vote for a third party without really changing the calculus of who would get elected. The idea that votes for third parties are fungible with votes for major party candidates is just not accurate.
Because it's true every time, and it works a lot. Gore would have won if Nader wasn't on the ticket, and guess what? The Republicans have been propping up third-party candidates for years.
Hell, in Florida they got some random dude on the ticket just because he had the same name as the Democrat -- and it worked.
Intuitively it doesn't even make sense in this case though. Biden is running as the safe ordinary establishment candidate. Trump and RFK Jr are going for the right wing wacko conspiracy theory crowd.
Unless I see data to the contrary, I'm going to assume that RFK Jr siphons more votes from Trump.
I know several people that have fallen for his bullshit who voted for Biden last time.
Pollsters do ask "if the election was held today, between X and Y, who would you vote for", for multiple combinations of candidates, so you can infer some of those opinions. I don't think they explicitly ask people to rank their choices, or at least I haven't seen those polls.
Well, there were a certain number of disaffected Sanders primary voters that switched to Trump when Clinton "won" the primary in 2016. It's hard to believe, given how diametrically opposed Sanders and Trump are, but there it is. Why would they go from a moderate candidate to a far right one? I don't know, and it's really hard to pin down in the data.
That's kind of the problem we have now. Why would someone that was a Biden supporter flip to RFK, when RFK is very clearly significantly to the right, and way off in crazy-land compared to Biden? I don't know. But given how likely Trump supporters are to show up, Biden really can't afford to lose too many to RFK. Or West, for that matter, who is closer to what I'd prefer politically.
Except they're talking about Vermont, where there are open primaries, meaning they could have been Republicans trying to spoil the democratic nomination. I find that far more believable than a Bernie bro voting for Trump.
I find that far more believable than a Bernie bro voting for Trump.
I don't. I was--am--a Sanders supporter, and I'm still pissed that twice the Democratic party has done everything it could to sink Sanders. I voted for Stein in 2016--in a state that easily went blue--because I honestly didn't think Trump could be as awful as he was. I figured he'd be run-of-the-mill Republican, rather than trying to go straight fascist. I figured, correctly that my vote would make very little difference in a state that is as reliably blue, albeit NIMBY, as it is.
I was, of course, entirely wrong about how awful Trump could be, and was.
In 2020 I voted for Biden, although I'm still pissed that yet again the DNC threw all their weight behind him, instead of the more principled candidate.
And I'll vote for him again, because any other vote is going to be hurting people that I care about. Even though Cornell West has, IMO, better principles than Biden, voting for West in a state that only went blue because the 'vote was rigged' last time would not be a good idea if I don't want to support a decent into fascism.
Why don't you believe it that it's more about the open primary in this one state than Bernie voters voting for Trump?
You voted for Bernie and still voted for Clinton after all the bullshit that happened within the party and so did I. I would need to see equivalent data from a closed primary state to even begin to believe in this possibility. From their side, it'd be the equivalent of one of us voting for Trump in an open primary back in 2016 when nobody thought he'd win the general in order to spoil the Republican race for the general election.
You voted for Bernie and still voted for Clinton
No, I voted for Stein. I said that; literally the second sentence there. The state I lived in at the time went strongly for Clinton.
Okay well I added that as an edit and wasn't able to reread your comment while writing it. Either way the point still stands that you didn't jump to Trump after Bernie lost the primary and I don't believe this analysis as it was done in a single state with an open primary. Occam's Razor states that the simplest solution is the most likely and Republicans trying to spoil the Democratic ticket makes a lot more sense than Bernie bros voting for Trump.