Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump are colluding to get RFK Jr.’s 5-or-so percent in the polls into the Trump column, but it may not be that clean and easy.
Just looking at the internals of a new poll out today, from Outward Intelligence, which has Kamala Harris with a six-point, 50 percent to 44 percent lead, over Trump in a six-candidate field, including Kennedy at 5.2 percent, and Jill Stein, Cornel West and Chase Oliver each in the half-percent range.
The pollster asked the self-identified Kennedy, Stein, West and Oliver voters who their second choice would be.
The Kennedy group does split for Trump, but it’s far from unanimous – the split is 59 percent to 41 percent for Trump.
If that were to hold, we’d theoretically see Harris, with Kennedy out of the race, at 52 percent, with Trump at 47 percent.
So, yes, the race tightens, but it’s not the game-changer that Kennedy and Trump might think.
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And then there’s this reporting from Mediaite, which wrote about a report from inside the Kennedy campaign about the upset feelings among the thousands of volunteers who have been working for the past year to help Kennedy get ballot access in the 50 states.
“A million people have said they want the right to vote for him, and it is not democratic that the right be taken away from a backroom deal,” a Kennedy organizer wrote to Mediaite in an email. “While we acknowledge and understand how valuable he would be in a Trump administration, it is too early to make that decision.”
“Thousands of people are outraged and upset,” the organizer added.
Those frustrations boiled over in a Zoom call organized by Kennedy volunteers, with one saying outright, “No matter how much we trust (Kennedy), many of us would not vote for Trump,” another saying “if he says he will endorse Trump, it will be seen as the two-party system has won again. Him being promised a cabinet position, Trump has gone through cabinet members like candy. I don’t think we can trust Trump,” and a third saying if Kennedy withdraws and endorses Trump, “he amplifies Harris’s convention bounce, feeds into the Dems’ narrative about him being a Trump plant, rewards their lawfare and media manipulation, does nothing for himself or Trump, and discredits himself forever.”
This doesn’t exactly sound like Kennedy giving Trump any kind of bounce by dropping out and endorsing.
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Chris Graham
