On Friday came the confirmation that he is out of the presidential race and recommends his voters to vote for Donald Trump.
Support for the outsider Kennedy has fallen steadily recently. He has struggled to find elbow room in the bone-chilling competition for voters, especially after the Democrats received a vitamin injection when they switched candidates.
With President Joe Biden’s announcement and Kamala Harris’ meteoric rise, all attention has been focused on the duel between her and Donald Trump. Developments in recent weeks have made Kennedy almost irrelevant.
Irrelevant
Several polls have not been able to quantify whether his continued presence in the presidential campaign or his resignation would have a significant effect on the two main contenders.
Earlier this year, several opinion polls showed that Kennedy had double-digit support, but the latest temperature measurements of voters give him an average of 4-5 percent support. It is far from certain that a final result would have given it even once, as history shows that third-party candidates do not live up to their preliminary numbers when the voters actually have to hand in their ballots.
Ahead of Kennedy’s announced round of clarification in Phoenix, his vice-presidential candidate, the 38-year-old lawyer Nicole Shanahan, had said that he might as well put in the years and recommend his voters to vote for Trump.
The split
Several recent polls have shown that Americans are divided in their view of the 70-year-old Kennedy, who is the son of former Justice Minister Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, who were killed in 1968 and 1963 respectively.
In July, a poll for AP/NORC showed that support was fairly evenly distributed, a decrease from February when more people had a positive impression of the candidate than the opposite. All polls have also shown that Republicans generally have a better impression of Kennedy than Democrats (52 percent for Trump and 37 for Harris).
Support for Kennedy has fallen noticeably since Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Kennedy’s profile was that he tried to appear as an alternative to the two older competitors who would revive the fight from 2020. Half of those who supported Kennedy said precisely that it was because he was neither Trump nor Biden. Only three out of ten cited his political views as a reason for their support.
Magic name
Several polls have shown that voters have favored him because of his family name and his associations with former prominent politicians such as his father and two uncles. But it took a very negative turn when several members of the Kennedy clan clearly distanced themselves from him and announced their support for Biden.
Former President John F. Kennedy appears as the highest-rated president in Gallup’s polls, and respect for him is strong in both camps in Congress. Nine out of ten Americans have a positive view of how he handled his job as president, an assessment that is shared across all camps.
The news that Kennedy was considering stepping down gained new momentum when a judge in New York ruled last week that his name could not appear on the ballot in the important state. The reason was that Kennedy had provided a false address on his election materials. This same thing must have happened in several places around the United States.
#Kennedy #Republicans #Democrats
2024-08-23 20:09:21
