USA, Kennedy Jr. collapses in consensus. But he is still decisive in making Trump win –

Lucio Martin

August 30, 2024

In the space of a month, the support attributed by the electorate to Robert Kennedy Jr. went from a high of 15% to a low of 5% at the national level. This collapse has been attributed to the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, a candidacy that had the effect of coagulating around herself a deeply Democratic electorate that, however, had momentarily embraced Kennedy’s candidacy, refusing to vote for Joe Biden because he was deemed unfit for the job. Assuming that the majority of his remaining supporters will go in the direction he indicated only a few days ago, when he announced his support for the electoral ambitions of former President Donald Trump, it is almost inevitable to wonder how the choice of the grandson of President John Kennedy will impact the final result. At least for the moment, everything suggests that the 2024 presidential elections, like those of 2016 and 2020, will also be decided by a very small number of votes, distributed within an equally small number of states. Such an eventuality seems to be confirmed by comparing today’s polls with those of four and eight years ago.

At the end of August 2016, Senator Hillary Clinton had a 5% lead over Trump, yet Trump then lost the election, losing in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a total of only 78,000 votes, or something like 0.06% of the entire electorate. Also at the end of August, but four years ago, Biden had a 7% lead over Trump, but then the incumbent president won the election only thanks to the 43,000 votes with which he surpassed the former president in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, or a margin of advantage in the order of only 0.03% of the total. In these circumstances of substantially almost equal division of the electorate by the two major parties, the results of these two rounds of elections were decisively influenced by the vote expressed in favor of third parties by a handful of voters. In 2016, Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, won more votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania than Clinton lost to Trump in those three states. Without Stein, Clinton would have become president. On the other hand, Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian Party nominee in 2020, won more votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin than Trump would have needed to beat Biden in those three states and retain the presidency.

This year, the race in this small set of states open to any outcome does not seem any less close. If we take into account even just the polls most favorable to Harris’ candidacy, she seems to be able to count on about 250 of the 270 electoral votes needed to open the doors of the White House to her, while Trump seems able to secure another 260. If these assessments prove correct, the outcome of the election will be decided by Pennsylvania, where the polls show the two big rivals as substantially tied. It follows that, at a time when Harris seems to enjoy a 2% advantage that, in itself, would condemn her to defeat, given the particularity of an electoral mechanism in which winning a simple majority of votes on a national scale can prove insufficient, Kennedy’s 5% could prove to be something particularly important, perhaps decisive.