RFK Jr. and Ending Narrow Victories
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wins in 2024, he'll end America's four-year cycle of narrow victories by 2028.
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wins in 2024, he'll end America's four-year cycle of narrow victories by 2028. By campaigning on policies that matter to most Americans, and ditching partisan puritanism, Kennedy is reshaping American politics.
The following is an excerpt from The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency, which is available on Amazon now.
—
Narrow victories in American presidential elections are now an accepted norm, with candidates focusing more strategically than ever before on winning over a handful of swing states to take them over the 270 electoral vote line to win a presidential election. While this strategy is certainly not new, Republicans and Democrats appear less willing than ever to win over as many Americans as possible and instead they focus on attracting the support of just enough people to scrape together a victory. Then, they hope that simply being an incumbent will take them over the line four years later to win a second term.
That’s not to say, of course, that presidents and presidential candidates don’t make promises about uniting a country and building a broad coalition of Americans. In fact, President Joe Biden made it a key point of his 2020 campaign, promising to unite the country behind his vision for America. In his victory speech in Delaware, the president-elect said it was “time to heal” the country, vowed not to “divide but unify,” and insisted it was time to “give each other a chance.”[1] His words conveyed one message, but his actions conveyed another. In October 2021, US Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum directing the targeting of American parents by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and labeled dozens of parents as terrorist threats for opposing the encroachment of woke extremism into the classroom.[2] This kind of hyper-partisanship existed even before President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office, too, with the latter sharing a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund for rioters who burned down American cities and destroyed black-owned businesses during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020.[3]
The Biden administration has in recent years abandoned talk of “unifying” the country and instead focuses almost entirely on one issue: protecting “democracy.” Even in their efforts to secure American democracy, however, the Biden administration has done a good job of demonizing, chastising, and condemning half of the electorate.
Unsurprisingly, Biden did not win in a landslide—and if he wins again in 2024, assuming he is the Democrats’ nominee, he probably won’t win in a landslide then, either. He won’t even win a landslide if he runs against a Republican nominee facing prison.
These narrow victories, however, do not need to be the norm—even in these polarized times. The voting public agrees on more issues than they realize. Studies not only show huge areas of agreement between Republicans and Democrats, but they also reveal dramatic misunderstandings about what each side believes.
A 2020 report based on over thirty in-depth surveys conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, titled Common Ground of the American People, found that Republicans and Democrats in fact agree on some of the most contentious issues in politics.[4] Among the issues in which Democrats and Republicans found at least some agreement were Social Security, immigration, poverty programs, energy and the environment, police reform, and trade.
Specifically, the report showed that large bipartisan majorities supported increasing food benefits but not allowing them to be used for sodas or candy and raising the minimum wage. On police reforms, similarly large majorities favored reforms requiring the use of body cameras and prohibiting chokeholds. On immigration, a large bipartisan majority supported giving children of illegal aliens a legal path to citizenship while also implementing an E-Verify system to ensure that illegal aliens cannot take jobs that would otherwise be available to legal US citizens.
In Monster of Their Own Making, I also described the findings of the “Perception Gap” study by the nonprofit group More in Common.[5] A sample of 2,100 voters from both sides of the political aisle were asked after the 2018 midterm elections what they understood about their political opponents’ platforms, and it revealed that most had exaggerated or inaccurate perceptions of their opponents’ beliefs.
The study found that Republicans overwhelmingly believed just half of Democrats were “proud to be American,” lower than the real eight-in-ten figure. Similarly, Democrat respondents said that only half of Republicans believe that racism still exists, when eight in ten GOP voters actually expressed concerns about modern-day racial discrimination. What’s more, nine in ten Republicans believed that “properly controlled” immigration could be good for the country, while Democrats predicted that the figure would be just five in ten.
The study also found that those who read the news “most of the time” had a perception of their political opponents’ views that was three times more distorted than those who read the news only “now and then.”
If people agree on more than they realize, and if they don’t fully understand what their political opponents believe, then a landslide victory in a presidential election may be as simple as reaching across the aisle, speaking some home truths to your own party, and advocating moderate policies that appeal to most people.
Trump arguably tried this in 2016, but his language and behavior became an obstacle he created for himself. Uniquely in this campaign and in recent campaigns, however, Kennedy has chosen to avoid insults entirely—not just about his Democratic opponents but about Republican candidates too.
In avoiding insults and chasing the support of a substantial majority of Americans, Kennedy is doing a national service. In running as an independent, he is giving America a chance to elect a new kind of president in a landslide victory – if not in his first victory, but certainly by the time it comes for President Kennedy to run for re-election in 2028. Uniting voters on the issues they care about most not only gives him an opportunity to create a happier nation through sensible governance, but could de-escalate political tensions. Narrow victories are the product of a divided society, they are won by hyper-partisan campaigns, and they leave greater partisanship in their wake.
Former president Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are two good case studies in narrow victories and the partisanship that always follows them.
In August 2023, Governor DeSantis appeared on an episode of the Ruthless Podcast during which he played a game of “Journo or Dem.”[6][MOU1] DeSantis was given four statements about himself and was tasked with deciding whether they were made by a journalist or a Democrat. Among the statements used in the quiz was a ludicrous claim that DeSantis may enjoy the company of former KKK grand wizard David Duke.
DeSantis and the crowd erupted into hysterics as he accurately guessed every single one, noting that it was hard to tell the difference between the two.
While the game was obviously just a bit of fun, the fact that a presidential candidate can appear before an audience and laugh at an entire section of the electorate—even if the attacks were directed at him first—shows us that something has gone very wrong in today’s politics. A presidential candidate should seek to unite the country and appeal to voters who may even be registered as Democrats. That is, traditionally, how candidates win—and yet, here we are in 2023, where Democrats and journalists repeat the same falsehoods about Republicans and Republicans respond by laughing off an entire section of the electorate who may, under normal circumstances, be willing to vote for a Republican. To engage in this kind of behavior is to set about winning by a small majority.
Since his 2016 victory, former president Donald Trump has fallen into the partisan trap, too—and now, his own pollster has shown he could lose to Biden simply because of his dwindling support among independents.
In a poll of forty swing districts in July 2023, Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio and Democratic pollster John Anzalone saw Biden beating Trump by four points, 47 percent to 43 percent.[7]
The same poll suggested that DeSantis may have a better shot at beating Biden in a general election—matching Biden at 45 percent support, but his victory would not be a landslide—even if Republicans wrongly were to describe it as one, as they did in 2016. When modern Republicans win, they win by a smaller majority than Democrats. The GOP will not only continue to lose the popular vote in every election going forward without a massive culture and policy shift on issues like abortion, health care, and student loans, but their ability to win an Electoral College majority could be wiped out too. That process could be sped up by a populist shift in the Democratic Party that goes far enough to guarantee small Electoral College wins for the next several decades.
Though DeSantis and Trump are entirely different candidates in many ways, the problem that both men have with independents and Democrats is not so much their policies—although DeSantis’s hard abortion policy will be a major turnoff for many voters—but their attitude and approach to politics. While their righteous anger may have been ignited by Democratic radicalism, their hard approach and harsh words come across as compassionless. That’s a problem in a country of compassionate people.
Woke extremists have fundamentally succeeded in pitching themselves as moderates in some ways, but to a greater extent they successfully defend their radicalism by justifying it as compassionate. When they criticize book banning, they proclaim their opposition to fascism while failing to mention that the books being “banned” contain pornographic material and they were, in fact, only removed from the shelves of public school libraries in Florida. In their defense of teaching gender ideology to children, they cite the allegedly high suicide rates of young people who suffer from gender dysphoria.
Regardless of what is truly compassionate, there remains a giant schism that was created, and is perpetuated, by a vocal, extreme minority. Those loud radicals have captured their parties’ leaders, and for as long as they maintain that control, narrow victories will remain the norm.
While DeSantis is out of step with most people on abortion, he could still win in 2024, assuming he wins the GOP nomination. Biden could win in 2024 too, assuming he wins the Democratic nomination, despite being out of step with most people on the issue of illegal immigration. In either case, a narrow victory leaves half the country—or more than half the country—spending the next four years wildly unhappy about the direction in which the country is being taken.
Vocal extremists are, of course, not the only ones to blame for this mess. Politicians lean into this hyper-partisanship, too, and instead of trying to cool things down they simply make it worse. When politicians do that, the schism gets wider and both sides move farther to the extremes. Woke extremism becomes weaponized by the Far Right, and people who may have never even considered themselves to be conservatives find themselves to the right of DeSantis. Some conservatives shift so far to the right that they cannot see any good in any Democrats—including the likes of Kennedy. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it becomes to capture those votes, increasing the likelihood of future partisan presidencies. This is just one symptom of permanent decline, and it is a symptom that perpetuates that decline also.
At present, Democrats not only misunderstand the views of Republicans and vice versa, both sides are growing increasingly hostile to one another. A 2019 study titled The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States[8] showed that the degree to which conservatives and liberals think negatively of one another is now at an all-time high, with many on both sides becoming so convinced in their worldview that they believe their opponents are subhuman or alien.[9]
Winning a big majority now, while it is still possible, may facilitate a political and social “reset” that sets a better example for younger generations and prevents this sectarianism from growing completely out of control. Beyond advocating for popular ideas, however, Kennedy is well positioned to achieve this goal by doing something truly radical in politics: telling the truth.
[1] “US Election: Joe Biden Vows to ‘Unify’ Country in Victory Speech,” BBC, November 8, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54859636.
[2] “US House Judiciary Republicans: DOJ Labeled Dozens of Parents as Terrorist Threats,” US House Judiciary Committee, press release, May 20, 2022, https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/us-house-judiciary-republicans-doj-labeled-dozens-of-parents-as-terrorist.
[3] Houston Keene, “Minnesota Bail Fund Promoted by Kamala Harris Freed Convict Now Charged with Murder,” Fox News, August 30, 2022, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/minnesota-bail-fund-promoted-kamala-harris-freed-convict-now-charged-murder.
[4] “Public Consultation in the News: 2021,” Voice of the People, https://vop.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CGOAP_0721.pdf.
[5] Daniel Yudkin, Stephen Hawkins, and Tim Dixon, “The Perception Gap: How False Impressions Are Pulling Americans Apart,” More In Common, June 2019, https://perceptiongap.us/.
[6] “Ron DeSantis Gets Ruthless,” Ruthless Podcast, January 14, 2022, ttps://ruthlesspodcast.com/episodes/ron-desantis-gets-ruthless
[7] AARP, “National Targeted Congressional District Likely Voter Survey, July 2023,” Fabrizio Ward + Impact Research, https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/research/topics/voter-opinion-research/politics/national-targeted-congressional-district-likely-voter-survey.doi.10.26419-2Fres.00721.001.pdf.
[8] Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (2019): 129–146, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034.
[9] Douglas J. Ahler and Gaurav Sood, “The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences,” The Journal of Politics 80, no. 3 (July 2018), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697253.
"Robert Kennedy Jr. is dropping red pills to the normies. He's normalizing anon talking points and conspiracy theories to millions of people, and doing it as a Democrat! ~Ultra Pepe Lives Matter (telegram)