- By Mike Wendling
- BBC News in Royal Oak, Michigan
Mike Panza showed up early to a comedy benefit to support Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Wearing a Star Wars-themed shirt and waiting in line outside the Royal Oak Theater in this Detroit suburb, he talked about what attracted him to the only candidate in the 2024 race identifiable only by his initials –RFK Jr.
“I’d like to get back to the happy medium,” Mr. Panza, 44, said. “His position on health care is really attractive. Kennedy wants to make people healthy, he wants to make the country healthy.”
Mr. Panza, who works as an environmental official, may come across as a disgruntled Democrat. But when I ask him who he voted for in 2020, he immediately responds: “Trump.”
Interviews with dozens of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters here reveal a paradox regarding the independent candidate, one of the biggest wild cards in November’s presidential election.
Conventional wisdom, supported by some opinion polls, says that Mr. Kennedy, a member of the country’s most famous — and Democratic — political family, poses more of a threat to Joe Biden than to Republican nominee Donald Trump.
However, other recent surveys, interviews with supporters and a closer look at the issues driving Mr. Kennedy’s base tell a different story: Perhaps Mr. Trump is the candidate who should be most worried.
“Given the current state of politics in Michigan, I would say it’s probably more biased against Trump,” said Corwin Smidt, a politics professor at Michigan State University. “But it’s a very uncertain situation.”
Mr. Kennedy consistently polls in the teens or high numbers, as a percentage. All indications are that he is the most popular independent or third-party candidate in decades.
Experts say support for third-party candidates tends to wane as elections approach and Mr. Kennedy is extremely unlikely to win the White House. Yet because of the tight electoral map, his significant support could potentially influence results in some states — including Michigan, a key battleground — and ultimately determine who becomes the next president.
Just a few miles from the comedy show, local Republicans in suburban Macomb County hold a pro-Trump rally every Sunday at a wide intersection surrounded by strip malls, fast food restaurants and a gas station.
This is hotly contested territory. Mr. Trump garnered about 53% of voters in Macomb in 2016 and 2020.
But in the last election, the vote share allocated to third-party candidates declined, allowing Joe Biden to improve Hillary Clinton’s vote share by about 3.5 percentage points. It was a small element that allowed Biden to bring Michigan back into the Democratic column in 2020.
At the gathering of about 20 Republicans waving American flags and handmade pro-Trump signs, reactions to Kennedy’s campaign ranged from striking bemusement to mild approval.
Peter Kiszczyc is a regular at these rallies. He said he was happy that independent candidates such as Mr Kennedy Jr and the left-wing Cornel West had entered the race.
“Some leftists will vote for them,” said Mr. Kiszczyc, 69, who emigrated to Michigan from Poland in the 1980s. “Some things I like about RFK, some things I don’t.”
But he agreed deeply with one of Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s most notable — and controversial — questions. “We all support his anti-vaccination position,” he said, gesturing to the small crowd of fans. of Trump.
After a career as an environmental lawyer, Mr. Kennedy led the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. His support and fundraising have soared – as has Mr Kennedy’s profile – during the Covid-19 pandemic.
His activism placed Mr. Kennedy at odds with most Democrats in a cultural and political divide that formed during the pandemic — and was particularly acute in Michigan.
In April 2020, then-President Trump focused his anger on Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s Democratic governor, for imposing lockdown measures, tweeting: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” The state has been the scene of numerous protests against Ms Whitmer’s Covid policies, including tense armed rallies at the state Capitol.
“A lot of anti-Whitmer voters came out for Trump in 2020,” said Mr. Smidt, the Michigan State professor.
He noted that many Michiganders attracted to Mr. Kennedy’s stance on health care and vaccines tend to be conservative — and therefore would fall more naturally into Mr. Trump’s camp.
“Michigan Democrats are not like California Democrats,” he said.
A number of Kennedy’s supporters at the theater – who paid $99 each for a comedy ticket – said they were opposed to lockdowns, masks and Covid vaccines.
“I think the whole pandemic has been mismanaged,” said Sara White, a 43-year-old mother who said she opposed school closures and mandatory vaccinations. Ms. White described herself as a former Democrat — “I voted for Obama,” she said — but noted that in 2020 she voted for Mr. Trump.
The evening began with a short campaign video produced by the creator of Plandemic, a series of conspiracy documentaries on Covid.
The jokes were directed at Make America Great Again issues, including mocking gender terminology, “waking up” youth and National Public Radio.
After the comedy, Mr. Kennedy said: “There are people out there tonight who are worried that I will take votes away from President Biden and elect President Trump.
“And there are people that I meet every day who fear that I will take away votes from President Trump and elect President Biden. And both of them think that will be the end of our republic…I think that our the democracy is stronger than that.
Mr. Kennedy’s message of “pox in both your houses” resonates with Liz Glass, a 59-year-old Democrat who describes herself as recovering and who owns a deli in Boyne City, in northwest Texas. Michigan. She voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, but will not do so again.
“I’m disgusted,” she said in a telephone interview. “It seems like both major parties just want you to hate the other, more than they have anything positive to offer.”
But it seems unlikely that Mr. Kennedy will be able to capitalize on one of the most important issues for disaffected Democrats, including Michigan’s large Arab-American population: the continuing war in Gaza. A loyal ally of Israel, he rejected calls for a ceasefire.
The two main candidates are trying – for obvious reasons – to present Mr. Kennedy as a natural ally of the opposing camp.
Mr Trump has expressed various opinions about RFK Jr, calling him “Joe Biden’s twisted political opponent, not mine” on his Truth Social account – but more recently calling him a Democratic “plant”.
The interactions between the two were even more complicated than that. Although Mr. Kennedy frequently criticizes Mr. Trump, he says he has been approached by allies to see if he would be interested in becoming Mr. Trump’s running mate. The Trump campaign has vigorously denied this claim.
Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to Trump, called Mr. Kennedy an “ultra-leftist.”
“Despite the dreams of the liberal echo chamber, Kennedy is an existential threat to Joe Biden and not to President Trump,” Mr. Hughes said in a statement, citing Mr. Kennedy’s views on taxes, fuels fossil fuels and gun control.
However, a recent NBC News poll indicated that 15% of Trump supporters would vote for Mr. Kennedy when presented with his name as an option – compared to 7% of Biden voters.
That’s a departure from several previous polls that showed Mr. Kennedy drawing more support from Mr. Biden.
Democrats still worry about this possibility. Local Democratic activists protesting outside the fundraiser called it a “spoiler.” And Democrats have launched legal challenges to Kennedy’s efforts to run for office. In Michigan, these measures came to nothing, as Kennedy was recently granted election access after being nominated by the small Natural Law Party.
In a statement to the BBC, Michigan Democratic Party Chairwoman Lavora Barnes took aim at Kennedy’s campaign. “The choice is clear in November, we must re-elect President Biden, and there is simply no alternative,” she said.
At this point in the campaign, the overall effect of Kennedy’s candidacy is unknowable, said Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar at the conservative Institute for Political Innovation who has studied the history of third-party campaigns.
But, Mr. Matthews said, his presence in the race could cause a number of surprises, not only in tight battlegrounds like Michigan, but also in states that appear relatively safe for one or the other candidates.
“At a level of 8 or 9 percent – about where he is in the polls right now – his support could really muddy the results in a number of places,” Mr. Matthews said.
