Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his presidential campaign in 10 swing states where he will seek to remove his name from the ballot. He said Friday that he did not want to play a spoiler role and prevent former President Donald Trump from winning the election. RFK Jr. cited his agreement with Trump on the fundamental issues of censorship and foreign policy as the reason for his tacit support.
Earlier this week, RFK Jr.’s running mate, entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, suggested they would avoid a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris at all costs; although RFK Jr. formerly a Democrat — and has a recognizably Democratic last name — recent polls suggested his candidacy hurt Trump slightly more than Harris. RFK Jr.’s main appeal was to disaffected, adversarial voters who were losing faith in elite consensus, especially regarding the federal government’s heavy-handed COVID-19 policies; these voters are more likely to choose Trump as their second choice than Harris.
Unfortunately, America’s winner-take-all system tends to create elections that are competitive for only the two major parties. Independent and third-party candidates struggle to gain ground and end up achieving very little. This is a structural problem; by contrast, in a European parliamentary system, a candidate who gets only 5 percent of the national vote can expect to get 5 percent of representation in government. Major parties must then work together with smaller parties to form governing coalitions. In the US, only the winner matters.
This means that tacit support for one of the two major candidates in exchange for influence is actually one of the only ways an independent can turn their support base into actual power. It is therefore not surprising that RFK Jr. have chosen this path. Seeking higher office outside of the two-party system is extremely difficult, and Republicans and Democrats are working tirelessly to make it even harder. Democratic activists, for example, filed legal challenges to keep RFK Jr. off the New York State ballot. While insisting that the health of democracy itself is the fundamental issue in this election, the Democratic Party hired operatives to counter third-party and independent candidates like RFK Jr.
Often derided by the mainstream media as a conspiracy theorist for his views on vaccines, RFK Jr. attracted some libertarian support. His strident opposition to COVID-19 mandates, censorship of dissenting voices on social media, and US military support for Ukraine attracted positive attention from the Libertarian Party (LP); LP Chair Angela McArdle expressed optimism that his ideology was moving in a libertarian direction. Still, he continued to hold progressive views on a range of economic issues, affirmative action, and climate change.
RFK Jr. however, deserves praise for being willing to listen to libertarians. He attended libertarian events including FreedomFest and the Libertarian National Convention; he sat for interviews with Cause‘s Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller and appeared on my show, Increasing. He also helped bring much-needed attention to the federal government’s forceful attempts to suppress constitutionally protected speech on social media.
It’s a shame that RFK Jr. was denied a seat in the first presidential debate, even though his poll numbers probably deserved to be included. Unfortunately, both Trump and then-presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden agreed to exclude him, and major media organizations were perfectly willing to listen to that demand.
In fact, RFK Jr. often at odds with the mainstream media, federal health bureaucrats and the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties (though he is friendly enough with Trump to give an endorsement). Given such a list of opponents, it’s no wonder that many libertarians felt at least somewhat favorably toward him.
Regardless of how you feel about RFK, he has shed light on a major structural problem plaguing our politics: Suppression of competition.
The two parties will keep forcing worse and worse candidates down our throats until we break this, and I applaud RFK for making the attempt. https://t.co/XmdgrL9cwk
— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) 22 August 2024