We chronicled Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign launch a couple of weeks ago when he pulled 14% support among Democrats in his primary challenge to unseat President Joe Biden.
However, the numbers have shifted since then, and not in Biden’s favor.
Slate Magazine, a bastion of progressive orthodoxy, wrote a piece earlier this week highlighting a new poll showing RFK Jr. now pulling over 20% support and called the trend “alarming” for the Biden campaign:
Kennedy officially launched his Democratic primary bid on April 19, after a month or two of making noise about it. In an April 9 Morning Consult poll, 10 percent of those surveyed said they would support Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The day of Kennedy’s launch, a USA Today/Suffolk poll had Kennedy at 14 percent. The Fox News poll released April 26, referenced by CNN, showed Kennedy at 19 percent. Kennedy was at 21 percent in an April 27 Emerson College poll.
Ten, 14, 19, 21: Each of these is a significant number of percentage points for a primary challenger to an incumbent president!
But even if 21 percent ends up as Kennedy’s high-water mark, it does speak to a fundamental problem with Biden’s reelection campaign—a problem that Democrats are still publicly whistling past.
A fundamental problem, indeed.
Democrats have never been excited for Joe Biden, he’s actually quite a terrible campaigner in practice and a worse candidate on paper. His decades in Washington make him the epitome of an out-of-touch politician that has been pampered by his government job(s) for so long, he has no idea what a gallon of milk costs these days.
Furthermore, Biden is merely a dike in the dam of Democratic politics holding back both sides of the spectrum from taking over. He plays the “moderate” when he needs to but then fires up some red meat for the progressive base every time he talks about the evil “MAGA Republicans” destroying the country.
On the one hand, he’s perhaps the best amalgamation of what politics has descended to. His speeches are void of accomplishment and his 2024 campaign launch was based on empty rhetoric of “giving everyone a chance,” whatever that means to a man who has presided over the highest inflation rates in 40 years.
Slate also points out that not too long ago, Democrats were getting pretty comfortable with the idea of jettisoning Biden in favor of someone, well, younger:
An April poll from NBC News (before Biden announced) found that 70 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of Democrats, did not believe that Biden should run for a second term. Sixty-nine percent of those who said he should not run cited age as a major or minor reason for the opinion. This was not a one-off. An Associated Press survey in February found that only 37 percent of Democrats felt Biden should run again. In a New York Times poll last summer, 64 percent of Democrats said they wanted another 2024 candidate. The primary reason given is always the same: age, age, age. Biden is 80, certainly doesn’t seem any younger than 80, and—if our understanding of time is correct—is only going to get older as time advances.
That was over two-thirds of the country including over half of Democrats who said Biden should step aside and not run again. That was before he announced, of course, so the numbers will have changed since then.
The main takeaway is that Biden remains what he was when Democrats finally settled on him during the 2020 primary. An embarrassment of gaffes wrapped up in an aloof package that has a tendency to sniff the hair of girls who happen to drift into his orbit. In short, the guy is creepy. Democrats will inevitably circle the wagons and stand by their hair-sniffing man.
In that context, it’s no surprise that someone like RFK Jr. is pulling almost one-quarter of Democrats who would prefer someone a bit less decrepit and outdated as their party’s standard bearer in 2024.
Nothing will amount to RFK Jr.’s challenge, or that of Marianne Williamson, for that matter, because the DNC will coalesce around Biden and make sure he is untouched and unchallenged for his re-election bid.
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