JFK Jr. Plays Third-Party Politics
With a splashy Super Bowl ad and a growing coalition of supporters, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not backing down.
“Third Party Candidates Widening Trump’s Lead Over Biden,” intoned Matt Welch for Reason Magazine on February 8, 2024. “There’s a reason why Democrats are freaking out over comparative anti-interventionists RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West.”
“You will rarely go broke betting against independent and third-party candidates to undershoot their expectations and to fail (as they have every presidential election after 1968) to win a single state,” prefaced Welch. “Many, though not all, of the conditions that dampened third-party enthusiasm in 2018, 2020, and 2022 remain in place, chiefly high negative polarization and the related anxiety that the worse of the two major parties will introduce authoritarianism.”
But:
“But America’s anti-interventionist sentiment almost always dwarfs that of their highest representatives in Washington, even those who were elected promising a more humble foreign policy,” Welch fretted. “And it’s not hard to imagine overseas entanglements sprouting all over the globe this calendar year, against a domestic backdrop of highly charged politics and profound youth-vote alienation from the rest of the country.”