It's a Three-Way Race for the White House Now
It's a Three-Way Race!
New York Magazine writes Democrats Are Starting to Take the RFK Jr. Threat Seriously. According to Real Clear Polling, Kennedy is at 15% in national polls now.
He is also no longer a "spoiler" because he is drawing voters equally from both sides. The Intelligencer writes:
"Much of his preliminary support appears to come from younger, male voters, and often Black and Latino ones — the exact group that Biden supporters are most concerned about maintaining.”
“The thing that makes this so difficult is the sheer number of the electorate that doesn’t see this as a Biden-versus-Trump race.”
Remember that Kennedy’s game is not to win outright. His game is to deny Trump or Biden the 270 Electoral College votes they need to win. He only needs to pull about 37 votes from President Biden and perhaps fewer from Trump to do this. If nobody gets 270 such votes, the Constitution provides that the process moves into a Contingent Election. This means that the new House of Representatives (not the current House) will decide based on who gets 26 states first. That will favor someone who gets along with both sides. There’s only one of them - Kennedy. The Senate will choose the vice president based on one senator and one vote. We have not seen this process since the early 1800s, when it happened three times.
The Intelligencer quotes a "senior Democrat" "who's been involved in the anti-Kennedy effort" who makes an absolutely critical point. The person explains: "If you move 7,000 people in a couple of these states, that’s the ballgame. You’re not talking about flipping 100,000 Trump voters in Pennsylvania". Cities and independents are driving this race. Kennedy doesn’t need to campaign in the countryside. He has to hit the key liberal cities that tend to be more centrist-leaning.
When I first wrote that Kennedy had a chance, it was a wildly out-of-the-market call - the kind of call I really like to make whenever possible and only when I have a high degree of confidence.
Nov 11, 2023: Independent's Day & The 7th Party System
That led to a more recent update published by UnHerd:
How RFK could smash the two-party system In American politics, upset has become the rule.
See also: Why 37 Votes = A Hung Electoral College, a Contingent Election, and the 7th Party System
The next step is to announce a VP. He has to announce this in order to get onto certain ballots. Rumors are setting the net on fire. I am not to concerned about the celebrity possibilities. The thing to watch is Google. As I have said in the past, every Presidency is influenced by the technology used to win it. Clinton used Saturday Night Live, and Obama coasted in on YouTube. Trump won on Twitter. I had said that this election is our first Podcast Presidency, with Instagram playing a strong supporting role. I had not anticipated a candidate that might get Google on side! That’s what will probably happen if Nicole Shanahan ends up being his VP pick. The algorithm is everything now. Past President’s used tech platforms. In a sense, Shanahan is Google. She was present at the creation of the Google story, one of America’s most important modern mythology stories. She is the mother of the Google heir. I am guessing she knows more about algorithms than most people alive today and has a network of the world’s leading algorithm experts to call upon. I am not saying Google will back her. I am saying she knows how to work the Google system, and that matters a whole lot more than money these days. SEO meets the Oval Office.
It may seem that picking an outsider to politics as VP is a form of insanity. Even I would suggest that there is a risk of what happened to President Obama. He won, but he had no idea how to operate the incredibly complex machinery of government and so had no choice but to allow the Democratic Party to run more and more of it every day. Arguably, this is how the DNC came to control levers of power that were traditionally in the hands of the President. I remember the tone at the time. The Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid thought of Obama as a clueless kid who had no IOUs or chips in the world’s highest stakes poker game. Obama picked his fights carefully but accomplished less because he had to fight the worst enemy you can have in Washington. He learned the hard way that the enemy is often (if not always) your own team. Kennedy knows this all too well. So, he is saying let’s bring in management, outside expertise, people who are not part of the system. Now, this is exactly what President Trump stands for. So, we already know that the public wants a sensible outsider who can “clean up Washington.”
Third, why be a deep-pocket donor when you can be a player? Kennedy is saying, “Don’t just donate your change to this. Be the change”. This is very Kennedyesque. This is, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country” in a modern format. Shanahan has her own pile of cash and seems to have funded the Superbowl advert that sprung Kennedy' into the view of the Boomers who don’t watch alternative media. The positive results of that advertisement have been so profound that President Biden felt the need to assemble all his Kennedy family allies in a sunny shot on the White House steps on St Patrick’s Day. RFK is being portrayed as the Black Sheep of America’s Royal Family. That holds a lot of appeal to the young. They ask, “What is he fighting against?” “Why did social media platforms ban him?” This is where things are starting to get seriously tricky.