The Four-Way Race for the American Presidency: Trump, Biden, Manchin and RFK

"Rule by Law" not "Rule of Law"

There was a three-way race for the American Presidency. It had been Biden vs Trump vs Kennedy. Now, after Trump's convictions on 34 counts of wrongdoing, we see a new entrant and new odds. Former Senator Joe Manchin re-entered the race within hours of Trump’s court judgment (which Trump will obviously appeal). Manchin is highly respected and has a strong following. But, he entered as an independent, not as a Democrat. This means he thinks Biden can’t win, Trump mustn’t win, and Kennedy shouldn’t win. So, now it’s a four-way race with two independents (Manchin and RFK) looking much more potentially popular than President Biden. Trump still leads them all. His polls bounced upward on the announcement of his convictions in the first of several trials against him. He now leads all others by at least 1.7%, according to Zogby. Prior to the convictions, Trump was leading the rest by 5 points, according to Rasmussen and a number of other polls. This race is already hard to judge but is sure looks set to be a nail biter with two “long-shot” “dark-horse” candidates now in the race. Not one. Thsi further raises the risk that nobody get the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win and we end up in a Contingent Election in January 2025.

Not everybody understood this was a three-way race because the mainstream press refused to report Robert Kennedy’s rather astonishingly strong poll numbers.  Zogby recently conducted a massive 50-state poll, with ten times as many participants as usual so as to lower the margin of error to almost nothing. They asked some 26,000 voters who they would support in a one-to-one race between only Trump and Kennedy and, separately, between only Kennedy and Biden. The results were stunning. If faced with a choice between President Biden and Kennedy, assuming there was no serious Republican contender like Trump, then Kennedy would win 367 Electoral College votes while Biden would win only 171. If faced with a choice between President Trump (pre-felony conviction/pre-appeal) it was a vastly narrower margin but, Kennedy still won against Trump by taking 270 Electoral College votes versus 268 for Trump. However, after the 34 Trump felony convictions (pre-appeal), one could expect this margin to be even wider in Kennedy’s favour. The polls also concluded that Trump beats Biden hands down in a one-to-one matchup pre-Trump’s felony conviction/pre-appeal process. Kennedy says President Biden is now the spoiler in this race. Not him. “To be a spoiler, a candidate has to fulfill two requirements — first, they must not be able to win themselves, and, second, by participating in the election, they must prevent someone else from winning who otherwise would.” As it stands, he says, Biden is the only one who cannot win against either candidate and “whose presence gives Trump the victory instead of Kennedy.” This has not been reported in mainstream media. I won't be surprised if you can’t find the Zogby poll. Here’s what I got when I went to find the Zogby poll results and got this:

I had to go to Duck Duck Go to find it. Interesting.

Manchin’s re-entry into the race aligns with the gossip around the Democratic Party. Word is they’ve been trying to figure out how to drop both Biden and Harris and replace them with someone else for the last few weeks. They had finally realized that Biden might not win and had started casting around to replace Biden and his VP, Kamala Harris, who is the least popular VP in history. It took a long time for them to clock that the Biden/Harris ticket does not hold a lot of promise even against opponents they view as a quack (Kennedy) and a criminal (Trump). It will be hard for them to dismiss Manchin. No doubt they will call him a traitor. But, the Democrats could not figure out who to replace Biden and Harris with or how to elegantly change horses mid-race. As I said many months ago, they had wanted to replace Harris with the Governor of California, but that, too, proved far trickier to accomplish than they had ever imagined. If it seems like the Democratic Party is a little behind the 8-Ball here, that’s because they usually are. Remember how Hilary Clinton dismissed Trump out of hand only to find herself firmly trounced by him? There’s a track record here of overestimating the probability of success and underestimating opponents. They certainly did not expect to face Manchin as an opponent. Despite his strong numbers, they still don’t see Kennedy as a serious threat.

That means we now have two popular independent and centrist candidates against both Biden and Trump. Kennedy and Manchin want to return to a bipartisan world. Manchin tweeted, “Let’s work together to fix America. Don’t hate the other side. There’s only one side - the American side - and we have to work together to save our country. That’s why I changed my party registration to no party affiliation.” This is very similar to the language Kennedy uses to describe his “We The People Party”. I