Democrats mostly unburdened by RFK Jr.’s possible Trump endorsement

CHICAGO — Democratic lawmakers, delegates, and attendees at the 2024 national convention aren’t sweating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. possibly dropping out of the race and endorsing former President Donald Trump.

Reports surfaced Wednesday that Kennedy, whose independent bid for the White House is only garnering single-digit support, is shopping his endorsement to the former president in exchange for a Cabinet-level position in a second Trump administration.

The nephew of Democratic President John F. Kennedy and son of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the former Democrat will “address the nation” from Phoenix, Arizona, at 2 p.m. Eastern ⁠— the day after Vice President Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told the Washington Examiner Thursday morning that a Trump-RFK endorsement wouldn’t kill the vice president’s momentum and that Democrats are already putting in work to win over independent and undecided voters.

“I think that the convention has a lot of excitement and energy, and this is going to be a very close race, and we still have to make the case to all the voters, every voter,” he said in an interview following remarks delivered at the Wisconsin Democratic delegation’s breakfast. “Endorsements usually don’t decide races. We have to work to win those independent voters.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) agreed that Kennedy backing Trump would not affect Harris, joking to the Washington Examiner that “it just perfects the formation of the Insane Clown Posse party.”

Basil Smikle, a political expert and the former executive director of the New York Democratic Party, said he already viewed Kennedy voters as Trump voters “more or less.”

“I think it adds maybe a handful of voters to the Trump campaign, but I don’t think it makes a significant impact,” noting that Kennedy might actually hurt Trump as a surrogate because he “comes with his own controversies.”

“The one thing Donald Trump doesn’t want is to take attention away from himself by having to answer for somebody who’s endorsed him,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It’ll be an interesting story, a curiosity, but I don’t think it makes any significant difference in this wave of sort of enthusiasm and excitement. I think Kamala Harris gets a bump from her convention in a way that Donald Trump didn’t from his.”

Gemma Lowery, a Democratic delegate from Delaware, celebrated Kennedy possibly backing Trump because his supporters don’t fit the “mentality model” of the Democratic Party.

“Take your voters. Go to the other side. I’m fine with him getting more numbers of people that believe that,” she said in a fiery interview. “I’m fine with that. I don’t believe in the power of what his position was anyway, and I think crazy begets crazy, and you can’t fix that.”

Sam Crunkilton, a Democratic delegate from Nevada, told the Washington Examiner she doesn’t think “anything, including Kennedy endorsing Trump, can stop” Harris’s surge.

“I think there’s just so much joy and excitement and enthusiasm at the moment. It’s just a very genuine feeling,” she stated. “I don’t know if there’s really anything right now that can really stop the excitement that I’m seeing from delegates here and even, you know, people back home in the community.”

Not everyone at the DNC, however, was happy to shoot down the idea that Kennedy’s withdrawal could hurt Harris.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) didn’t stop to answer when the topic was broached by the Washington Examiner.

And former Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh, a never-Trump Republican-turned-Harris supporter, claimed a Kennedy endorsement would “help” the former president.

“There’s overlap between him and Trump because he’s a bad guy and a f***ing nutcase as well,” Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, told the Washington Examiner. “So this is going to make it more difficult for Kamala Harris, and we’ve got to make the case to try to reach those people, but that’s not going to be easy.”

Polling since Harris entered the race suggested that she fared significantly better in a race including Kennedy than in a head-to-head matchup with Trump.

Prior to President Joe Biden‘s 2024 withdrawal in July, polling consistently found Kennedy pulling more support from Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than from Republicans.

But after Democrats swapped out Biden for Harris, the Washington Post conducted an analysis of polls from Reuters-Ipsos, the New York Times-Siena College, the Wall Street Journal, Marquette University, CBS-YouGov, and NPR-PBS-Marist College from the first week of August and found that Harris’s average lead over Trump expanded from 1.5 points in a head-to-head matchup to 3.3 points when Kennedy is included. 

“Since the Democratic ticket turned over from Biden to Harris last month, a half-dozen quality polls have tested both a Trump-Harris matchup and a crowded race that included independent and third-party candidates. In all of them, Harris performed better in the crowded race,” the analysis reads. “Just about all of those numbers are within the margin of error, and the shifts are small. But given this is now a half-dozen polls and that these shifts are among the voters in the same poll, it’s safe to say third-party candidates are now hurting Trump more.”

Jen O’Malley Dillon, Harris’s campaign manager, said Wednesday that Kennedy endorsing Trump isn’t “going to really interfere with the race too much.”

“We are very confident that the vice president’s going to win, whether she’s running against one candidate or multiple candidates. And at the same time, I think, when you look at RFK and what’s happened over the last several months, the more the American people hear from him, the more we see that they don’t like him that much, and they think that what he’s saying is more extreme,” she said in an interview with Politico. “You saw his numbers peak several months ago. They’ve continued to drop. I think that’s similar to what we’re seeing with Donald Trump, and I think a lot of the base of the support that exists across the board is going to stay.”

The Trump campaign, asked for comment, pointed to remarks the former president made on Fox Business on Wednesday and Fox News Thursday morning.

“I would always be honored,” Trump said when asked about a possible endorsement from Kennedy. “I respect him.”