Title: RFK Jr.’s Popularity Foretells Trouble for Biden

President Joe Biden looks nervous about what effect Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is having on his chances for reelection. When he threw down the gauntlet to offer terms of debate to former President Donald Trump, he made it clear he wanted to keep the insurgent independent as far away from the debate stage as possible.

For his part, Trump was happy to oblige, agreeing to Biden’s demand that their battle of wits be a “head-to-head comparison of the two candidates with a chance of winning the election.”

It’s difficult to tell whom Kennedy is hurting more on his trek around the country in search of ballot access in all 50 states. He’s only secured ballot access in Utah, though his campaign has claimed he’s qualified for several others.

Kennedy’s polling is sporadic. It’s difficult to gauge how he is doing in important contests where he isn’t guaranteed ballot access. With history as a helpful but imperfect guide, it’s clear popular insurgents have hurt the incumbent party more than the challenger.

It doesn’t take massive victories for rogue candidates to have outsize effects on presidential contests. In three contests in particular, it’s clear that when a third-party candidate received as little as 3% of the vote, he managed to make the contest a referendum on the incumbent and his party to a greater degree than any reelection contest already is.

William H. Taft

Kennedy didn’t make it as far into the primary contest as Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged his one-time protege William H. Taft for the Republican Party’s nomination. In 2024, Kennedy barely made it out of the opening days as a Democratic challenger to Biden before switching parties.

Taft had the awkward task of rejecting a primary contest being launched by his predecessor. Roosevelt was waging a campaign to pull the Republican Party to the left and had all of the grandeur of his time in office to provide his fight with Taft extra heft.

Kennedy doesn’t have the same governing experience Roosevelt offered, but he’s already mounted an unsuccessful bid to challenge Biden from within the party before leaving it to start his own. His nascent We the People Party was built up to make it easier to gain ballot access in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, and North Carolina.

Roosevelt was a far more effective challenger than Kennedy is shaping up to be. Following the defeat at the convention, his Bull Moose Party carried out a brutal attack on Taft, driving him off the campaign trail and onto the golf links. The rest of the 1912 contest was between Roosevelt and Wilson, with Taft only winning eight Electoral College votes to Roosevelt’s 88 and Wilson’s 435.

Hubert Humphrey

Democrats were going to struggle to hold on to the White House in 1968 even before George Wallace mounted his American Independent Party bid with a plea to “stand up for America.”

Discontent with the prolonged conflict in Vietnam, the political assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and a chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago paved the way for Richard Nixon to make his comeback from political loser to world leader.

Political violence on the scale of 1968 is missing in 2024, but Biden is struggling to reassure the country he is the man to handle conflicts around the globe. After showing robust support for Ukraine and Israel in their wars of encroachment against Russia and Hamas, respectively, the Biden administration is struggling to tell voters the conflicts have an end in sight or that it can shepherd the world toward resolutions.

Trump is shaking off his own reputation as a political loser and could make Republicans forget all about the series of losses the party has had since he upset Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Like Trump today, Nixon walked through most of the 1968 contest with a comfortable lead over Humphrey.

However, Nixon’s comfortable lead shrunk on Election Day. The reliably Democratic South wasn’t ready to line up behind him, and six states couldn’t stomach giving the Kennedy-Johnson-Humphrey line of succession another four years.

Wallace always intended to play spoiler, taking just enough votes to deny either major candidate enough support to win outright and throw the election to the House. Instead of splitting the electorate, Wallace split the South with Nixon. He won 46 Electoral College votes, holding the three states his segregationist forerunner Strom Thurmond won in 1948, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, while picking up Georgia and Arkansas.

Nixon’s landslide victory was still four years away. In 1968, Wallace siphoned off enough votes from Humphrey in the South to make the popular vote a close contest with just 43% of voters nationwide backing the Republican. But that chaos in the country and at the ballot box left Nixon with 301 Electoral College votes to Humphrey’s 191 and temporarily repaired his reputation.

George H.W. Bush

Unlike Ross Perot, a successful businessman who mounted the most successful third-party challenge in modern history, Kennedy isn’t independently wealthy, but he has recruited a vice presidential candidate who has enough money to bankroll their attempt to play spoiler.

Biden has faced many of the same challenges and controversies Bush had to contend with during his sluggish reelection campaign in 1992. Like Bush, Biden has an economy that is doing better than voters seem to recognize, is facing repeated questions about his health and vigor as a candidate, and has even had a problem with checking his watch at a less-than-opportune time.

With independent funding taken care of, Kennedy’s next step is to mimic Perot’s success in finding his way onto the debate stage with Trump and Biden. No third-party candidate before or since Perot has been allowed to go toe-to-toe with the major party representatives, and with the Commission on Presidential Debates getting pushed to the sidelines, it looks as if Kennedy won’t be in a position to make history.

Perot, like Roosevelt and Wallace before him, had a much larger impact on the candidate in the party he most closely aligned with. Despite Trump’s initially warm reception of Kennedy, vaccine skepticism, and the penchant for conspiracy theorizing Trump and Kennedy share, it’s clear the former Democrat looks more like Biden on paper than the former president.

In 1992, a low-energy Bush fell victim to an energized third-party candidate who insisted his followers help put him on the ballot in all 50 states and a talented major party challenger who overcame myriad personal foibles to bump the steady hand out of office.

In the end, Perot had less success in the Electoral College than Wallace two decades earlier, but he won an incredible 19% of the vote, the most since Roosevelt in 1912. Bush wound up wounded, limping across the finish line and handing Clinton an apparent mandate with a 370-168 Electoral College rout.

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Bad news for Biden

While Biden, Taft, Humphrey, and Bush all would have preferred to remind voters why they should return them or their party to power, they were each forced to deal with the uneasy fact that all was so unwell under their regimes that new challengers enjoyed a groundswell of support.

As much as Biden wants to make his last campaign a referendum on how Trump performed four years ago, Kennedy’s continued presence will serve as a reminder to voters that all is not well in the United States. It might even be as bad as Biden says it is.