Washington Wednesday: New team of rivals

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 28th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

On Friday, Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump.

His decision comes as Kamala Harris has taken a slight lead in six of the seven swing states, according to recent data from the Cook Political Report. Those states are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

MAST: Might the Kennedy endorsement help? World’s Washington Bureau reporter Leo Briceno has the story

LEO BRICENO: By the end of his campaign, Kennedy was polling at around seven percent nationally—a steep drop from the 20 percent he had in several polls back in November of 2023. But that’s still millions of potential votes. And in a tightly contested election, they could be decisive in November.

JASON AMATUCCI: There will be a lot of people from the campaign that follow him and follow his lead…

Jason Amatucci is a former director for the Kennedy Campaign in Virginia. He spoke to me by phone right after getting the news about Kennedy.

AMATUCCI: This new unity ticket, as they’re calling it, I think is a very powerful coalition that will combat a lot of the forces that are working against America right now.

Amatucci declined to definitively say how he’ll vote this fall, but he said that he’ll follow Kennedy’s lead.

AMATUCCI: And I support Kennedy and his mission and his issues and wherever that takes me, I will go.

The question for Kennedy supporters eyeing the Republican ticket is whether Trump will take the same positions as Kennedy on key issues. The question for Trump is whether there are enough Kennedy voters to improve his odds in swing states.

Polling by Mainstreet Research in June found that Kennedy had a sizable presence in contested battlegrounds. In Pennsylvania for instance, he was polling at around eight percent back in June. In Wisconsin, he had 13 percent. And in Michigan, Kennedy was polling at around 11. Meanwhile, recent polls show that Harris and Trump are either dead even or within two points of each other in all three of those states.

In his campaign-ending speech on Friday, Kennedy articulated why he felt that his voters should support Trump going forward. He pointed to areas of overlap between him and the former president that had become apparent over private conversations between the two.

JOHN F. KENNEDY JR.: Last summer it looked like no candidate was willing to negotiate a quick end to the Ukraine war, to tackle chronic disease epidemic, to protect free speech, our constitutional freedoms, to clean corporate influence out of our government or to defy the neocons in their agenda of endless military adventurism. But now one of the two candidates has adopted these issues as his own—to the point where he has asked to enlist me in his administration.

Kennedy didn’t mention what kind of role he hopes to take on in a potential second Trump administration. But supporters like Amatucci hope that that possibility, whatever it looks like, means their campaign wasn’t in vain.

AMATUCCI: If he’s actually going to be in government, making decisions and making things happen, I think that’s huge. I think that’s a big thing, I don’t really understand the mindset of like ‘oh this is ending’ and ‘this is all down the tube and there’s nothing happening next.’

Fighting chronic illness wasn’t really a part of Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020, but he’s always had a more critical eye toward America’s role in conflicts overseas—especially during his presidency. And he has put a lot of emphasis on combating the administrative state.

Here’s Trump in his first address to a joint session of Congress.

DONALD TRUMP: We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five-year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials.

The same day that Kennedy dropped out, Trump started incorporating some of the language that the third-party candidate had made a fixture of his campaign.

TRUMP: Millions and millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water, and a healthy nation have concerns about toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food. That’s why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts working with Bobby to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases.

But some long-time Kennedy supporters aren’t so sure. Esther Maynard worked on the Kennedy campaign in Virginia as a volunteer, and she’s skeptical about Trump’s promises on the campaign trail.

ESTHER MAYNARD: I’m not sure there’s very much that Trump could say that would convince me to trust him. I don’t think I’m going to trust him until if he becomes president, he’s able to follow through with action.

She pointed out that in 2017, Trump pledged to work with Kennedy on a panel on immunization safety. But that didn’t happen.

That said, she thinks she’ll probably end up voting for him anyway.

MAYNARD: I don't think people are going to be psyched about it, because there's a reason we were Kennedy's supporters and not Donald Trump supporters, but if we previously thought that Bobby Kennedy had a pretty good read on the situation, and had pretty good judgment, and would make a pretty good president, then I think that we should listen to him when he says that this is the smart strategic decision for how we can best preserve the republic.

Even if Kennedy doesn’t play a role in a second Trump administration, Maynard believes the issues Kennedy highlighted will still play a role in American politics—especially on chronic illness and the emergence of allergies, stunted development in children, and more.

MAYNARD: He’s kind of the canary in the coal mine but he notices the gas before the rest of us do but if we ignore it we’re going to notice it sooner or later. And if you can manage to put the pieces together for them and say ‘hey, look around you, we’re not okay, and here are the reasons why, and this is how you fix it,’ I think that that definitely has the power to stay in the national conversation.

And there’s historical precedent for third party candidates influencing the national conversation. Daron Shaw is chair of state politics at the University of Texas at Austin. He says that issues that become important in politics often come from outside voices.

DARON SHAW: Historically, the political science literature tells us that those movements are pretty important if for no other reason than they usually force—at least if they have some kind of momentum or steam—they force the political parties to take into account the issues and the grievances brought to the table by a third party. That’s true going all the way back to the socialism and the social Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt who basically co-opted much of the socialist party agenda when he was crafting his New Deal. That’s true for Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 when the Democrats and Republicans basically co-opted many of his ideas on the budget.

So what was the primary motivator for Kennedy supporters? His policies, or his status as a third option?

In July, the Pew Research Center found that as many as half of Kennedy’s supporters said they were open to voting for him because he provided an alternative to the two main parties. Just 9 percent of respondents said they followed him because of his policy issues. So that means it’s likely the bloc of voters that will follow Kennedy to join Trump is smaller than many think it is.

In his address, Kennedy framed his move to support Trump as the best way to continue his work. He compared it to a coalition made all the way back in 1861 that supported Abraham Lincoln’s campaign and helped him win the election.

KENNEDY: In those meetings he suggested we join forces as a unity party. We talked about Abraham Lincoln’s team of rivals. That arrangement would allow us to disagree publicly and privately and fiercely if need be on issues on which we differ while working together on the existential issues upon which we are in concordance.

Kennedy joined Trump on the campaign trail in Arizona last week and has been tapped to join Trump’s transition team.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno.

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