RFK Jr. Spread Some Libertarian Ideas, Then Sold Out to Trump
Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has suspended his campaign for the presidency in 10 swing states, where he will seek to remove his name from the ballot. He said on Friday that he did not want to play a spoiler role and prevent former President Donald Trump from winning the election. RFK Jr. cited his agreement with Trump on the fundamental issues of censorship and foreign policy as the reason for his tacit support.
Earlier in the week, RFK Jr.’s running mate, entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, suggested that they wished to avoid a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris at all costs; even though RFK Jr. was formerly a Democrat—and has a recognizably Democratic last name—recent polling suggested that his candidacy was hurting Trump slightly more than Harris. RFK Jr.’s main appeal was to disaffected, contrarian voters who lost faith in the elite consensus, especially with respect to the federal government’s heavy-handed COVID-19 policies; these voters are more likely to pick Trump as their second choice than Harris.
Unfortunately, the U.S.’s winner-take-all system tends to create elections that are competitive for just the two major parties. Independent and third-party candidates struggle to gain traction and end up accomplishing very little. This is a structural problem; by contrast, in a European parliamentary system, a candidate who receives just 5 percent of the national vote might expect to receive 5 percent of the representation in the government. Major parties must then work with smaller parties to form governing coalitions. In the U.S., only the winner matters.
This means that tacitly supporting one of the two major candidates in exchange for influence is actually one of the only ways for an independent to transmogrify their support base into actual power. It’s not surprising, then, that RFK Jr. has chosen this path. Seeking higher office outside the two-party system is extremely difficult and Republicans and Democrats work t
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