Why a Late RFK Jr. Polling Boom Is Unlikely

The last three independent presidential candidates who polled at over 10 percent lost momentum by Election Day.

Whatever you think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his independent candidacy for president this year, he’s already accomplished something that’s fairly rare in recent American politics: registering support from over 10 percent of the electorate in national (and many battleground state) polls. He’s currently at 10.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling averages and 10.2 percent at FiveThirtyEight in surveys of the presidential race that include non-major-party candidates. This has only happened four times in the last 75 years: in 1968, when former Alabama governor George C. Wallace ran on a so-called American Independent Party ticket; in 1980, when former Republican presidential candidate and Illinois congressman John Anderson launched an independent candidacy after dropping out of the GOP race; and in 1992 and 1996, when Texas billionaire Ross Perot twice built a strong independent campaign on his own wealth and message.

It stands to reason that campaigns like these, which show some promise but not enough to make their candidate a realistic prospect for victory, will lose altitude as Election Day approaches and voters start worrying about “wasting their votes.” A lot of observers expect the Kennedy–Nicole Shanahan ticket to lose support as it becomes obvious it’s likely to become a “spoiler” for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. But it’s worth a look back at the notable independents of recent memory to see if that was true for them, and if so, how rapidly and thoroughly they faded.

George Wallace, the regional champion

1968 independent Wallace differed significantly from Anderson, Perot, and Kennedy in that he was essentially a southern regional candidate. A reactionary populist Democrat (he ran in Democratic presidential primaries in 1964, 1972, and 1976), Wallace represented white resistance to the civil-rights revolution that was transforming the South. While he ran a quasi-national campaign and was on the ballot in all 50 states, Wallace’s explicit strategy was to win enough southern electoral votes to throw the close Humphrey-Nixon contest into the the House of Representatives, where southern congressmen could use their leverage to slow down civil-rights and voting-rights implementation.

Wallace didn’t miss the target by much: He won 46 electoral votes, and Nixon won just 31 more than the minimum necessary to win. The Alabaman finished second, ahead of Humphrey, in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, which Nixon won after a powerful Republican effort to undercut Wallace among southern conservatives (Nixon’s “southern strategy,” which he took into the White House, was Wallace’s true consolation prize). In the polls, Wallace had an autumn surge, racking up 21 percent in both Harris and Gallup polls in late September. But his support dropped as Election Day approached, and he wound up with 13.5 percent of the vote. Since there were no presidential debates in 1968, Wallace never got to share the spotlight with the major-party candidates.

John Anderson, the centrist who got squeezed

In some respects, John Anderson’s 1980 campaign most resembles Kennedy’s. Like RFK Jr., he was a major-party contender who launched an independent candidacy after underperforming in the early GOP primaries, arguing that neither Republican Ronald Reagan nor Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter offered a compelling agenda to meet the country’s needs. He mostly offered a mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism in a year when many of his fellow Republicans were alienated by Reagan’s hard-core conservatism, and many Democratic liberals (particularly those who backed Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful candidacy) were estranged from the outsider-incumbent Carter.

Anderson went independent in April, and almost immediately, Gallup showed him polling at 20 percent or higher. At his peak in June, he was at 24 percent, per Gallup, trailing Carter by 9 points and Reagan by 11. Carter, however, refused to participate in any debates that included Anderson, so the independent was consigned to one meaningless debate with Reagan. He steadily lost ground in late summer and the autumn, eventually abandoning his centrist stance and on some issues running to Carter’s left. Anderson wound up with 6.6 percent of the vote and wasn’t near second place in any state. Since Reagan won a majority of the popular vote and beat Carter by nearly 10 percent, carrying 44 states, Anderson really couldn’t claim to have significantly affected the outcome.

Ross Perot, the “radical middle” maverick

The most successful independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Perot exploited George H.W. Bush’s unpopularity (especially with conservatives) and Democratic ideological divisions to throw a scare into both major parties in 1992, using his vast wealth to secure universal ballot access and make folksy yet substantive pitches on TV talk shows and in paid ads. He argued that both major parties were damaging the country through fiscal profligacy and free-trade policies, offering himself as a disinterested business executive willing to do what was needed to eliminate both budget and trade deficits. Upon announcing his candidacy in March, he was immediately running even with Democrat Bill Clinton, and in June, Gallup showed him running first, with 39 percent to Bush’s 31 percent and Clinton’s 25 percent.

But suddenly, the wheels began falling off the Perot bandwagon, which suffered from campaign-staff and volunteer infighting and the candidate’s own paranoia about attacks on him and his family, especially from the campaign of his fellow Texan Bush. In the middle of the Democratic convention, Perot suddenly dropped out of the race, conceding the Democrats had “revitalized themselves” under Clinton and that he saw no path to the presidency that didn’t go through a “disruptive” election in the U.S. House. As his hopes that one of the two major-party candidates would endorse his economic proposals faded, Perot abruptly dropped back into the race at the beginning of October and began to rebuild his support even as Clinton built a sizable lead over Bush. Perot managed to make the stage in all three presidential debates, but never regained his mojo. He finished with nearly 19 percent of the vote, nothing like his June peak but still impressive. He won no electoral votes, though he did finish second in Maine and Utah. Some Republicans at the time claimed Perot had “spoiled” the election for Bush, but exit polls showed Perot voters being drawn from both major-party candidates’ columns, which means Clinton would have won in any event.

Perot’s second campaign in 1996, at the helm of the “Reform Party” he created as his vehicle, peaked in the Gallup poll at 19 percent in June but then steadily lost ground. He was excluded from the October Dole-Clinton debates as a nonviable candidate, and was at 6 percent in the final Gallup survey. He eventually received 8.4 percent of the vote, less than half of his 1992 total; Clinton defeated Dole by 8.5 percent (49.2 percent to 40.7 percent). You could argue that Perot’s balanced-budget message influenced the major-party candidates to make clear and responsible budget proposals, but otherwise his impact was ephemeral.

The bottom line: Independents lack staying power

This is obviously a limited dataset, but modern independent presidential campaigns have routinely lost momentum as Election Day approaches and voters focus on viable candidacies. It’s hard to know what might have happened in 1992 had Perot not dropped out for nearly two months, but in the end, his campaign never regained its early momentum.

But we know that unlike Wallace in 1968, Kennedy has no particular regional base or realistic hope for obtaining a significant bloc of electoral votes. Unlike Perot in both 1992 and 1996, Kennedy has no crystal-clear and limited set of policy proposals with which his campaign is identified. And like Anderson in 1980, he seems to be drawing from both major-party candidates in a way that gives both campaigns an incentive to marginalize him as a “spoiler.” Indeed, the odds are high that the Trump and Biden campaigns will go harshly and heavily negative on the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket just as voters begin to drift away from nonviable candidates. Yes, there is significant voter frustration with the major-party offerings in 2024, but that was also the case in 1968, 1980, and 1992. At this point, we can’t even be sure that RFK Jr. will gain ballot access in every state, which the previous independent bids did all achieve. So there’s no particular reason to imagine that a Kennedy boom is in America’s immediate future.