Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to end his presidential bid comes after his poll numbers had fallen to the level of a run-of-the-mill third-party candidate, after initially showing notably strong support.
And while it is hard to foresee the effect his decision might have on the election, his endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump is unlikely to change the nature of the race, even if it is well-received by Mr. Kennedy’s supporters.
This is in part because it is hard to know how many of Mr. Kennedy’s supporters will vote in November. They are less likely than others to have voted in 2020, and are also less likely to say they will vote come November.
And despite the common narrative that he was hurting Mr. Trump by staying in, it was not consistently clear which candidate Mr. Kennedy was drawing more votes from after President Biden exited the race. In recent Times/Siena polls, when pushed, Mr. Kennedy’s supporters were more inclined to support Mr. Trump. But other recent high-quality polls had found him to be pulling support from Vice President Kamala Harris.
That disagreement among polls is partially a reflection of how quickly public opinion has been changing over the last few weeks. And when high-quality polls show different findings on similar questions, it is often an indication that the opinions being measured are not strongly held.
In fact, only a minority of Mr. Kennedy’s supporters in recent Times/Siena polls said they would definitely vote for him, an indication that they might still be making up their minds.
Some early polls found Mr. Kennedy’s support at over 20 percent after he announced his intention to run as an independent candidate in October 2023. When he left the race, Mr. Kennedy was polling at less than 5 percent nationally, according to New York Times polling averages.
His initial level of support — almost unheard-of for a modern third-party candidate, even if it never lifted his bid out of the realm of the quixotic — was largely a result of the intense displeasure among voters with their choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, compounded by the quirks of asking about third-party candidates in polls.
But his numbers had begun to fall long before Ms. Harris entered the race and was met by a jolt of enthusiasm. That jolt led them to drop further, and there was still plenty of time for those numbers to continue to decline before Election Day.
Before he dropped out, his level of support in the polls was lower than the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, was receiving at this time in 2016, and was closer to that for Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, that year. Mr. Johnson went on to receive a little over 3 percent of the vote; Ms. Stein received about 1 percent.
In the most recent Times/Siena polls of seven key battleground states, if all Kennedy supporters who identified as Republicans, leaned toward the Republican Party or did not lean toward either party moved to support Mr. Trump, he would gain, on average, 1 percentage point. On average, Ms. Harris held a slim 2 percentage point lead in those polls, with or without Mr. Kennedy.
To be sure, some of these states’ outcomes could be decided by mere thousands of votes, as they were in 2020. But with Mr. Kennedy’s prominence already having waned, and fewer of his supporters likely to say they’ll vote, his decision to leave the stage may not change the state of the race significantly.
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