A poll has found that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – the once-Democrat-now-independent presidential candidate and nephew of JFK, known for his environmental and anti-vaccine activism – is more popular among voters than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Joel Kotkin in UnHerd says RFK’s popularity shows that Americans aren’t despairing just yet. Here’s an excerpt.
Amid the muck created by America’s two inadequate presidential frontrunners, green shoots are rising. They may not grow to maturity this year, but the basis for the emergence of better political choices already exists and is showing surprising life.
The majority of voters, particularly independents, do not want a Biden-Trump rematch. That’s no surprise, since three-quarters of the population think that Joe Biden is too old, with the vast majority considering him not mentally up to the job. For his part, Donald Trump has consistently failed to gain approval from more than 42% of the electorate. Astonishingly, the most favoured of all the candidates is neither one of these two, but instead independent candidate Robert Kennedy.
This all reflects a deep political despair. Nearly two-thirds of Americans dislike the political status quo, and barely 4% think the system is working well, a Pew survey found, while 75% feel that national leadership has declined in recent years, according to Rasmussen polling from last month. Crucially, independents still form the largest voting bloc in the U.S., with 43% of adults identifying as such.
But the growing disenchantment could also become a source of hope for a new breed of leaders. In the Republican Party — despite her frankly disingenuous comments about the Civil War — Nikki Haley has emerged as a viable alternative to Trump. Among Democrats, we see the rise to prominence of independent-minded liberals like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, the onetime progressive heartthrob who works closely on issues with conservatives such as Sen. J.D. Vance.
Like a majority of Americans, Fetterman aggressively supports Israel and wants to staunch the open border. Unsurprisingly, he is denounced by the progressive press for breaking the party line. Similar treatment was accorded to Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, now an independent. The people are willing, unlike Biden and the party establishment, to take on the lunatic Left fringe that now infects the Democratic Party on anything from Israel-Palestine to the impact of the porous border.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A separate poll found that Nikki Haley, who was pipped to second place in Iowa by Ron DeSantis, elicits much lower enthusiasm from her supporters than other Republican candidates: while 88% of Trump’s voters and 68% of DeSantis’s voters are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about their candidate, just 39% of Haley’s backers said the same.
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