Editorial: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s very dangerous crusade

No independent candidate has been elected president or even come close, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won’t be the first. His chances are nearly zero, but he could make the difference in who wins.

The role of spoiler must be irresistible to someone with so much ego, resentment and crackpot ideas. That makes him dangerous to a country that can’t afford another election won by someone who loses the popular vote — or could even be decided by a dysfunctional House of Representatives, which is worse.

The anachronistic Electoral College encourages meddling by third-party contenders like RFK Jr., Cornel West or the No Labels organization that threatens to run a hand-picked slate.

Despite widespread voter dissatisfaction with the prospect of a Round Two between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both are virtually assured of being their party’s nominees next year. Both also have good reason to worry about alternatives, especially RFK Jr.

A threat to Trump, too

Kennedy shares a name and little else with his fiercely liberal father, former Attorney General and Sen. Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy, a champion of racial justice and the poor who was assassinated in 1968.

The Democratic fear has been that Junior would siphon enough votes away from Biden in battleground states to throw the electoral majority to Trump. But now that he’s chosen to run as an independent, some polls suggest Kennedy could hurt Trump more because of his right-wing positions on gun control, vaccines and aid to Ukraine.

“He’s a lot more popular with Republicans than with Democrats,” says the election site Five Thirty Eight.

The Republican National Committee greeted Kennedy’s strategic swerve from Democrat to independent with a long list of objections to his environmental policies, which is the best thing about an otherwise dangerous platform.

As if blind to the obvious irony, the RNC also called him a conspiracy theorist who made stolen election claims when George W. Bush won the White House.

Before Kennedy’s switch, Republicans praised him. Much of his campaign money bore Republican fingerprints. The GOP hoped he would weaken Biden in the primaries, as his uncle, Ted Kennedy, did to President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

A ‘right-wing nutcase’

From the Democratic side, Robert Reich, a liberal professor who was President Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, is calling RFK Jr. “a dangerous, right-wing nutcase.”

“While his father was a fierce advocate for racial justice,” Reich wrote, “Junior has gone down a dark, racist rabbit hole.”

Kennedy has implied that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jewish and Chinese people. Four of his 10 siblings have repudiated him, calling his independent candidacy “deeply saddening for us” and “perilous to our country.”

The last time a famous name disrupted an election, former President Theodore Roosevelt ran independently in 1912 against his former protégé William Howard Taft after failing to win the GOP nomination. Still popular, he carried eight states and 27% of the popular vote, but won only 88 electoral votes to Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s 435.

George Wallace and Ralph Nader

That was the high-water mark of independent candidacies. In 1968, when Alabama’s George Wallace carried five states, he needed only one more state with 10 or more electors to deprive Richard Nixon of an electoral college majority.

If no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College, the decision is thrown to the U.S. House, where each state has one vote. In 1968, Democrats controlled 26 delegations and could have awarded the presidency to Hubert Humphrey, despite Nixon’s 7 million vote plurality.

In the famously close 2000 election, independent Ralph Nader got less than 3%, but more than enough of those votes were cast in Florida to tip the balance to George W. Bush, who edged Al Gore here by 537 votes. Nader had more than 97,000 votes in Florida.

In 2016, Libertarian and Green party candidates arguably cost Hillary Clinton enough votes in key states to help Trump win, despite him losing the popular vote.

Fascism vs. autocracy

Significantly, Nader is not running again and said he would do nothing that could indirectly help elect Trump.

“I know the difference between fascism and autocracy, and I’ll take autocracy any time,” Nader told the Washington Post. “Fascism is what the GOP is the architecture of, and autocracy is what the Democrats are practitioners of. But autocracy leaves an opening. They don’t suppress votes. They don’t suppress free speech.”

In a modern, fully representative system, the popular vote would decide the presidency. Voting would be by ranked choice, so people could vote as they want without fear of their first choice helping to elect a candidate they dislike most.

The current reality is that voting for a candidate who can’t possibly win helps elect someone else, but voters won’t know who until it’s too late. That’s why voters should reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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