Republicans are starting to worry about RFK Jr.

Republicans are waking up to the reality that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could sink their standard-bearer just as easily as he could hurt President Joe Biden, after a pair of new polls showed the presence of third-party candidates on the ballot might not necessarily benefit former President Donald Trump.

Even Trump is acknowledging his potential problem.

“They say he hurts Biden. I'm not sure that that's true, and I think he probably hurts [us] both,” Trump said of Kennedy in a radio interview Monday night. “But he might hurt Biden a little bit more, you don't know."

For months, Democrats have been on the defensive over the renegade Kennedy, with Biden surrogates warning openly about the effect Kennedy could have on the election and the Democratic National Committee going so far as to set up an operation solely to counter the threat of third-party and independent candidates.

But recent polling broadly shows Kennedy drawing evenly from both of the major party candidates’ 2020 supporters. And Kennedy’s significantly higher favorable ratings among Republican voters suggests he has more room to eat into Trump’s vote share than Biden’s.

In addition, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data shows far more interest in Kennedy from former Trump donors than people who previously contributed to Biden.

“If the Trump campaign doesn’t see this as a concern, then they’re delusional,” Republican consultant Alice Stewart said. “They should be looking at this from the standpoint that they can’t afford to lose any voters — and certainly not to a third-party candidate that shares some of [Trump’s] policy ideas.”

On John Fredericks’ radio show Monday, Trump called Kennedy “extremely liberal.” And Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser on Trump’s presidential campaign, has for months denigrated Kennedy as rumors cropped up about Trump considering him as a running mate. Sharing a link to a news report that Trump’s campaign had attempted to recruit him for the ticket, LaCivita in January called the story “100% FAKE NEWS” and described Kennedy as “one of the most LIBERAL and radical environmentalists in the country.”

Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, told POLITICO that in battleground states, “everything I'm seeing is that at the end of the day, RFK Jr. is going to hurt Joe Biden more than he's going to hurt Donald Trump. And that's why the Biden people are trying to get him thrown off the ballot.”

Still, while McLaughlin maintained Trump has “a much more intense base than Joe Biden does,” he said, “I definitely think that there will be some percentage that RFK Jr. takes from Trump.”

In two polls released so far this week, from NBC News and Marist College, Biden actually gained relative to Trump in matchups featuring Kennedy and other third-party candidates, though the differences were well within the margins of error in each survey and represented a break from previous polling.

In the NBC News poll, a negligible 2-point Trump lead in a head-to-head matchup became a 2-point Biden advantage when Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein were added as options. That’s because 15 percent of respondents who picked Trump against Biden defected to Kennedy in the five-way matchup, compared to 7 percent of those who chose Biden initially.

The Marist poll showed Kennedy winning equal shares of respondents who reported voting for Biden (12 percent) and Trump (12 percent) in 2020, and roughly the same percentages of self-identified Democrats (8 percent) and Republicans (10 percent) — mostly in line with other polls that show Kennedy drawing evenly from both major-party candidates.

Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement to POLITICO that “we are confident we can win the support of the voters no matter who is on the ballot.”

The campaign dismissed Kennedy as a “radical leftist” and cited the DNC’s third-party rapid-response operation as evidence of how “worried” the Biden campaign is about Kennedy siphoning votes from the Democratic incumbent in a general election. The DNC has been aggressively attacking Kennedy in part through billboards linking the scion of the Democratic political dynasty to Trump. A new one the DNC unveiled on Monday to “greet” Kennedy in Scottsdale, Arizona, depicts the independent candidate in one of Trump’s signature red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps and calls him a “spoiler for Trump.”

“It’s clear that the DNC and the Biden campaign are putting tremendous amounts of energy and effort into discrediting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and reminding voters of [Biden’s] support from the [bulk of the] Kennedy family,” Stewart, the Republican consultant, said. “It would be wise for the RNC to do what they can to make sure people understand how Trump would be a better president in his policies over RFK Jr. and Biden.”

Trump and Kennedy share some common appeal among supporters who view them as representing a similar strain of anti-establishment politics. And several Republican strategists noted to POLITICO that Kennedy could attract vaccine-skeptical voters who previously supported Trump or his former primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has two things going for him. One is a Democratically known last name, which could play to low-informed Democratic voters who are looking for an additional option beyond Biden,” Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett said. “But beyond that, he has a lot of interesting if not conspiratorial ideas, from vaccines to autism to a wide range of fringe ideas that certainly play more to the right than to the left.”

The overlap in potential support for Trump and Kennedy is evident in more than just policy. Of the $22.7 million that Kennedy's campaign has reported raising from donors giving at least $200 — the threshold at which the Federal Election Committee requires campaigns to itemize donations — since his launch last summer, nearly $1.6 million comes from more than 1,700 donors who gave to Trump's campaign during the 2020 cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis.

By contrast, Kennedy has raised only $850,000 from about 980 donors with a record of giving to Biden's 2020 campaign. Both totals represent a small overall share of Kennedy's fundraising. But they are one data point suggesting his appeal may be stronger among those once interested in Trump.

Kennedy’s campaign also counts at least one former Trump campaign hand among its ranks: Kennedy’s head of Black voter outreach, Angela Stanton King, also worked on Black voter outreach for Trump’s 2020 bid.

Kennedy’s communications director, Del Bigtree, who runs an anti-vaccine nonprofit, promoted his cause on Jan. 6, speaking at a rally near the Capitol on the day of the riot.

And several recently departed staffers have been more candid about their conservative slant — at times embarrassing the campaign. One consultant, who the campaign declined to name, wrote in two fundraising emails that people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were “activists sitting in a Washington DC jail cell stripped of their Constitutional liberties.” Kennedy later issued a statement that this did not represent his views.

Another consultant who was leading New York ballot-access work suggested the Trump and Kennedy supporters had a shared enemy and should tactically vote together in November — a strategy that the campaign also distanced itself from in a later statement.

Kennedy himself has attacked Trump for not “draining the swamp” while in office and accused him of hiring “swamp creatures” like John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser. But in recent weeks, he’s focused more of his contrast campaigning on his one-time primary rival, Biden — arguing in a CNN interview that Biden could be considered a bigger threat to democracy than Trump.

“Kennedy was introduced, supported and certainly propped up by the right thinking he would be a torpedo to Biden in a primary,” Bartlett said.

Now, he said, “That torpedo may be turning into a bit of a boomerang.”

Natalie Allison, Adam Wren and Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.