RFK Jr.'s third-party threat: Does it hurt Biden or Trump more?
Published in Political News
WASHINGTON — Tempted to make a bet on the rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump?
There are a lot of reasons that would be a bad idea. Here’s a big one — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Polls, pollsters and pundits disagree about how much support Kennedy has — or even which candidate he potentially would hurt more.
The Trump and Biden campaigns, however, seem more in agreement: They’re both acting as if Kennedy poses a small, but significant threat to Biden’s reelection.
They are probably right.
With the election now just over six months away, the vast majority of voters, probably about 9 in 10, have made up their minds. Only a handful of states are truly in doubt. But those locked-in voters and states are evenly balanced between the two sides.
Within the closely divided states, the sliver of the electorate who remain uncertain about which candidate they will vote for — or whether they’ll vote at all — will be critical to the outcome.
A newly released study by the Pew Research Center finds that 91% of people who voted for Biden last time and 94% of those who voted for Trump plan to vote for the same person this year. Registered voters who did not cast a ballot in 2020 are almost evenly divided, Pew found.
So it’s not surprising that over the past year, the race has fluctuated only within a very narrow band.
In most polls during the first half of last year, Biden led by a small margin. Trump took a small lead in surveys during the last few months of the year, which he held until early spring.
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