Lisa Desjardins:
This is where we have to do polling. And we always remind people that polling is great for trends. These are not – we’re not saying these are absolute numbers, but it tells us something about what’s happening with Kennedy and what his change of heart might mean here.
So let’s first look at Kennedy’s own support. When we did our first poll in the spring when he announced his candidacy, it was around 11 percent, so somewhere in the double digits. Let’s follow up in the spring to see what happened there. It stayed pretty stable at that level, but started to decline after June.
There was a big drop in July after President Biden dropped out of the race. And where does he stand now? Even lower, according to our poll, about 5 percentage points. That may not sound like much. The question, of course, is: What are those 5 percent doing in a close race? Where are they going?
So let’s look at what the race looks like right now, according to our recent polls. It’s close. It’s within the margin of error. It’s practically a tie, with Harris technically ahead a little bit. Look at that 5 percent. Jill Stein has 1 percent too. These are all – the only candidates polling at 1 percent and above.
I want to talk about that Kennedy 5 percent. And the question then is, in particular, why do the campaign teams believe that this helps Donald Trump? Because we know that there are voters of both genders who support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Let’s look at another number we had. This is how Kennedy supporters voted in 2020. Look at this, folks, twice as many Kennedy supporters – this was this month – said they voted for Trump in 2020 than they did for Biden. And that leads us to what Amy was talking to you about, these dissatisfied Trump voters.
Trump believes they can get it back from Robert F. Kennedy.
