Op-Ed: The Silent Rise of the Trump-Kennedy Voter
The development of the Trump-Kennedy voter is the most interesting phenomenon to form this election cycle, and no one seems to be noticing it.
In 2016, there was the Trump-Bernie voter. This sizeable cohort of the electorate, mostly young white men of middle- or working-class backgrounds, had committed themselves to voting for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
These voters were universally put off by the Democratic National Committee’s blatant rigging of the nomination process, using fundraising apparatuses, superdelegates and voter databases to favor Hillary Clinton. Enraged and seeking someone to go to Washington and break things, many “Bernie Bros” threw their support behind Trump.
Similarly, among my blue-collar friends and young colleagues of varying political persuasions, I am now seeing the rise of the Trump-Kennedy voter.
Like the Trump-Bernie voter, these voters want immediate and radical policy change in Washington, and they don’t really care how it happens. They are watching RFK Jr. get the same treatment from the DNC as Sanders in 2016, and they do not like it.
The DNC has refused to hold a debate between RFK Jr. and President Joe Biden. The corporate media, exemplified by the always hypocritical “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post, has done nothing to challenge (or cover) this. Instead, they have closed ranks around Biden, relentlessly attacking RFK Jr. and shielding the DNC by perpetuating the myth that prior primaries have not been rigged.
Circumventing the corrupt establishment media, Kennedy is making a run on internet-based platforms. Indeed, the Trump-Kennedy voter was birthed at the center of independent media — the Joe Rogan podcast.
RFK Jr.’s recent bravura performance on Rogan was equal to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Everyone I know who listened to that podcast has said to me, ‘This is new. This guy is amazing. I could really vote for him.”
In the Rogan podcast, RFK Jr. noted that the same people who voted for his father in 1968 also voted for George Wallace in 1972. Not everyone who voted for RFK in ’68 or Wallace in ’72 was white working class, but almost everyone who voted for both was.
RFK Jr. is brushing up on a truth of American politics: Everyday Americans are pissed, and they have been since at least 1968.
White working-class and middle-class voters are the only true swing voters in America. Welfare recipients invariably vote Democrat. The wealthy, once a staple of the Republican base, have gradually realigned with the Democrats. Evangelicals and Hasidic Jews vote Republican. Soldiers vote Republican, while teachers’ unions strongly vote Democrat. Blacks and Hispanics vote overwhelmingly Democrat, although the latter is starting to realign.
Notably, white working-class and middle-class voters are not ideologically rigid. Sanders socialism? Sure. Kennedy family internationalism? Sure. National populism? Sure.
America’s hockey moms and Joe six-packs, as Sarah Palin would call them, are concerned with an end result. They want secure borders, low inflation, no pointless foreign wars, robust American manufacturing, patriotic public schools that teach traditional values, and accountability for the totalitarianism we suffered under during COVID. The exact ideological reasoning used to get to these outcomes is immaterial to these voters.
America’s working class is currently aligned with Trump. However, I am hearing murmurs among my friends and neighbors in middle America to the effect of, “I never thought I would vote Democrat after COVID, but since my state is kinda late in the primaries, I may throw my vote to Kennedy if Trump already has the nomination locked down or somehow gets too far behind to win the nomination.”
However, neither Kennedy nor Trump (nor anyone else) has a lock on these voters.
Kennedy’s voice has a strong Katharine Hepburn (in the latter years) quality to it, making it difficult to listen to him but for the quality of his message. This could be a hindrance in the age of audio-visual media, but — to quote Tallulah Bankhead — “Kate has the most terrible voice I’ve ever heard. You go into a theater and you nearly die for the first five minutes. And when you come out, if anybody else talks, you can’t stand it because they’re so dull.”
Likewise, Trump seems to be in a political bind.
He only partially delivered on the southern border wall, his largest campaign promise. On COVID, he is being hit from the right for having developed and promoted the vaccine that Biden would eventually force on the entire country through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. This unconstitutional action cost thousands of people their jobs and made Biden unpopular. Ironically, the vaccine mandate may cost him his job too in 2024.
With this in mind, it is clear that the Trump-Kennedy voter can only go for Trump or Kennedy. Ron DeSantis’ campaign is struggling; it appears he is hoping something will break for him after the first GOP primary debates next month.
Obviously sensing the emerging Trump-Kennedy voter, Desantis took a swipe at Kennedy last week, identifying several policy issues where conservatives would find RFK Jr. displeasing, including climate change. But this line of attack only works for die-hard conservatives; the cohort of Trump-Kennedy voters does not read Edmund Burke.
Intellectually, DeSantis is correct, but his attack missed the mark for the same reason the Daily Mail article that attacked RFK for womanizing did — voters do not care about that sort of thing. (Also, he is a Kennedy — womanizing is to be expected.)
This is a matter of instinct. The Trump-Kennedy voter is looking for a sincere sense that whoever they vote for will fulfill promises. Either man can win America’s only true swing voters, but he can only do so on his ability to hear their frustrations and turn them into results.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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