The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
In an election cycle that can only be described as stranger than fiction, things have just gotten impossibly weirder. Longtime Democrat-turned-independent candidate for president Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed none other than Donald Trump.
The move wasn’t totally unexpected; both campaigns had been hinting at it for days, and a certain sect of Trump supporters have been angling for an alliance for months. It culminated in one of the strangest political marriages we’ve seen in some time.
In a weird way, though, it’s a very American-looking union.
Aside from being a member of one of the most famous political dynasties in American history — a relationship upon which he has capitalized — Kennedy is far from a ne’er-do-well or grifter.
He made a name for himself as a prominent environmental activist and attorney, working as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an organization known for being a thorn in the side of the Environmental Protection Agency during Republican administrations.
He was even named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” — not a credential that would render him a GOP darling.
But his assertions that common childhood vaccines are dangerous, his skepticism of government in general and his outspoken opinions on the COVID vaccine in particular attracted support from government cynics on the right, growing a base of supporters as motley as one could imagine.
Indeed, his campaign platform is an amalgam of both left- and right-leaning policies: strength on the border, dovish foreign policy, populist economics, and support for the Second Amendment, abortion rights and legalizing marijuana.
Kennedy’s platform is predicated on challenging what he deems a corrupted two-party system; he intended for his ticket to attract the growing number of voters who find themselves politically homeless.
Early polling showed that his candidacy would siphon away enough support from Joe Biden to give Trump the edge in the election. Now that Kamala Harris is the new “joyful” Democratic nominee, that edge may be less certain.
But it’s probably not nonexistent.
Homeless voters will need to go somewhere, and if the two divergent campaigns pool their resources and work together they could build enough support over the next three months to secure a Trump-Kennedy conservative-populist-progressive victory, if you will.
In a weird way, you could say Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump is how politics should be done. Parliamentary democracies (of which America is not one, but arguably should be) rely on alliances between otherwise divergent parties to secure victories.
At least on issues that send voters to the polls, the Venn diagram of Trump and Kennedy supporters is promising.
And while political parties like to talk about unity and compromise when it suits them (consider Harris’ nomination acceptance speech ), it’s rarely done in reality because politicians once in office tend to primarily serve their bases.
In this way, we could be entering new territory in modern American politics.
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