The struggling independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is expected to drop out of the US presidential race, and while some have speculated that this may be a boost to Trump’s chances in November, our polling suggests that it is unlikely to have any major impact on the Republican or Democratic hopefuls.

At the beginning of August, we asked over 7,000 Americans their voting intention for the presidential election. We chose not to prompt RFK Jr, instead giving respondents the choice between Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and ‘Another candidate’. The results showed a 4-point lead for Harris (51% to Trump’s 47%), with 2% of respondents saying they would vote for another candidate.

Of this 2% (weighted 101 total responses), 35% voted for Biden in 2020, 28% voted for Trump, 11% for the Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, 3% Green, 8% another candidate, and 16% did not vote. In other words, most of those who said they would vote for ‘Another candidate’ are not typical third party voters, and thus are unlikely to be intending to vote Green or Libertarian this time round.

Meanwhile, other pollsters who do prompt RFK Jr have him between 3-5%. Thus we can infer that most of those who selected ‘Another candidate’ in our poll did so because they intended to vote for RFK Jr.

RFK Jr dropping out [and endorsing Trump] would therefore not be enough to put Trump in the lead against Harris. Other polls suggest this swing might be higher, but we have reason to doubt that RFK Jr’s voters, even with an endorsement, would uniformly move over to supporting Trump in November.

More than one in three people who said they might vote for a candidate besides Trump and Harris this year had voted for the Democrat, Biden, in 2020. This is a significant chunk of possible RFK Jr voters that voted for the Democratic candidate, against Trump, 4 years ago, and thus would be difficult to imagine them all swinging to Trump now. This is supported by research from Pew which indicates that during the period when Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris in July, the polling bump enjoyed by the Democrats was in large part at the expense of RFK Jr.

Another factor to consider is that even with RFK Jr dropping out, there will still be third party and independent options available in November. If Kennedy had been picking up Libertarian and Green-minded voters, it’s just as easy to imagine them going back to their respective party’s candidates as it is to see them voting for the Republicans or Democrats.

It has been difficult to pin down RFK Jr’s campaign ideologically. He has been unable to gain the access and media coverage that independent candidates in the past were offered, such as Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. This has reinforced his status as a fringe figure in the election, not helped by his policy proposals in areas which neither of the major parties are willing to touch – cryptocurrencies, the military-industrial complex, vaccines, and so on. It is for these reasons that one can easily imagine many of his potential voters (including the 16% who did not vote in 2020) moving over to the Libertarians, or choosing not to vote at all, before deciding to cast their ballot for Donald Trump.

Get the data

Survation conducted a survey of 7,448 adults aged 18+ in the United States on their voting intentions. Fieldwork was conducted between 24th July – 8th August 2024. The full results are available to download here.

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