- By Mike Wendling
- BBC News in Royal Oak, Michigan
Mike Panza showed up early to a comedy benefit to support the Kennedy campaign for president.
Wearing a Star Wars-themed shirt and queuing outside the Royal Oak Theatre in this Detroit suburb, he talked about what drew him to the one candidate in the 2024 race identifiable solely by his initials – RFK Jr.
“I’d like a return to the middle of the road,” said Mr Panza, 44. “His stance on health care is really appealing. Kennedy wants to make people healthy, he wants to make the country healthy.”
Mr Panza, who works as an environmental officer, might sound like a disaffected Democrat. But when I ask who he voted for in 2020, he answers immediately: “Trump.”
Interviews with dozens of Robert F Kennedy Jr supporters here point to a paradox about the independent candidate, one of the biggest wildcards in November’s presidential election.
Conventional wisdom, backed up by some opinion polls, says that Mr Kennedy, a member of the country’s most famous – and Democratic – political family, presents more of a threat to Joe Biden than to the Republican nominee Donald Trump.
However, other recent surveys, interviews with supporters and a closer look at the issues that animate Mr Kennedy’s base tell a different story – that perhaps Mr Trump is the candidate who should be more worried.
“Given the status of politics in Michigan right now, I would say he’s probably more damaging to Trump,” said Corwin Smidt, a politics professor at Michigan State University. “But it’s a very uncertain situation.”
Mr Kennedy is consistently polling in the teens or high single digits, percentage-wise. By all indications he is the most popular independent or third-party candidate in decades.
Experts say support for third-party candidates tends to decline closer to the election, and that Mr Kennedy is extremely unlikely to win the White House. Yet, because of the tight electoral map, his significant support has the potential to influence results in some states – including Michigan, a key battleground – and ultimately determine who becomes the next president.
Just a few miles away from the comedy show, local Republicans in suburban Macomb County hold a pro-Trump rally every Sunday at a wide intersection surrounded by strip malls, fast-food outlets and a gas station.
This is hotly contested territory. Mr Trump carried around 53 percent of voters in Macomb, in both 2016 and 2020.
But in the last election, the share of the vote going to third-party candidates declined, allowing Joe Biden to improve on Hillary Clinton’s slice of the vote by about 3.5 percentage points. It was one small piece that allowed Biden to flip Michigan back into the Democratic column in 2020.
At the gathering of a couple of dozen Republicans waving American flags and handmade pro-Trump signs, reaction to the Kennedy campaign ranged from guffawing bemusement to mild approval.
Peter Kiszczyc is a regular at these rallies. He says he’s glad that independent candidates such as Mr Kennedy Jr and left-winger Cornel West have entered the race.
“Some leftists will vote for them,” said Mr Kiszczyc, 69, who emigrated to Michigan from Poland in the 1980s. “Some things I like about RFK, some I don’t.”
But he was in deep agreement with one of Mr Kennedy Jr’s most noteworthy – and controversial – issues. “All of us support his position against vaccination,” he said, gesturing at the small crowd of Trump fans.
After a career as an environmental lawyer, Mr Kennedy headed the anti-vaccine organisation Children’s Health Defense. Its support and…
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