Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Campaign Is Being Way Overhyped
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Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Campaign Is Being Way Overhyped
It’s another example of people cherry-picking evidence to make a political point.
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A few weeks ago, Robert Kennedy Jr. launched his campaign for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy Jr. is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, and he’s been securing between 10% and 20% in polls asking Democrats who they support in the primary.
Conservative journalists are jumping on these poll numbers to argue that Biden is tremendously vulnerable as a general election candidate and that Democrats are just as open to electing wacky politicians as Republicans are.
The only problem with these claims is that the evidence is exceedingly flimsy.
First of all, while Kennedy’s polling would be impressive for a completely unknown candidate, “Kennedy” isn’t exactly an unfamiliar name. Few of the conservatives writing about his campaign have taken the time to seriously consider that Kennedy may just be riding high on name ID.
In one poll from late April, an astonishingly small sliver of Democrats (8%) said they did not know who Kennedy was. But is it really plausible that 92% of Democrats were paying enough attention to the news to know who Kennedy Jr. was within days of his campaign announcement? Less than half of Americans can name the three branches of government. Considering how little most people pay attention to politics, I’m very skeptical that the overwhelming majority of Democrats actually know much about Kennedy other than that he has a famous last name.
And that last name is political gold. The most recent poll I could find asking Americans what they thought of President John F. Kennedy was from Gallup in 2013. That survey found that, in retrospect, 85% of Americans approve of JFK — the highest number for any president in modern American history. It is very easy to believe that many Democrats are simply telling pollsters that they support Kennedy Jr. because they have strong positive associations with his last name.
In the coming days, Democrats will inevitably begin to learn more about Kennedy Jr. When they do, I don’t think they’ll like what they see. His outlandish behavior ranges from comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany to claiming that 5G is a plot to “harvest human data” to calling Anthony Fauci “the most despotic doctor in human history.” I have difficulty imagining any of that finding much support within the Democratic Party.
Why, then, are people rushing to insist that Kennedy’s campaign is an inflection point? I think what’s happening is that people have unrelated political points they want to make, and the Kennedy news cycle is simply a useful jumping-off point from which to make that argument.
But this is obviously not how rigorous analysis is supposed to work. You’re not supposed to begin with a conclusion and seek out any shred of supporting evidence you can find. That’s just an extreme form of cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
Unfortunately, the problems of cherry-picking and confirmation bias are not isolated to this example alone. These two plagues have spread to every corner of our public discourse.
Consider, for example, what’s going on in New York City with the tragic death of Jordan Neely, the homeless man who was killed by a man who put him in a chokehold after Neely was threatening people on the subway. Even before we knew anything about the circumstances of his death, activists were declaring that this was “murder” (a technical term that means the death was criminal), that Neely was “lynched,” and that “Neely was executed for being poor, black, and disabled.” To be clear, my problem isn’t with any of these claims per se. It’s that people can’t even bother to find out the facts before slotting this tragedy into their preexisting political narrative.
This kind of thing happens all the time. In a country with over 330 million people, there will always be a plump cherry ready to be picked and used as evidence for any argument. People of all ideological persuasions are eager to shoehorn anything and everything into their ideological understanding of the world. Think about how the enormously popular Twitter account LibsofTikTok can leverage a few isolated videos to condemn the entire public school system for “grooming” children. Think about how often Fox News uses the wackiest thing that a member of the “squad” has said to convince their viewers that all Democrats are extremists. Think about how MSNBC does the same thing with Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert.
Regardless of where it’s coming from, this is all just a variation on the same theme: people starting with a conclusion and scouring for evidence to support that claim. And we’re all probably at least somewhat guilty of working backward like this.
But we should all do our best to stop cherry-picking facts to match our conclusions. That may be aspirational since we all have biases that can never be totally extinguished. But even so, it’s an important thing to aspire to because the world is a complicated and messy place. If we want to have any hope of even beginning to understand it, we’ll have to try and rid ourselves of the tendency toward cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
Like I said up top, I ask I ask free subscribers to do just one thing per post to help me reach new readers.
For this one, please consider forwarding this email to someone who is interested in politics or elections. Since I don’t have a big social media following, I’m very much dependent on you all to help spread the word 🙏