Larry Sabato suggests RFK Jr failed to ‘cash in’ on Kennedy name

Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Larry Sabato suggested that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. failed to “cash in” on the family name, following the contender’s decision to suspend his White House bid Friday. 

“He tried to cash in on the Kennedy magic, and it turns out that the magic was in the 1960s, it was not transferred to this century,” the editor-in-chief of the election forecaster Sabato’s Crystal Ball said Friday during an appearance on MSNBC. 

Kennedy, who started off his presidential run as a Democrat last year, switched to an independent bid, eventually gaining low-double-digit support in the polls. The long-shot candidate announced in Arizona Friday that he would suspend his campaign and back the GOP nominee former President Trump.

Sabato argued that Kennedy started to lose traction in the polls once Vice President Harris rose to the top of the ticket, after President Biden withdrew from the race in late July not to seek a second term. 

“He has been dropping like a rock ever since Kamala Harris got in,” Sabato said of Kennedy.

“When he started, he was in the upper teens. In some polls, he was in the low 20s, and now at best, he’s at five or 6 percent in some of the states, and those polls are outdated,” he continued. “You know, we’ve had a Democratic Convention. One network poll just a few days ago had him at 2 percent.”

Sabato, a political scientist, said that just because Kennedy is endorsing Trump does not mean that his remaining supporters will automatically go to the former president’s side. 

“For people who think that, because he’s endorsing Trump, he can just move that 2 percent into Trump’s column,” Sabato said. “They don’t know much about politics. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not going to work that way.” 

His comments come after the Trump campaign released a memo from its pollster, Tony Fabrizio, positing that the former president would gain the majority of Kennedy’s supporters in a head-to-head race against Harris. 

Sobato, however, predicted that some would flock toward the former president, but others would back Harris. Another portion, he added, could still choose to back a third-party candidate.

“Some of them may choose someone else on the ballot,” he said. “There are still plenty of other candidates, depending on which state you’re in, and a lot of them will be couch voters, particularly the low-information voters who were attracted to him because of his name.”