Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attends an event in Los Angeles on March 30, 2024.
CNN —
Third-party and independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are making an unusually strong showing in early polls of this fall’s presidential race – a finding that not only highlights a strain of dissatisfaction with Joe Biden and Donald Trump but also adds further uncertainty towhat is shaping up to be a close contest between them.
Across fivenational polls released in March and April– fromQuinnipiac University,Fox News,Marquette Law School,NBC NewsandMarist College–Kennedy receivedan average of 13% support for his independent presidential bid whenhis name was explicitly included in the survey question, with independent candidate Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein taking an average of 3% each. Given the narrow margin between Trump and Biden, who are effectively deadlocked in many surveys, even a fraction of that support could prove crucial to the election’s outcome.
Historical precedent, however, suggests that third-party and independent candidates’ election performancesrarely live up to their polling.
“When people tell us that they’re going to vote for a third-party candidate, they’re actually telling us one of two things,” said Dan Cassino, the executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll, whohas researchedthe overestimated support for such candidates in surveys. “Some proportion are saying, ‘I hate both of the major partycandidates, and I’m going to illustrate that by saying that I’ll vote for literally whoever you put in the third spot (whether I’ve heard of them or not).’ Others are saying, ‘I really like that third partycandidate, and I’m going to vote for them!’”
Given the relative unpopularity of this year’s two major presidential candidates, Cassinonoted, the first group – those who treat being polled as an opportunity to vent their discontent with the system – are likely to far outnumber those who are fully committed to backing a specific alternative. In anational CNN polllast year, 39% of voters who said they would support Kennedy for president also said, in a separate question, that they didn’t know enough about the candidateto offer an opinion of him.
But finding the right questions to disentangle those sentiments is difficult, and past polling has frequently struggled to estimate the support for such challengers. In the 2014 midterms, most surveys overstated the eventual support for third-party candidates. But while pre-election polls that asked voters about third-party candidates by name tended to inflate their support, those that omitted them often underestimated it, according to data compiled by Joe Lenski, the executive vice president of Edison Research. Estimations of third-party support were less accurate further out from Election Day, the report also found.
More broadly, while the public have long expressed enthusiasm for new political alternatives as a concept, that fervor has rarely translated into traction for any specific movements. For more than a decade,Americans havetold Gallupthat the Republican and Democratic parties “do such a poor job that a third major party is needed,” while continuing to vote overwhelmingly for major-party candidates in elections.
Even in the 2008 president contest between two broadly liked candidates,Barack Obama and John McCain, nearly half of registered voterssaid in Gallup’s pollingthat they wished they had additional choices to pick from.
Polling on third-party and independent candidates could be especially tricky to navigate this year, for a number of reasons:
Dissatisfaction with the major-party candidates is unusually high
In arecent Gallup poll, 29% of US adults said that neither Trump nor Biden would make a good president – still a distinct minority of the populace, but a slight uptick from 25% in the summer of 2020 – and significantly higher than the 8%-to-19% shares who said the same of the candidates in 2004, 2008 and 2012. (Gallup did not ask the question in 2016, another year that featured relatively unpopular major-party nominees in Trump and Hillary Clinton.Libertarian Gary Johnson tookabout 3% nationally in thatcontest, the best showing for a third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1996).
Kennedy’s name may be giving him a superficial boost in recognition
Kennedy, who carries a storied surname, enjoys the sort of name recognition that most presidential challengers would envy. IntheMarch Quinnipiac poll, 31% of registered voters said they hadn’t heard enough about him to form an opinion, compared to 71% for West, and 69% for Stein. But other polling suggests a significant gap between awareness of his existence and deeper knowledge of his positions: Ina December Monmouth poll, roughly half of registered voters said they hadn’t heard anything about Kennedy’s positions on public health issues such as Covid-19and vaccines, with a similar share saying they weren’t aware of Kennedy’s support for unsupported “claims that autism is linked to vaccines.”
Independent candidates’ level of ballot access is still unsettled
Each state has its own process for candidates hoping to appear on the ballot. While Kennedyhas saidhe hopes to make the ballot across all 50 states and Washington, DC, it’s possible that some voters now backing him or other independent candidates in national polls won’t actually have the option to do so in their state this fall.
The ways polls are conducted has changed
For decades, most public polling was conducted over the telephone by live interviewers. That gave respondents a chance to volunteer responses that weren’t explicitly included by the pollsters – for instance, answering a question about their preference between two main candidates by offering up that they’d actually prefer a third one, or that they wouldn’t vote at all.
Many pollsters, however, havemoved at least in part to conducting online surveys, making it more difficult to incorporate similarly off-the-cuff responses. Instead, pollsters generally have to make a clear-cut decision as to whether an option should be present or not. While neither mode of polling is inherently better or worse, the shift is a further complication in trying to compare current polling withwhat we’ve seen in the past.
What’s the best way of demonstrating this uncertainty? Cassino suggested starting with an experimental approach: asking half of a poll’s respondents to choose between Biden, Trump and Kennedy, with the other half instead choosing between Biden, Trump and a different third-party candidate with little name recognition. The difference in support between the third options would then indicatethe share of active support for Kennedy, rather than disgruntled respondents casting the equivalent of a protest vote.
Many public pollsters, meanwhile, are currently asking two different questions about the general election – one naming just Biden and Trump, and anotherincluding additional candidates – and separately reporting the results of both. Polls are often described as providing snapshots in time of public sentiment. But even snapshots taken at identical moments can reveal different facets of their subjects, depending on the framing. That’s a good reminder of the limits to how precisely polling can capture the current state of any race, let alone predict how it might evolve in the months to come.
