RFK Jr. Leads A Robust Independent Wave Into 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought an independent wave 20 years in the making to a head.

Dec 28, 2023

Since the turn of the 21st century, the stage has slowly been set for an independent wave to sweep American politics.

*Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, July 20, 2023 [Source: Congressional Quarterly, Public Domain]*

The number of voters who identify as Democrats and Republicans has notably declined over the past twenty years while independents have risen to comprise nearly half of the electorate. A strong majority of Americans believe that the two-party system fails to represent the people.

Second, a vibrant independent media landscape has emerged to rival legacy news outlets, reshaping how Americans view politics and our government. Cable news networks are receiving their lowest ratings in years while podcasts, independent platforms, and citizen journalists are thriving on the Internet.

As such, environment lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rise as an independent presidential candidate did not come out of the blue. It is rather the evolution of a well-documented surge in independence from both major parties that has the potential to shake the foundations of the two-party system next year.

In 2016, pundits who saw no possibility of a Trump victory severely misjudged the mood of the country. Kennedy remains an underdog in 2024, but pundits who see no possibility of his victory are similarly misjudging the moment the country finds itself in.

The Rise of the Independent Voter

First, Americans have become far more independent over the past twenty years.

In 2004, around one-third of voters were independents, one-third were Democrats, and one-third were Republicans. Between 2004 and 2023, however, the two major parties’ combined share of the electorate fell from 68 percent to 54 percent while the share of voters who identify as independent rose from 31 percent to 44 percent.

*Chart of U.S. political party affiliation between 2004 and 2023; Data sourced from Gallup Party Affiliation, chart created by Holden Culotta*

The first major shift towards independence seems to have been catalyzed by the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Independents have made up a steadily growing plurality of the electorate since 2009. The final years of the Bush administration saw a collapse in the number of Republicans and a skyrocketing number of independents. The number of Democrats declined more slowly throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.

A second turning point appears to be happening now. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of Democrats fell from 30 percent to 27 and the number of independents rose from 39 percent to 44. The post-2020 shift can likely be primarily attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic and the massive transfer of wealth from the working poor and middle class to the billionaire class that accompanied it, not to mention the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties.

The Covid-19 pandemic was followed by a collapse of faith in institutions across the board, faith which had already been on the decline for years. Confidence in the two-party system is unsurprisingly low. Since 2013, a steady 60 percent of Americans have believed that the two-party system no longer represents the people.

The 2024 election is also shaping up to be a friendly environment for independents for one reason unique to this election: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the likely Democratic and Republican nominees, are both historically unpopular. Democrats and Republicans still have time to nominate alternative candidates, although the Democratic Party’s staunch refusal to hold an open primary contest and Trump’s commanding lead over his Republican challengers gives a rematch between the two an air of inevitability.

Legacy media pundits and independent pundits agree that independent voters will decide the 2024 election, and polling shows that Kennedy already leads Biden and Trump among independents. Not only that, but Kennedy leads both Biden and Trump among voters under the age of 45, who comprised 42 percent of the electorate in 2016 and 2020.

Given the political environment described above, it appears difficult to argue that Kennedy does not have a clear, albeit challenging, path to the White House in 2024.

The Rise of Independent Media

*The Joe Rogan Experience #2075 — Protect Our Parks 10 (Part 2)*

Legacy U.S. media outlets have been controlled by just a handful of massive corporations for years. Unsurprisingly, Americans’ faith in their reliability as honest actors has plummeted.

Distrust of legacy media outlets is giving way to the rise of a vibrant independent media landscape. Data from 2022, for example, showed that The Joe Rogan Experience reached more than three times as many viewers as the top cable news show at the time, Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ironically, Carlson has since moved to X and launched an independent show.

Across the Internet, independent shows have gained a robust audience. Breaking Points, hosted by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, has been pivotal in paving the way for independent media to evolve and thrive. The YouTube show boasts hundreds of thousands of views on each new video. Independent journalist Mario Nawfal’s X Spaces reach millions of listeners and regularly feature voices that are seldom platformed by legacy media outlets. Actor and comedian Russell Brand launched an independent news show on Rumble that reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers each week.

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The rise of independent media is reshaping how Americans view politics and our government. In the past, legacy media outlets served as the gatekeepers who decided what kind of information the American people were shown. Today, the power to decide what information the American people see is diffused across thousands of news outlets, podcasts, citizen journalists, and other content creators.

Media coverage of the 2016 and 2020 elections was instrumental in determining both outcomes. A burst of populist energy in 2016 launched Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders into close competition with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and enabled Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination.

Legacy media outlets enjoyed a stronger ability to shape election narratives in 2016 than they do today, and their decision to freeze Sanders out of coverage while providing Trump with near-constant airtime proved to be critical to the election’s outcome. Trump received several billion dollars worth of free media helping to propel him from a political outsider to a viable candidate. Sanders, on the other hand, received a fraction of the media attention given to his chief primary opponent, Clinton, or Trump.

Media coverage once again shaped the outcome of the election in 2020. According to an August 2022 poll, 79 percent of Americans believed that “truthful” reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop story would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election. The decision by major media outlets not to take the story seriously was influenced by a letter published in October 2020 by more than fifty former intelligence officials warning that they believed that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Furthermore, the Twitter Files, published between December 2022 and March 2023 by independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, revealed that Twitter’s content moderation decisions have been heavily influenced by the U.S. intelligence community for years. Political actors, including both the Biden 2020 campaign and the Trump administration, had many content moderation requests honored as well.

Ironically, one of the first censorship requests made to Twitter by the Biden administration on January 23, 2021 was to remove a Tweet posted by Kennedy himself.

Independent news has risen to counter this trend towards censorship, and Twitter is now X, home to a myriad of independent shows and citizen journalists. None of this is to say that the entirety of the new independent media landscape is polished and reliable journalism, but it absolutely represents a sea change in American politics.

For example, multiple surveys have found Kennedy’s net favorability to be higher than any other national political figure. Despite a torrent of negative and adversarial coverage of Kennedy from legacy media outlets, he is viewed more favorably by the American public than Trump, Biden, and every other 2024 presidential contender.

Evidently, the new independent media landscape and podcast network is already robust enough to enable an independent candidate to credibly challenge the two major parties.

A Viable Alternative

*4th of July fireworks at the White House, July 2012 [Credit—Matthew Straubmuller, License—CC BY 2.0]*

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Kennedy has already broken through one of the most significant barriers to independent candidates: thanks to numerous polls placing his support between 15 and 20 percent, the average voter is likely to see him as a viable candidate and not as a “wasted vote,” a perception which plagues third party candidates.

The “spoiler effect” argument remains persuasive to many Americans given the historic resilience of the two-party system. America has been governed by a two-party system since the 1790s. The two parties in that system changed several times during the first half of the 1800s, and several third parties throughout history have won seats in Congress and elected a handful of governors, but the two-party system itself has remained intact since the early days of the Republic.

Americans thus have a deeply entrenched view of alternative candidates as mere spoilers to the two major party candidates.

However, there is reason to believe that this view could quickly erode between now and November 2024. Americans’ faith in the institutions of our Republic has been on a trajectory of erosion for years. Inflated food, housing, and energy costs will dampen any enthusiasm for a continuation of the status quo. The presumptive major party nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, are historically unpopular.

Furthermore, America’s electoral system allows for a candidate to win the presidency with a rather small plurality of the popular vote since most states award 100 percent of their Electoral Votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state, regardless of the margin of victory.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with just 39.8 percent of the popular vote. The election was split between four major candidates, with a Southern Democratic Party ticket splitting off from the Democrats, a Constitutional Union Party ticket aimed solely at preserving the Union, and Lincoln on the Republican ticket.

A similar scenario may be on the horizon today. No Labels has tens of millions of dollars to support a campaign if they ultimately choose to run one, while Dr. Cornel West’s independent bid, Dr. Jill Stein’s Green Party bid, and the Libertarian Party’s eventual nominee are each likely to earn a small share of the vote.

In such an unpredicatable environment, the path for Kennedy to earn a plurality of the vote in enough states to win 270 Electoral College votes is not a pipe dream.

Kennedy remains an underdog in the 2024 election.

The two-party system is deeply entrenched within the American political system and has proven to be remarkably resilient over more than two centuries. America has seen just one independent president in our history: George Washington.

The facts remain, however, that momentum for an independent movement has been building across the country for decades. Kennedy’s campaign is the natural evolution of this movement, not an aberration. The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the 2024 election makes it a more likely environment for historic change to occur than any in recent history, as Saagar Enjeti explained during a recent episode of Breaking Points:

“This is the most precarious and crazy situation proceeding into an election that we have seen since ‘92. And the stakes are so much higher today than they were in 1992.
The stakes today [are] high just in terms of the tremendous uncertainty in the global system and for the American future, and the variety of directions that we could go.”