Kennedy Jr’s Candidacy as a Route to Voting Reform
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As a third party candidate, Robert Kennedy Jr. faces the significant challenge of appearing as a potential spoiler for the upcoming election (see here). Some of his talking points have mentioned voting reform, mostly focused on security and identification. While as far as I can tell his candidacy does not refer to the kinds of technical reforms we would hope for, if he wins the election as an independent, not only will he have broken the rutted two party system, his presidency will probably usher in a great opportunity for technical voting reform. In fact he justifies his candidacy by claiming that among the three, he would be the Condorcet winner.
Based on what I am observing at the moment, if I vote at all, I will almost surely vote for him. Feel free to disagree, I’d like to know what others think. This is not a political forum per se, but voting reform is inevitably a political topic. As a moderator, I’m opening the door to this discussion. If anybody finds it inappropriate, tell me and I will be considerate about not saying more on this topic.
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@cfrank sign this petition to get RFK Jr. in the presidential debates: https://www.kennedy24.com/debate-petition
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This thread made me lose interest in this forum. RFK Jr. is a monster.
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@Isocratia I mean, maybe. But if you bail from a conversation just because people are discussing ideas that don’t neatly align with your views, I think that kind of runs counter to productive discussion. Engagement is the whole point of a forum. Why not take the opportunity to make your case? On that point, I don’t think I was being dogmatic, I was just putting a moderate, measured perspective out here. In particular, that if a candidate has comparable support to what Nader did, he should also be on the debate stage.
As for Kennedy, I’m not sure if you followed his campaign directly, but from what I saw, his platform had some surprisingly rational moments. Whatever mistaken views he holds about healthcare, his core message was about dismantling corporate capture of government—which, let’s be honest, is exactly the route that’s brought us to the brink of fascism today. Frankly, he seemed more committed to stopping Trump than the Democrats did.
Like him or not, he was a third-party candidate who genuinely threatened to shake up the duopoly—something we haven’t really seen since Nader. And given how deeply dysfunctional the two-party system has become, that’s not nothing. The political landscape is a real-time disaster, and reform doesn’t just happen on its own. While it wasn’t his main agenda, one thing I appreciated about his run is that he was literally the only candidate to talk about ranked-choice voting and other technical fixes.
That said, I completely checked out when he aligned himself with Trump. At that point, his platform basically collapsed. His current sellout stance disillusioned a lot of his supporters—and honestly, he should’ve just bowed out once it was clear he couldn’t win.
If you see it differently, I’d be interested to hear why. That’s why I brought this topic up in the first place.
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@A Former User said in Kennedy Jr’s Candidacy as a Route to Voting Reform:
This thread made me lose interest in this forum. RFK Jr. is a monster.
Just one person posting something you disagree with made you lose interest in the whole forum?
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@toby-pereira apparently so, because they left. But honestly in terms of the purpose of a forum, that doesn’t really subtract from anything.
Anyway, this original post was made well before RFK Jr.’s (imo reluctant) alignment with Trump. At least one of RFK Jr.’s predictions was correct, namely that Biden and/or Harris would not beat Trump. His “no spoiler” pledge would have given beating Trump the greatest possible chance, but Democrats refused to cooperate because they are power hungry, greedy, and benefit too much from the duopoly to concede to a third party candidate, even at the cost of Trump winning.
IMO, that’s primarily why RFK Jr. angled against them, in game theory terms it was as a punishment. It was a textbook failed prisoner’s dilemma, and they got a taste of their own medicine in a way that hurt everybody and could have been avoided. But I digress.