Breaking the Binary in US Politics
Robert Kennedy Jr like most 3rd party candidates upsets the usual norm of simply trying to be better than the other. That is why he annoys both sides.
It is so easy when a choice is between black and white is it not? More than a few psychologists have made the point that humans tend to like easy decisions when it's one or the other. It can be even more the case if it's something that we don't necessarily have a lot of personal experience or knowledge about. Trying to impose simple binaries on more complex situations has frequently been an objective for messaging from political parties and governments. Any given issue that might have a dozen different options on the table, but most communication staff will almost always present their own option only in a relative position to a single other usually held by whatever the other major party involved is. reducing political decisions this way they're tempting to try and give a clear picture to the public, but it is also frequently designed to make their position look better.
This isn't radically different from the same thing most salesmen do. When you're looking to buy something they intentionally try and get information from you to reduce the number of choices so as to make your decision easier. As a general rule it makes getting the sale simpler as somebody doesn't get information overload and become indecisive. It's one of the key components of almost any sales class.
Think of an issue like raising or cutting taxes. There's more than two positions on most of these fronts. In fact it's an entire spectrum. There's different types of taxes and someone's position might be different on each one. You might like property tax more or less than income tax. But most political parties aren't going to complicate it by asking the same person that might say lower taxes generically which ones they're talking about. I could support increasing some taxes by 2% and reducing a different type of tax by 3%, but it's unlikely a party is going to try and digest complex answers like that. As such they put a very simplistic mode on the table of either one or the other to try and herd voters into their camp.
The same thing goes for when polling is done. it intentionally tries to produce only two options so as to make messaging easier to do. If a poll produces seven or eight different answers it runs into the problem that nobody is likely to be able to get a critical mass of voters. This is why almost every poll question is intentionally worded on issues to try and get people to herd into one or two sides. it's more useful to try and probe where at least larger groups of people might be.
In an election season this sort of approach makes sense. You're basically trying to retail specific positions in order to get the most votes possible. From a governing standpoint it can be a little bit more problematic as frequently it allows politicians to simplify something that might force them to move in a different direction. This is especially true when you only have two political parties as options.
In any country that only has two major parties it's usually been the case that electoral strategy is simply to make yourself look better than the other one rather than to take any particular risks. you are trying to maximise the number of votes you get, therefore taking a position well outside the centre is more likely to lose votes rather than get them. As such two party systems tend to be more moderate in the long term.
This is what makes the current situation in the United States somewhat strange. You have two presidential candidates who are both generally outside of what most of the population want. Poll after poll have shown roughly three quarters of the population not wanting Biden and Trump being their options. This has been the common argument why if there ever was a year for a third candidate to be a threat this would be it.
It's been true through most of the last three decades in the United States that both parties have spent more time trying to make the other one look worse than they are as a means to try and shift the electorate. Generic polls have suggested that most of the population doesn't necessarily like who they vote for but they have a more negative view of the other one. The evolution of negative advertising has been a big part of this.
This is typically shorthanded as negative polarisation. People don't have strong feelings for what they like but they have very strong feelings about who they don't like. From this standpoint it's easy when you only have two options on the ballot to simply try and make yourself look better than the other side.
Rather than trying to actually give people a reason to vote for something, create a binary where the opposite is sufficiently outside of what people would see as being acceptable. The same thing exists in some other countries like Britain.
Within the United States it's generally been a wide held belief that the two parties have done almost everything in their power especially in legal respects to ensure this situation of only two parties remains. It allows the binary position where they can reduce any issue to two positions and just make theirs look better than the other one in order to help election teams get votes.
The last month has been filled with various reports of how both the Democrats and the Republicans are wary about Robert Kennedy Jr’s presidential run. Both basically presented cases as to why they think Kennedy will hinder their own candidature more than the other. As I've said before I'm somewhat sceptical that he hurts one more than the other, but he does fundamentally change the dynamic of the race overall. It's a fairly simple situation having a third candidate removes the entire binary position of simply being better than the other guy is good enough to win the election.
If you have three or more candidates it becomes more necessary to make a positive argument as to why you're better. It also means that specific issues can become more significant as one candidate might appeal to a certain voting block. Within electoral strategy this means trying to figure out where your strengths are in Target those voters knowing that you're leaving others to vote for someone else.
It's hard to say that there's ever been two specific candidates that depend on the situation of simply trying to be better than the other one more than Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It might be something of an overused statement sometimes but both candidates would have a hard time beating anybody other than the other one. That is, neither would run on their own merits by choice. Both side's best argument is how bad the opposition is. Anyone who has a strong opinion on Joe Biden or Donald Trump is probably more likely to vote for the opposite. Much of the targeting of Kennedy has opened the suggestion that both election teams have a hard time trying to come up with a strategy of presenting the positives of their own person.
Even if the situation which I believe is the most likely is that Kennedy basically has a different voting pool generally than either Trump or Biden would be trying to get, it still undermines the idea of us versus them that both were looking for. If you're looking for the biggest reason why both sides view Kennedy as a threat I would suggest this is the better place to look. It forces both to try and make positive cases for themselves.
How the major parties have dealt with a third party candidate in the past has more often than not been trying to ignore them. Yet it seems to be something that could be a sleeper issue as to how much time they spend trying to attack Kennedy in the lead up to the fall this year. And maybe the biggest wild card to pay attention to going forward just by drawing so much attention does that in and of itself end up helping Kennedy get more votes than he would normally and costing whoever it is that attacks him the most.