RFK Jr. just dropped out. Is that bearish for Harris?
RFK Jr. just dropped out. Is that bearish for Harris?
Pun absolutely intended.
UPDATE (8/23): Kennedy has ended his bid. We've changed the headline, but the rest of the story is still very topical and has been preserved as it was for posterity's sake.
UPDATE #2 (8/24): We’ve removed Kennedy from the model — for a more up-to-date explanation of the impact this had (not much), see here. The procedure wound up being simpler than what I describe below.
Greetings from charmingly overcast Seattle, Washington, where I’m here for a book event tonight. Given the timing and that I have family I rarely get to see all the way up here1, I won’t have anything on Kamala Harris’s DNC speech until tomorrow (if I have anything to say at all). For my general thoughts on where Harris’s candidacy stands, though, check out this piece on the post-convention phase of her candidacy — or this week’s “Kamala Edition” of Risky Business with Maria:
I also want to thank Silver Bulletin readers for their amazing enthusiasm for On the Edge, which debuted at #5 on the New York Times bestseller list this week! We’re also #6 on Amazon Charts and — this one’s really important to us2 — #5 on the Indie List. Someone should probably write a trend story about what my partner and I have started to call the “Substack Effect” for book authors. I realize I’m talking to a microfraction of the audience, but if you’re someone who’s working on a book, I’d strongly encourage you to start an email newsletter — just trust me on this one.
Now on to Model Talk.
RFK Jr.’s bear of a campaign and how it affects the model
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was never going to be my cup of tea, but as someone who would like to see more electoral competition, I always root for independent candidates to at least not embarrass themselves. But from dead bears to brain worms, RFK Jr. has pretty clearly failed that test.
And whatever slim chances Kennedy had of a Ross Perot-like rise in the polls was further undermined when Democrats smartly replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris, reducing the number of pox-on-both-houses voters. Third-party candidates often lose steam as the election approaches, but Kennedy’s trajectory has been particularly ignominious. In three-way polls against Biden and Trump, he initially polled at 10 or 11 percent, then gradually faded to 8 (save for a bounce just after Biden’s awful debate). In the Trump-Harris matchup, though, he’s dropped to about 4 percent:
Kennedy had been shopping around for an exit strategy, including a cabinet appointment or other position from one of the two major-party candidates. It isn’t any great surprise, then, that Kennedy is widely reported to be considering dropping out of the race and possibly endorsing Trump — the more transactional of the two candidates — in exchange for who-knows-what. Let’s do the rest of this in Q&A format.
Prediction markets are very convinced RFK will exit the race? Are they being overconfident?
Polymarket traders reckon there’s around an 85 percent chance that Kennedy will drop out during remarks he’s scheduled to make tomorrow in Phoenix, and a 95 percent chance that he’ll do so before Election Day (and a 90 percent chance he’ll endorse Trump by then). You could make a contrarian case here, I suppose, that Kennedy is erratic and unpredictable, and/or that the widespread leaks of his plans could box him in and make him look weak and sycophantic to Trump. But, the reporting has been pretty definitive, his own vice presidential pick sparked the rumors, and Kennedy has done little to bat them down, saying “I will not confirm or deny that."
Would RFK dropping out hurt Harris or Trump more? And by how much?