On April 13 I wrote a piece called “Is An RFK Jr. Effect Actually Happening?”. In this article I examined and analyzed a month’s worth of general election presidential polling of Trump, Biden, and RFK Jr. My goal was to determine if there was an “RFK Jr. effect”. I wanted to see if it was possible to discern any tendencies of him pulling respondents away from Trump or Biden, or having no net effect on either.
My conclusion was not too hard to come by: [spoiler alert] There was no discernable RFK Jr. effect. He sometimes seemed to have an effect on Trump, sometimes Biden, all to varying and random degrees. And many of the polls that showed Biden losing ground on Trump when you threw in RFK Jr. were really showing an effect from the addition of West and Stein into the mix. There were not nearly as many polls that included RFK Jr. that did not also include West and Stein, but the ones that did only include RFK Jr. still had no obvious net effect.
I’m glad I wrote that article then, because had I waited for a week or so, I may have had to scrap it all and readjust to a new reality. Four new polls just came out, and they all suggest that there may be an RFK Jr. effect emerging. The thing that makes these new polls so compelling is that, although their overall head-to-head results are quite different—the RFK Jr. effect is apparent and similar in all of them.
So it’s hard to just ignore them or dismiss them as polling noise. It’s still a bit too early to say there’s a definite trend, but four completely different polls within the same week, showing different overall results, but very similar RFK Jr effects, should be noted. Let’s examine the results.
Here’s a table I made to breakdown the 4 recent polls I’m referring to:
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