RFK Jr. Has A Big Problem With Consistency — Will His Voters Care?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may not have qualified for Thursday’s CNN-organized presidential debate, but the independent candidate for president definitely has the juice to make an impact in November. Multiple national pollshave shown Kennedy with double-digit support, and he’s officially on the ballot in several states, with enough signatures to appear on a dozen more.

The candidate has faced an uphill climb not only because he’s up against one current and one former president, but also thanks to his decades of false statements about vaccines and his embrace of other conspiracy theories.

Another key problem for Kennedy’s campaign? Consistency. On several key issues, Kennedy has flip-flopped numerous times since launching his White House bid, leaving voters with a fuzzy picture of what he actually supports and why.

After Kennedy’s switch from a Democratic presidential contender to an independent one in October of last year, he had tens of millions of new voters to court. In a speech announcing the independent bid, Kennedy said he’d “surrendered my attachment to taking sides.” On the contrary, he seems to love taking sides, having now positioned himself on the dueling ends of key debates on abortion, environmental policy and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America who has written aboutKennedy’s candidacy and voter base, said he didn’t expect that Kennedy’s habit of changing course would hurt him too much.

“Very few voters are policy voters, especially anti-system voters” like Kennedy’s, he said. “There’s a lot of political science that suggests people pick candidates first, and then they update their issue positions to follow that.”

Still, Drutman acknowledged that if