We know that every vote counts in this fight for the American presidency and now that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has withdrawn from the race, the voters he managed to seduce will have to find a new contender in the Democratic or Republican camp.
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The man who is one of the heirs of the famous Kennedy family collected nearly 10% of voting intentions last spring, but since Kamala Harris took Joe Biden’s place as Democratic candidate, this percentage has halved.
The latter, however, decided to ignore the Democratic candidate, who is currently on a roll, and give his support to Donald Trump.
Journalist and host Pierre-Olivier Zappa took on the task of dividing the independent candidate’s votes to try to discover how RFK Jr.’s withdrawal could impact voting intentions on November 5.
“A marginal impact”
Although the redistribution of the few votes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might have won in the race will have “a marginal impact,” according to Mr. Zappa, the journalist points out that several White House contests in recent years have ended in very close results.
“If we take the current election, we say that RFK had 5% of the voting intentions in the polls, if we divide that roughly speaking: 2% who would go to Donald Trump, 1% who would go to Kamala Harris and 2% who would not vote, well that makes a fairly marginal impact on public opinion support for Donald Trump,” notes the anchor of TVA Nouvelles 22h. “On the other hand, that is sometimes what makes us win a state or a key state and gain access to the White House.”
In the last election, Joe Biden won the southern US state of Georgia by just 11,000 votes.
“It’s a small margin, we’re talking about a 0.2% lead for Joe Biden,” Zappa notes. “That’s to say that there are extremely close contests and that sometimes a handful of voters, a few thousand, make the difference.”
In fact, Donald Trump even tried to overturn the election result in this key state.
See all the examples in the video above.
