Opinion | Trump, RFK Jr. and the Disillusioned Black Voter

When Sen. Ted Kennedy ran for president in 1980, his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. served as a campaign surrogate. According to “The Kennedys: An American Drama,” a 1984 biography of the family by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Bobby Jr. would visit black churches in the South and tell congregants that black people were “worse off now than they’ve ever been in the history of this country.” When a historian advised him to stop saying that because it wasn’t true, Mr. Kennedy replied, “You’re right, but it always gets applause that way, so I think I’ll leave it in.”

More than four decades later, Mr. Kennedy is still trafficking in misinformation. In 2021 he produced a one-hour documentary that peddled conspiracy theories about vaccines being designed to harm black people. During the pandemic, blacks were underrepresented among the vaccinated and overrepresented among Covid deaths. A 2022 analysis of the literature on vaccine hesitancy published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities concluded that “mistrust of the medical establishment” and “uncertainty in vaccine safety” were top concerns of black Americans.

The recent collapse of No Labels as a third-party alternative almost surely helps President Biden’s re-election bid, but Mr. Kennedy’s independent candidacy still presents a problem for Democrats. Donald Trump’s improvement in the polls among minorities has garnered more attention, but don’t discount Mr. Kennedy’s appeal to black voters. On racism, Mr. Kennedy can cite his family’s support for civil rights and voting rights. On gun violence, he can talk about losing his own father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, to an assassin in 1968. When the topic turns to substance abuse, he can invoke his own youthful struggles with heroin addiction.

It’s understood that Mr. Kennedy isn’t going to become the next president, but he remains the most likely third-party candidate to influence the outcome of the race. The RealClearPolitics average of polls puts his support at just under 10%, well ahead of Cornel West (1.9%) and Jill Stein (1.5%). Historically, third-party candidacies fade as Election Day approaches, but Mr. Kennedy’s familiar name could make him an exception. Even without qualifying for the ballot in every state, as a write-in candidate Mr. Kennedy could have a major effect on who wins the presidency this year.

In 2016 Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton thanks to roughly 80,000 votes in three states—Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2020, 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin delivered the presidency to Mr. Biden. What these narrow margins in the past two presidential elections suggest is that even if Mr. Kennedy’s support drops to half its current level, he’s still a danger to Messrs. Biden and Trump in swing states that are expected to determine the victor.

Among whites, education and gender have long been reliable indicators of how someone will vote. The most Democratic group is college-educated women. The most Republican voting bloc is men without college degrees. Traditionally, the nonwhite vote hasn’t broken down the same way, but as Ronald Brownstein wrote in the Atlantic recently, that may be starting to change. Significant percentages of black and Latino working-class men moved away from the Democratic Party in 2020. Polls show them continuing to drift in that direction and voting more like working-class whites.

If Mr. Trump is driving the trend, he may be getting some help from Mr. Kennedy, an antiestablishment populist with similar appeal. A Morning Consult survey this week showed that the share of the black vote with a favorable view of Mr. Kennedy had climbed to 51% from 38% in polling conducted before and after he chose Nicole Shanahan as his running mate last month.

According to Mr. Brownstein, the working-class blacks and Hispanics who are abandoning Democrats don’t otherwise resemble the typical MAGA voter. They aren’t especially enamored of Mr. Trump, and most aren’t ideologically aligned with the former president. Instead, the rift has been opened by a deep disaffection with the state of the economy as it relates to their everyday lives. For college-educated voters, inflation is more of an annoyance. For the working class, it’s a much bigger deal.

We won’t know if this shift in minority voting patterns is a temporary phenomenon or indicative of a lasting political realignment until Mr. Trump leaves the stage. But if black voters in particular no longer believe that racial identity should determine which political party they support, this is progress.

In our two-party system, better political representation derives from playing Democrats against Republicans, not offering undying loyalty to one side. And heaven knows black voters could use better political representation. Perhaps the black working class will show the way.