Could RFK Jr., Really Skew the 2024 Election? Yeah, He Could
People blew him off as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist, but it may be time to take him seriously.

This year, however you vote, you’re probably crazy for voting that way. I’m not saying not to vote, but there’s no way to leave the polls and not be bat-sh*t behind the drama. I’ll explain why.
A few months ago, it became pretty clear that the 2024 presidential contest would be between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, a rematch of four years ago. Unsurprisingly, many are groaning about a lack of political progression, given a lack of choice.
One served four years in the White House and did little more than embarrass the nation with his hubris, bad policies and virtually opening the floodgates for a pandemic that could have tanked the economy. The other is a Washington insider that did much better than his predecessor, but who is having the damnedest time selling himself to the public because he’s such a poor communicator, especially amid a populace that can barely afford to pay the rent and with emerging volatile global conflicts.
Even still you’d think Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the U.S. Attorney General who was assassinated in 1968 during his own presidential campaign and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, who arguably pivoted society’s direction in the latter 20th century, was little more than an afterthought. His is just one of several names that tend to pop up as alternative candidates to the mainstream ones each election. Sometimes they become viable third party competition like John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 2000, which political historians argue cost Al Gore the election that year.
But Kennedy, 70, pulled a hat trick on Thursday that the others hadn’t: he won a spot on the Michigan presidential ballot after the Natural Law Party nominated him as their candidate, the Detroit Free Press reported. So why does this matter? Because in 2016 and 2020, Michigan was one of the critical swing states that determined the outcome of the election.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton pretty much bungled her chances by forgetting the tool-and-die blue collar people in metro Detroit, favoring the suburban patrician types who everyone thought would hand her the presidency. Trump capitalized on that by just talking to the people Clinton ignored and narrowly defeated her in the electoral college.
In 2020, Biden, understanding this mistake, put together a coalition of several elector-rich states including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Nevada. But Michigan was special because people actually tried in a lawsuit to pretend that Biden somehow faked the ballots. They tried similar idiocy in Georgia, too but a federal judge smacked both down, saying Trump’s supporters were out of their minds. Then they attacked the capital the next month.
Now, Biden faces a new challenge in Michigan thanks to the Israel-Gaza conflict. Everyone knew when it began in October 2023, that it was going to have some impact on U.S. politics. But the political skirmish has been intense. It led to the downfall of the first African American president of Harvard University, and the horrible murder of a Palestinian boy in Chicago.
It’s been particularly intense in Michigan because metropolitan Detroit is home to a significant population of Middle Eastern people. That means Chaldeans, Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestenians and a number of other nationalities and ethnicities. The suburb of Dearborn, Mich., once fiercely protected as a whites-only enclave by its old racist mayor Orville Hubbard, is now 55 percent Arab-American, the first city in the U.S. to have a majority Middle Eastern population.
Needless to say, much of this critical voting group in the metropolitan Detroit region is not happy about the Biden administration’s reaction so far regarding Gaza.
In fact Michigan 12th District U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib is Palestinian-American herself and has been vocal about the conflict, which has cost an estimated 1,139 Israeli lives and killed nearly 33,900 Palestinians through Israeli military action against Hamas terrorists.
“Right now we feel completely neglected and just unseen by our government,” she said in February. “If you want us to be louder, then come here and vote ‘uncommitted.’ " That expressed the disdain the Detroit area’s Arab population feels about the Biden administration’s pronounced support for Israel, which has long angered the Arab world, much of the global Muslim population and other critics of the nation. This brings us back to RFK Jr., who steps into Michigan as someone for that group to cast a vote for since they may have no interest in Trump, and cannot commit to Biden unless there is a ceasefire.
If Michigan’s Arab-American population casts enough ballots for RFK Jr., in Wayne, Oakland and Monroe counties, the state’s population center, that could siphon electoral votes from Biden in November, costing him the state and potentially the election. The scenario could be repeated in Minnesota, which has a significant Somali Muslim population that has no reason to be in love with Biden’s Israel policies, either.
Now, for the past couple of years Kennedy has been known more for his coronavirus vaccine denialism than as a politician. He railed loudly against the vaccine, joining a vocal group of extremists, conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientists claiming all types of misinformation about vaccine efficacy. Fortunately, despite this, enough of the vaccine was used by the global population to prevent COVID-19 from spreading and becoming another bubonic plague.
But now all this, obscure as it may seem, could be what skews the 2024 election, perhaps causing the confusion of 2000 where we had to wait weeks to find out who would be president, or maybe something altogether different. It’s impossible to know. The easy solution would be for Biden to come up with sensible policy toward Gaza that results in a ceasefire, if not some kind of solution. The White House has said that’s what it wants, but the continued humanitarian crisis in Gaza is not leaving people hopeful.
So again, for the third time, it looks like Michigan, particularly the Detroit area – the city that put the world on wheels, gave us Motown, techno music, the Bad Boys, the 2023 Lions and also the best pizza in the country, may determine America’s future.