What happens when an electorate wants change but there’s no obvious change candidate on the ballot?

This question popped into my head after I watched one of Rich Thau’s fascinating monthly focus groups of Biden-Trump voters, with the latest edition convening Pennsylvania voters who voted once for either President Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton and once for former President Donald Trump.

Thau has been doing these qualitative monthly check-ins with voters across the country ever since the rise of Trump. For the 2020 election cycle, he gathered voters who voted Obama-Trump. Now, he has shifted the voter résumé to the mix of folks above, still focusing on people who have switched their votes election to election. (Thau and his company, Engagious, are also partnering with NBC News on another recurring focus group project gathering key voting groups in battleground states.) You can see some of the archived focus groups at his website. This is one of those projects that become exponentially more impactful with each new monthly addition to the archives, so pay attention!

The headline-grabber for this month’s Pennsylvania check-in was the surprising level of interest in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. among these swing voters. In some ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise. These voters are by definition not hard partisans, and they certainly aren’t pleased with either major party, as they’ve been comfortable voting against both of them over the last two elections.

As I wrote months ago, there was always going to be a moment in this campaign cycle when both major parties had finished their nominating processes and selected Biden and Trump — and yet the public wasn’t satisfied with that outcome. We are at that moment.

Six months ago, while we knew his trials were always going to be a disruptive moment for Trump, it wasn’t clear how much other issues were going to be disruptive to Biden. But clearly, the Middle East is becoming a hugely disruptive political issue for him.

Ironically, it was this moment in the calendar that the folks at No Labels had once identified as the perfect time to pick their ticket and start selling it publicly. The convergence of a front-loaded primary calendar with ballot deadlines made it inevitable that an April lull would be an ideal opportunity to fill an obvious void. This spring period in 1992, after it became clear that Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush would be their parties’ nominees, was when Ross Perot got an opening — and he used it brilliantly. The strongest 90-day period for Perot’s campaign was essentially April 1 to mid-July (the start of the Democratic convention).

Ultimately, No Labels failed to find a compelling ticket, so it has since called off its effort. But No Labels didn’t fail because the vacuum of people looking for an alternative to Biden and Trump ceased to exist.

With no mainstream third-party alternative available for now, that vacuum is being filled by Kennedy. For many voters, one can tell, he’s simply a famous name filling a void. You can hear the lack of knowledge many of these Pennsylvania voters had about Kennedy other than his name, and those who knew something about him knew only a few things. Moreover, it was clear that his best asset was the fact that his last name was neither Trump nor Biden.

Watching the initial interest in Kennedy’s candidacy among these voters serves as a reminder that there was a powerful opportunity for a true potential unity ticket — not one that professed “centrism” per se, but one that promised to take a partisan timeout for four years and attempt to focus on hard choices to solve hard problems, like immigration.

But given the stakes of this election, it has also been clear to me that while an opening exists with the true middle-of-the-road or less partisan crowd, the lane is very narrow. And unless partisans from one or both parties also wanted an alternative, there really wasn’t a path to victory.

But there is a path to relevancy.

I’m convinced that if Kennedy were merely just anti-Covid vaccine, rather than anti-most vaccines, the voters he needs to persuade wouldn’t view him as skeptically, and that would make others take him more seriously. Every one of these new measles outbreaks around the country has the fingerprints of the anti-vax crowd on it, and whether those outbreaks are in South Florida or Northern California or Oklahoma or elsewhere, they all serve as a reminder that anti-vaccine messaging has done real damage to real human beings.

Despite all of that, the initial interest in Kennedy does tell me that he is going to be a very powerful “none of the above” candidate on the ballot.

Nationally I think it’s pretty clear Kennedy pulls from both Trump and Biden about evenly, reinforcing this notion he’s most likely a placeholder for “none of the above.” Where this will get tricky is in the battleground states, because I’m not as convinced Kennedy will pull evenly from the two major candidates when you start to measure this in Michigan versus North Carolina or Arizona versus Wisconsin.

Not all anti-Biden and anti-Trump voters around the country act the same. Military veterans in North Carolina who choose to vote for Kennedy, say, may also vote GOP down the ballot, but they don’t trust Trump as commander in chief. And while those votes won’t hurt the GOP in other ways, they will lower Trump’s support and give Biden a lower “winning” number to carry North Carolina. If Biden can make 47% a winning number in North Carolina, he’ll carry the state.

Kennedy could also become a place to park votes for folks uncomfortable with Biden’s execution of foreign policy, particularly all things having to do with Israel and Gaza.

That same math problem could affect the Democrats if, say, a big chunk of progressive voters in Michigan or Wisconsin decides both Trump and Biden have the same basic policy toward Israel and they vote for Kennedy as a protest vote. Perhaps that wouldn’t hurt Democrats down the ballot in either state, but it would lower the winning number Trump needs to carry either. As in North Carolina for Biden, if Trump can make 47% a winning number in Wisconsin or Michigan, he’ll carry it.

I don’t foresee Kennedy’s getting north of “none of the above” territory come Election Day, but the likelihood that he continues to poll in double digits until at least October seems high. And if that means he ends up qualifying for the national debates, then we could enter some rarely charted territory.

If he’s in the debates, it’s a potential opportunity for Kennedy. But I’m hesitant to believe he can make the most of that opportunity, because, so far, every time he has had a chance to grab a mainstream spotlight, he has instead either eagerly traveled down rabbit holes marked “vaccines” and “Jan. 6” and “Kennedy conspiracies” or he has gotten so defensive when asked about them that it quickly derails him.

Despite every effort by voters wanting to take Kennedy seriously as a candidate, he has a hard time presenting himself as a serious candidate.

I am curious whether, in a moment when both Trump and Biden are proactively going after Kennedy, the combination of being attacked by both major-party nominees has a bizarre boomerang effect that boosts the independent, especially if Trump and Biden are attacking him for different things.

Bottom line: Pay attention to Kennedy and to voters’ flirtation with his candidacy. It has nothing to do with Kennedy the person and everything to do with Trump and Biden. The stronger Kennedy looks in the polls, the more it appears to be a direct reflection on the collective weakness of the two parties. And the stronger he looks in the fall, the more variance you should expect in how the battleground states shake out.

When the news became a reality TV show 

To say I have a lot of thoughts about O.J. Simpson is an understatement. For one: The impact he had on the news industry and the TV consumption habits of all Americans is quite remarkable.

Looking back, I now realize the entire O.J. experience — from the feeding frenzy coverage the week Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered to the multiple televised trials over the following three years — is probably one of the five most impactful events to happen in my lifetime.

Obviously, 9/11 tops that list, as does the election of the country’s first Black president. I was a teenager when the Challenger space shuttle exploded on live television, and I distinctly remember heading to a Cub Scout meeting the day Ronald Reagan was shot. After those four events, “where were you when O.J. was in the White Bronco?” is probably next. (I was co-hosting a house party that Friday evening, if you must know.)

But looking back, the profound impact Simpson had was on how media and its consumers interact.

I’d argue that pre-O.J., the news business was a healthy mix of delivering information you needed to know balanced with information we knew you wanted to know. And I’d argue what that episode taught news executives was that the “news” could be profitable if you packaged it in a way that made consumers want to watch! What if you simply gave consumers what they wanted to know or hear and didn’t drive them away by giving them information they didn’t want to know or hear?

Thirty years later, I think the media-industrial complex has learned how to deliver everyone what they want to hear to the point that people can live in different realities. We don’t have a shared set of facts anymore, because the news business is stuck with a revenue model that provides financial incentives for catering to whoever it thinks are their readers or consumers.

Sadly, it’s hard to explain to anyone who was born after the Simpson trial that a different media landscape did exist before. While news networks always wanted more eyeballs, there was a line between news and entertainment that wouldn’t get crossed. In trying to explain this pre-O.J. world to my 17-year-old and to some college students I’ve been meeting with weekly this semester, I realized how hard it’s going to be to try to go back to some of the old ways we did business. 

Ultimately, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you want. But I hope, as we all look back at the O.J. saga of the ’90s and all the bad decisions that were made in the attempt to make that coverage more compelling to viewers, that we don’t repeat many of them as we gear up for coverage of at least one, and perhaps two, trials of the century this spring and summer — involving another celebrity from the ’70s and the ’80s.

Cameras in the courts: Hot take alert 

I’ve been unofficially polling friends and colleagues with the following question: When have cameras in the courtroom been truly a good thing for the public as a whole?

I started from a position of “I’ve yet to find one example.” But there was one televised trial that made me hesitate for a minute: the trial of the cops involved in the killing of George Floyd. I think a strong argument can be made that more good than bad came from the televised testimony in that trial.

But outside that example, I’m struggling. I don’t think cameras were a net plus for the public with Simpson. Ditto Johnny Depp. Now, just because I’m a no-camera guy doesn’t mean I’m anti-transparency. I think audio-only, which the Supreme Court temporarily gave us during the Covid-19 pandemic, should become the norm, with all trials available live via audio.

But the more I see cameras in the courtroom, the less I believe they have been a net positive for understanding the courts or the justice system. It’s clear all the televised courts have given us is access to cheap and free reality TV programming. Click.