Pollsters Gone into Hiding Since Kennedy Announcement and The Rise of the Zombie-Candidate Polls

Has the fear of being the bearer of bad news to an entrenched, but very fragile, Democratic Party Establishment resulted in silence or deceit from Pollsters with regard to the 2024 Democratic Primary?

May 06, 2023

At Real Clear Politics’ website today (5 May 2023), the 2024 Democratic Primary polls page looks like this:

Real Clear Politics’ 2024 Democratic Primary polls page on 5 May 2023

First, look at that long list of candidates! Some haven’t declared their 2024 candidacies but appear to be leftovers from 2020: Buttigieg, Clinton, Warren, Klobuchar. Harris is presumably not running as anything but Vice President but does well in Harris polls (any relation?). Sanders has explicitly said he’s not running and has endorsed Biden. Newcomers to the field, Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez, haven’t declared yet (and probably won’t). That leaves two declared candidates for 2024: Biden and Williamson.

Kennedy is not listed, presumably because he’d only just declared on 19 April and, as it appears on RCP’s page, not a single poll related to the 2024 Democratic Primary has been done since that day, now 16 days ago.

But we know there have been at least three polls since then.

On April 19, the day Kennedy announced his candidacy, USA Today1 reported:

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launches his unlikely bid for the Democratic presidential nomination Wednesday with the support of 14% of voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020, an exclusive USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds.”

A week later, on April 26, Fox News released polling results putting Kennedy at 19%, according to an article in USA Today2

The next day, on April 27, Emerson College announced their poll3 in which Kennedy reached 21% in a three-way race between Biden, Kennedy and Williamson.

These results have been described in the legacy media as “surprising”, “alarming”, “eye-catching” and “flashing warning signs”. Noticeably absent in the legacy media are descriptions like “surging”, “strong right out of the gate”, “skyrocketing” or any other celebratory or positive language.

But Real Clear Politics includes none of these three latest polls that include Kennedy. Perhaps they’re just waiting for an HTML repair specialist to come and add another column to their table. Perhaps some key employee is on vacation. It’s Unclear. And it’s beginning to feel a bit Unreal as well.

But what is Real and Clear is that Kennedy’s strong showing in these three latest polls is a serious problem for the establishment Dems. After all, Kennedy isn’t just another horse for horse-race journalists to write about— not just another 2020 IdPol micro-targeting candidate to pull votes away from Sanders and eventually endorse Biden.

Kennedy represents a wooden stake through the very heart of two key establishment narratives. The first narrative, obviously, is a harmful COVID policy that embraces expensive, unsafe and ineffective mRNA jabs while suppressing cheap, safe and effective generic drugs. The second narrative is a Ukraine policy that exploits Ukraine soldiers as cannon fodder (estimated 300,000 dead so far) in a proxy empire war against Russia and Putin. So, for a news outlet to fairly report Kennedy’s outstanding campaign start is tantamount, in the eyes of the establishment, to denouncing current COVID and Ukraine policies, positions which, apparently, are 100% off-limits in the current Overton window of acceptable public debate.

What, then, is an obsequious, brown-nosing, sycophantic captured press news outlet to do in the face of these circumstances? We know some pages of the playbook from Bernie’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

The first tactic, of course, is to just ignore Kennedy. Who can forget the 2015 NPR reports about Sanders that wouldn’t mention him by name but only as part of an ill-defined group of “anti-establishment candidate(s)”? But, ignoring RFK Jr. is more easily said than done. He is, after all, a Kennedy. The public expects a Kennedy’s campaign to be reported as a serious thing. So that’s out, but not entirely. The press can still minimize coverage of Kennedy, slant it negatively and simply neglect to commission polls that might show Kennedy’s strength.

The next trick in the playbook is to crowd the field with many tiny candidates to give reporters lots of irrelevant people to talk about instead of the establishment-“undesirable” candidate. This trick worked well in 2020 when Bernie had to share press coverage with over twenty other Democratic candidates in the primary. How can that work in 2024?

If we take a look at what’s going on over at pollster 538’s site, we can see that the list of candidates people are being asked to choose from is strangely long in the May 1 Premise poll.

538 website includes Emerson 4/25 and Fox 4/24 polls that show Kennedy at 21% and 19% respectively, however the Premise poll between Kennedy and ten undeclared candidates shows Kennedy in the single digits (4%). Who paid Premise for this poll, I wonder?

Why would Premise conduct a poll between Kennedy and ten undeclared candidates? Why are neither of the other two declared candidates as of 5 May 2023, Biden nor Williamson, included?

Will any of those ten undeclared candidates actually declare an intent to run for the office of the President? Doubtful. Most of them are establishment candidates who would never rock the boat by primarying a sitting President of their own party who is seeking re-election. That just isn’t done. Especially if running as a recognized establishment candidate might further embarrass Team Biden for refusing to hold primary debates. But, if the nominee is going to have to debate Trump in the general election, shouldn’t the voters get a chance to see how the candidate performs in a debate before nominating them? What if Biden can no longer form coherent sentences? How would we find that out before it’s too late?

What we’re really seeing with the Premise poll, I believe, is a strategy wherein Kennedy is polled against undeclared “zombie” candidates, who are never going to declare they’re running in 2024, in order to deliberately make Kennedy’s numbers look worse than they actually are relative to other declared real candidates.

Some may feel that it makes sense to poll against candidates who “might declare”. But, in truth, that makes about as much sense as continuing to poll for candidates after they’ve withdrawn from the race and endorsed another candidate. In both cases you’re polling a person who actually is running for the office against someone who isn’t.

Notice, in the Premise poll, how progressives Sanders (10%), Ocasio-Cortez (8%) and Warren (5%) garner 23% of the vote. Add those to Kennedy’s 5% and you’d have 28% of the vote. If Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren weren’t running, would their supporters not vote for progressive Kennedy instead? We don’t know. That’s the point of zombie candidate polls. The establishment can assert that most of those voters would convert to Biden. Without real polling of the actually-running candidates, polling against zombie candidates serves only to fool us into thinking Kennedy’s support is thinner than it really is.

Expect that Premise’s poll is just the first of many that will follow the same gaslighting pattern. An old adage comes to mind: “Figures don’t lie; but liars figure.” Expect the polls to be designed to favor Biden and minimize Kennedy.

The pundits are going to be hammering the narrative that Kennedy is a spoiler candidate from now until the Democratic convention (at least) and it’s doubtful that the most important polls will ever be conducted. For Democratic voters who want to be sure the Democratic party retains control of the White House in 2024, the most important polls are:

It’s November 2024. Trump and Biden are the two major nominees. Who will you vote for?
It’s November 2024. Trump and Kennedy are the two major nominees. Who will you vote for?

We need to know which candidate, Kennedy or Biden, will be strongest against the most likely Republican nominee. We can’t afford to sit back and wait for the legacy media to commission these polls. We’re going to have to fund such polls ourselves.

We know from the Emerson College poll, previously mentioned, that 33.7% of Independent voters support Kennedy. Because Independent voters almost outnumber Democrats and Republicans combined, that 33.7% is a voting block as big as 2/3 of the Democratic party. Ignoring Kennedy’s strong support among independents (and even many Republicans) would be almost criminally negligent for anyone dedicated to ensuring a Democratic victory in 2024.

However, the only polls we’re likely to see with Kennedy in them before the convention are going to be drawn from registered Democratic voters, as is customary.

In conclusion, it may be necessary to commission additional polling in the 2024 election season in order to find out which real (non-zombie) candidates are strongest and to find out which candidates will perform best in the general election.

Be prepared to call out pollsters who try to protect their careers by designing polls to minimize Kennedy’s standing.

UPDATE: 8 May 2023— A new poll4 reported on Fox News, not only shows Biden losing the nationwide popular vote by about 7% in head-to-head contests with both Trump and DeSantis, but also shows massive erosion of support from Black voters declining from a 75% lead to a 35% lead.

Noticeably absent are any numbers for head-to-head contests between Kennedy and either Republican nominee (as predicted above). It is interesting that Fox News feels it's important to report the relative strengths of more than one Republican candidate against the presumed Democratic nominee Biden, but, so far, no news organization seems to feel a duty to report the relative strengths of more than one Democratic candidate against the presumed Republican nominee(s)

Biden’s lead with black voters fell from 75% to 35%

As of this morning, there are no new polls on Real Clear Politics or 538 websites for the 2024 Democratic Primary.

A Wikipedia page on the 2024 Democratic Primary5 notes that the following potential candidates, who have appeared as "zombie" candidates in at least one of the polls listed on the RCP and 538 webites, have "publicly denied interest in running" for President in 2024: Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Gavin Newsom, Bernie Sanders, J.B. Pritzker, Stacey Abrams. Of the undeclared candidates seen in recent polls, only AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and Kamala Harris have not "publicly denied interest in running"

Even Wikipedia appears to be stymied. They have no new polls since 23 April. They have six zombie candidates in their table, but no room for Kennedy or Williamson who have actually declared.

Update 9 May 2023 — Rasmussen Reports has released poll results for data ending 7 May 20236. Happily, there were only the three declared Democratic candidates and no "zombie" candidates. The result were: Biden 62%, Kennedy 19%, Williamson 4%. Apparently 15% were undecided or were withholding their vote for someone else. One question they asked was "If the two major party tickets were Trump-Kennedy and Biden-Harris, who would you vote for?" I'm very curious to see those numbers but I don't have a Rasmussen membership, so I'll have to wait a bit.

Update 16 May 2023 — The 538 page is still cranking out zombie polls with Sanders in the number two spot and up to 12 candidates in what is actually, at present, a three-way race.

Seriously? 538 site is still cranking out zombie candidate polls? Go Bernie!

Update 22 May 2023— Real Clear Politics changed the URL of their Democratic primary page at some point.7 Previous refreshes of the old URL8 showed no changes. I am not sure when the new page became available, but it is correctly based on the three declared candidates and has a few newer polls.