Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Planning to Announce Independent Run

I am cautiously optimistic about this.
First, the reasons not to be:
The Kennedy name might conceivably attract some confused Democratic votes.
His spoiler candidacy will obviously be targeted at Biden supporters and intended to siphon them away.
But I'm still cautiously optimistic because:
We already have a well-known guy with the last name "Kennedy" in the Senate: This absolute tool, a Louisiana Republican and all-around douchebag that Democrats universally despise. So name recognition effects may be blunted a bit.
RFK's poll numbers in the Democratic primary as a hypothetical alternative to Biden have stayed consistently 45-50 points below Biden. Most Democrats aren't going to jump ship to a hopeless independent candidacy and cede the race to Trump.
RFK is immensely popular... with deranged wingnuts who still believe the COVID vaccines have microchips in them and are the sign of the Beast. These people weren't gonna vote Biden in the first place, and there might be enough of them in the Republican party for RFK's candidacy to be a Trump spoiler instead.
I'm going to be paying really close attention to see which side he siphons from more, but like I said... I'm cautiously optimistic RFK will have a more damaging effect on Trump than on Biden.
If Trump goes after him hard, I'll take that as confirmation that Trump is worried about that.
- Can we convince the Q people that he's the other dead Kennedy they are waiting for in disguise?
  
  That's it! JFK is secretly immortal! He faked his own death and assumed the identity of his son! The real RFK is off investigating pizzeria basements to rescue children on behalf of his father!
  Rejoice, Q! Your savior has actually already emerged! Vote RFK to support the true Trump, not the holographic impostor he's been replaced with, and the Great Awakening will arrive with the Storm and... fuck, I can't keep this up.

Such an obvious spoiler. Who is going to vote for him?
- Single-issue anti-vaxxer voters might trust him more than they trust Trump. (and none of them were going to vote for Biden anyway, so probably at worst a wash for Biden)
  
  This is my dad. He doesn't like trump but still suffers from all kinds of other anti-progrsssive brainwashing.
  He thinks RFK is a brave outsider.
  He also voted for Perot, so take that for what it's worth.
- Old, confused Democrats? He's not really leftist at all. Everything I've heard about him makes me feel like he's a Republican.
  
  Lmao hardly any of his actual policy positions are in line with the Republicans.
- Well, the D's know the name of the game is beat Trump, that's how biden got nominated, nobody actually liked him. They'll vote for Biden no matter what just to make sure Trump doesn't win.
  The target demographic for this guy are Trump independents, that is, the people that won him the election in the rust belt in 2016, people who lean Democrat but were sick of the politicians and their constant bullshitting. So it's likely RFK is a way to spoil Trump, not the D's.
- Hopefully Republicants.
- He has massive support among the wingnut right. The Ben Garrison/Kill Fauci/J6 is a Hoax crowd.
- Morons.
  "But aren't all the morons already voting for Trump?" I hear you say.
  No. There are always more morons.
- He will vote for himself, and his mother is still around and will probably vote for him.
  So I am expecting him to get exactly 2 votes.
- An unfortunately significant number of people.
  
  Really? I have not seen any evidence of that.
  
  The guy is crazy, but that doesn't seem to be a problem anymore.
- Democrats who don't think Biden is far enough to the right. They'll still blame progressives if Biden loses to Trump, though.
  
  How do you do fellow ensign?

It’s the only move he has, he’d never get the Dem nomination. Too many see right through his conspiracy nonsense.

Dude is a stain on the Kennedy name. Dude thinks wifi gives cancer.
- Sadly still more coherent than Trump, who said that the noise from windmillls causes cancer.
  https://apnews.com/article/25ff42c9747043b3b80e098a0f90b1d5

Good luck. Get all the Roswell and COVID conspiracy theorists in a pile, and baby...you got A STEW GOIN

Good. The lunatic vote will split between him and Trump.

At least he has given up the farce of pretending to be a Democrat

For now at least, polls show about 25% of Democrats would vote for him over Biden vs 13% of Republicans. This is bad.
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-faces-disastrous-defeat-if-rfk-jr-runs-third-party-candidate-1828858
- It's over a year from the election. Polls right now mean nothing.
  
  It's more the lopsidedness than the numbers themselves that concerns me. It would only take an extraordinarily small difference to hand the election to Trump with how close it was last time and is now. But I'll try to use the optimism from this thread to smother my cynicism for now.
- 41 percent of Democrats have an at least somewhat favorable view of Kennedy
  Yeah, no. I'd guess that only a single-digit % of Democrats - mostly Extremely Online ones - have any idea who he is; this is a survey where they pressed for lukewarm responses from mostly-uninformed voters and then pretended that it actually reflected public opinion in a meaningful way.

These debates are going to be wild. Trump and Kennedy just screaming gibberish at each other while Biden stands between them with the quietly desperate look of a pensioner trying to remember his PIN number at the supermarket checkout.
Fucking hell.
- Nah. Biden's still sharp. He's gonna turn to the cameras, give a sparkling smile, and say, "Get a load of these guys, right?"
  
  Sharp as a sphere 😑
- I doubt Kennedy (or Cornell West) will be included in any debates.

We need to make this guy the poster child for ranked choice voting. With it he'd only be wasting donor money, not endangering our future as a spoiler candidate.