Kennedy, Christie and the Supreme Court: Are they changing the race?

Returning from a trip to China almost exactly eight years ago, I found my inbox filled with editors’ requests to write about two huge stories that unfolded while I was gone: the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage and the emergence of a surprise candidate who entered the race after my departure, Donald J. Trump.

Needless to say, after a few weeks off in the Pacific Northwest, my inbox this week isn’t nearly as many requests as it was in the wake of the Obergefell decision and Mr. Trump’s escalator. But the requests I have nonetheless deal with a similar set of topics: a major Supreme Court decision, this time to end affirmative action programs, and two upstart candidates who didn’t get much attention before I left, Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. and Chris Christie.

Court gives Democrats some cover

As I wrote at the time, the Supreme Court’s decision to make same-sex marriage a fundamental right was likely politically advantageous to Republicans. Yes, the court ruling was popular and the Republican stance on same-sex marriage grew increasingly unpopular, but that’s exactly why that decision pleased them: it virtually removed the issue from political discourse and freed Republicans from an issue that would otherwise have been might have taken place. she hobbled.

In theory, something similar could be said for the court’s affirmative action ruling, but this time with the decision to help the Democrats. Here, too, the court takes a popular position that may free a political party — this time the Democrats — from a problem that could hurt it, including among the burgeoning Asian American voter base.

It’s worth noting that this is nothing like how the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade helped Democrats. Subsequently, the court ruling sparked a backlash that boosted liberals and gave Democrats a new campaign theme appealing to grassroots and moderates alike. If the most recent case helped Democrats, it would do so in almost the opposite way: To gain political advantage from the ruling, Democrats might have to stop talking about it.

It was quite easy for the Republican elites to stop talking about same-sex marriage in 2015, as many were already eager to move on after a losing political battle. It is not so obvious that the democratic elites would like to distance themselves from the fight for affirmative action, or even be able to, given their constituencies’ passion for racial equality.

About those other candidates

Obviously, any analogy between the first few weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign and the slow rise of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie will be much more tense. First, Mr. Christie and Mr. Kennedy were already making ripples in the race when I left, and I thought maybe I should write about them at some point. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, couldn’t be further out of my mind in mid-June 2015. When I heard about his bid for my return, I thought he would fade away so quickly I wouldn’t even have to write about him. Whatever you think of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie, there’s not much reason to think they could just go “pop.”

Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Christie don’t have much in common – other than their undeniably low odds of actually winning – but they have become factors in the race in their own way simply by being the best or even only vessel for expressing explicit defiance against their party’s frontrunners, Joe Biden and Mr. Trump.

Usually, a willingness to stand up to a front-runner is not enough to distinguish an aspiring candidate. This year is the time. No current or former elected official has yet challenged the incumbent president in the Democratic primary. And while many prominent Republicans seem willing to join the race against Mr. Trump, few seem willing to attack him directly, forcefully, and consistently. When they attack him — as Ron DeSantis recently did for supporting LGBTQ people a decade ago — it’s often from the right, and not about the issues that animate the base of a hypothetical non-Trump coalition: relatively moderate, highly educated Republicans .

Of the two, Mr. Christie is probably the one who most effectively satisfies this demand of direct opposition to the Frontrunner. There may not be a large constituency for anti-Trump campaigns, but it exists and Mr. Christie is giving it what it wants. Just as importantly, directly attacking Mr. Trump creates a constant diet of media attention.

All of this makes Mr. Christie a classic faction candidate, the kind who don’t usually win presidential nominations, but can nonetheless play an important role in the campaign’s outcome. If he gains the loyalty of those who are outright against Trump, he will deny an essential non-Trump voting bloc to another Republican who could have broader appeal across the entire party — Mr. DeSantis, say. This is most likely set in New Hampshire, where patchy survey data (often from Republican companies) shows Mr. Christie creeping into the mid- to high-single digits.

Mr. Kennedy is a more complicated case. With the help of a famous family name, he has overtaken Marianne Williamson by the small distinction of being Mr. Biden’s biggest rival in the Democratic primary. Average, Mr. Kennedy polls in the mid-teens, with some surveys still showing him in the single digits and one poll showing him above 20 percent. That’s more than Mr. Christie can say.

But unlike Mr. Christie, Mr. Kennedy doesn’t exactly give Biden skeptics what they want. Instead, he promotes conspiracy theories and appears on right-wing media outlets and deserve praise of conservative figures. And unlike Mr. Trump, whose most ardent opposition is likely to be aimed at the center, Mr. Biden is probably the most vulnerable to challenge from the ideological left. This is not what Mr. Kennedy is offering, and the polls show it. While Times/Siena polls from last summer showed Mr. Biden most vulnerable among “very liberal” voters and on progressive issues, Mr. Kennedy actually fares much better among self-described moderates than liberals. He does not clearly fare better among younger Democrats than older ones, despite Mr. Biden’s longstanding weakness among the younger group.

It is too early to say whether Mr. Kennedy’s humble standing among moderate and conservative Democrats reflects a constituency for anti-modernist, anti-establishment liberalism, or whether Mr. Kennedy’s family name simply advances him among the less engaged Democrats, more likely to identify as moderate. In any case, his ability to play a major role in the race is limited by his espousal of conservatives and conspiratorial positions, even though he may continue to earn modest support in the race due to the absence of another prominent non-Biden- option.