The reality is running as an independent means you get a tiny single digit fraction of the time even nobodies like Literally Who Republican Tim Scott gets (he will get several hours of exposure on national tv during the Republican debates) and therefore running as an independent has effectively quashed RFK's campaign. Yeah, if I bother voting at all, it will definitely be for him, but I honestly had forgotten about him recently, after getting really excited about him months ago. The general public will vote for whatever they are told to (ie choice A or choice B, which is the entire point of the system of democracy: Manufacturing consent.)I have seen both Democrats and Republicans being mad at Kennedy with the accusation that he's going to take more votes from their party than from the other one.
My initial assumption was also that he would take more from Trump. It's painfully obvious that his headline positions hold no resonance with the modern Democratic conglomerate
The reality is the single reason Trump was elected was massive media coverage. And now RFK won't have that. You give massive media coverage to people like, say, Ron Paul, and they would win in a landslide. You ignore them or lie about their performance (as famously reported in the Jon Stewart clip about Ron Paul) and they sink to single digits.
As for who a candidate takes votes away from, I couldn't care less. A smart, competent leader like RFK will be earning the votes of good people from across the country. If he earns a vote that would otherwise go to Candidate X, then Candidate X needs to step up his game and offer us something. Third parties force candidates to be more populist. But RFK would earn a lot of the negative votes--the people who are just voting for someone because they don't like Trump, or think Biden is too senile, so vote for the alternate. But I've always found that "taking votes" reasoning absurd and it is only ever applied to elections. No one says "Oh why are you joining the Methodist church? You know if Methodists didn't exist you'd probably prefer being Baptist" HUH?
I did listen to a 2 minute summary of the Republican debate and it was of course a shit show, with no one offering a single good idea for America, but lots of criticism of each other with Vivek going hard (and getting no applause, which I found suspicious--won't the Idiocracy Worldstar audiences of today applaud any pithy attack? Was the audio deleted?). Nimrata Randhawa looked like she was about to cry. She chose to remain silent when given a chance to defend herself against corruption and greedy kickbacks being a defense contractor and she chose to remain silent, which is really dumb because no one really knows anything about her and now all they will remember is Viveks "Corruption" points.
Maybe it would be fun as a drinking game, but I would rather be tortured than watch the full debate. I did see Chris Christie embarrass Ron DeSantis for being wishy washy on Trump. Christie is terrible and a mainstream neocon but at least he has balls unlike most of the rest. When your best hope is outsourcing to an Indian to run your country for you, you are doing something wrong. (Of course I mean Vivek not Nimrata).