He’s out, but scammers like Kennedy will never run out of marks

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this afternoon that he’s ending his so-called independent campaign for president. He’s endorsing Donald Trump. With that announcement, I won’t have to talk about him anymore, thank God, though the need to talk about third parties hasn’t stopped.

“I no longer believe that I have a realistic path to electoral victory," Kennedy said today. "I cannot in good conscience ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path."

He never had a path. He’s a scammer.

This can’t be said enough.

Third parties can’t win. We know this is true, because they never win. The last and only time a third party won was in 1860. A major party had disintegrated and the country was on the brink of civil war. Since then, every single president has been a Republican or a Democrat.

But Kennedy – and Jill Stein and Cornel West and the rest – always say there’s a chance, like there’s a chance that a 5-foot, 10-inch man who’s 50 years of age can be an NBA all-star. It’s not impossible in theory, I suppose, but in practice, it’s too stupid to even mention the idea.

We know they can’t win and so do they. That’s why, when they say they can win, they are in fact lying. And they know they are lying. They know they are lying to Americans who don’t know any better or who have an elevated opinion of themselves. And because there will never be a shortage of the ignorant and delusional, there will never be a shortage of third parties that say they can win when they can’t.

Scammers like Kennedy and Stein and West rob supporters of their money and time, but that’s not all. They rob them of their hope in democratic politics. They say the goal of their campaigns is to save America from the anti-democratic grip of the two-party system. Then, when they lose, and they always lose, their supporters give up hope. What’s the point of participating in politics when the system is rigged?

While our system isn’t rigged, it was in fact designed in such a way that ultimately prevents more than two parties from having the resources needed to compete for the presidency. But it wasn’t designed that way for nefarious reasons. It was just a choice the founding fathers made.

The alternative would have been what’s called a proportional system. That’s when competitors take a percentage (or a proportion) of their winnings. Such a system might benefit someone like Kennedy, as the person who won the most votes (say, 51 percent) might have to bargain with him in order to form a government, because he took some votes (say, 5 percent). This is how things work in Israel and the UK.

I don’t know why exactly (perhaps we should ask Professor Heather Cox Richardson), but Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the others chose something else. It’s called the winner-take-all system. In it, the winner (at least 50 percent, plus one) gets everything and the loser gets nothing. With a system like that, it’s virtually impossible for more than two parties to compete with a realistic expectation of winning.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Republicans and the Democrats don’t do their best to maintain the status quo. It’s in their interest to box out third parties, especially in swing states. But the major political parties did not establish the system. They emerged after the system had already been established. As a member of a political dynasty, Kennedy knows this better than most.

He knows something else – that lots of Americans don’t take their democracy all that seriously. Oh, they say they do, and they act very high-minded! But, in fact, they know very little about politics. They don’t want to know, because knowing something is beneath them. Let the partisans sling the mud, they say. We are above that! They prefer to be called “independents,” rather than Republican or Democrat, and their feelings about the parties are so strongly negative they might not even vote. Pollsters often call them “undecideds,” but they have decided plenty. They have decided to make ignorance a virtue.

Which makes them easy marks.

Sadly, Kennedy’s announcement won’t dampen enthusiasm for such cultivated naivete. Nor will his Trump endorsement. (Update: As I was writing, the AP reported his campaign is suspended, but not ending, a distinction without a difference. It also said he’s not endorsing Trump, though in a court filing he said he was.) He was always a greater threat to Trump than he was to the Democratic nominee. (Now that he’s out, his supporters will move over to Trump.) This was evident in Trump’s welcoming of Kennedy’s endorsement. Meanwhile, according to Kennedy, the Harris campaign wouldn’t give him the time of day. That’s the best indication that there’s nothing he has that she needs.

It’s also an indication that Kennedy’s departure has changed nothing about the election, including the fact that the people most attracted to third parties are attracted for the wrong reasons. His run is over, but as there will never be a shortage of the ignorant and delusional, there will never be a shortage of scammers trying to rip them off.