Just What Kind of a Third-Party Candidate Is R.F.K. Jr.?

 Categorizing previous third-party bids helps us understand where he fits in and where he might wind up.

Ross Perot was in the middle of things in a 1992 debate with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Credit...Marcy Nighswander/Associated Press

With six months to go until the election, it’s still too early to judge whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democrat-turned-independent candidate for president, will prove to be more than a mere spoiler.

He starts out with roughly 10 percent of the vote and one of the most famous names in American politics. It’s enough to at least contemplate whether he’ll be the kind of third-party candidate who makes a lasting mark.

Even without having won the presidency, third-party candidates have often played an important and even healthy role in American politics.

They can elevate new issues, represent marginal constituencies and sometimes even win plenty of votes: Six third-party candidates have either won states or reached double digits in the national vote since the rise of the two-party system. They can be a lot more than mere spoilers.

The polling shows many of the conditions for a successful third-party candidacy could be in place. Voters dislike both candidates. They’ve been dissatisfied with the state of the country for 20 years, but for the most part the campaign season hasn’t been focused on solutions to customary longstanding problems. It’s enough to wonder whether this might be the first time since 1992 that a third-party-candidate gains a meaningful foothold.

To understand the Kennedy campaign, it’s worth looking at how similar kinds of third-party bids have managed to gain support in the past, or fallen short of making a splash. For simplicity, I’ve broken down third-party candidacies into three groups that Mr. Kennedy plausibly reflects. The groups are not mutually exclusive — historically, many candidates exhibit the traits of multiple categories, and so does Mr. Kennedy. The taxonomy also mostly applies to transient third-party bids like Mr. Kennedy’s, not the campaigns of established minor parties (Green, Libertarian, Constitution and so on). The categories might help make sense of what it would take for Mr. Kennedy to be more than a mere spoiler in this election.

The movement candidates

Every so often, a new set of problems and issues rises to the forefront of American politics — and the major parties simply aren’t positioned to address them. In these cases, the new issues don’t neatly map onto the existing political alignment. They could even be so orthogonal to the usual political divide that it would be deeply painful and divisive for a party to try to take them on. An issue might even risk breaking up a major party, as the future of slavery did in the 1850s (the Whigs no longer exist).

When important issues go unaddressed, a third-party candidate often comes along to bring them to the fore. Historically, these third parties tend to be fleeting. Their issues fade, whether because things get better or because the major parties ultimately do enough to satisfy their demands. (The famous exception being the run-up to the Civil War.) But until they fade, these movements look and feel like a major third party. They’re usually for something, something big that draws significant support, whether it’s free silver or reducing the deficit.