Polling Suggests The Country Is Absolutely Done With RFK Jr.

Failures

from the poll-position dept

It’s been a little over half a year since RFK Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services and his tenure thus far has been chaotic, to put it mildly. Listing all of the various forms of fuckery that have already occurred under his watch would be a full length post of its own, but there are certainly some lowlights. There was the bizarre comments about getting to the bottom of chemtrails. He presided over the largest measles outbreak in decades and essentially blamed the victims for it. It sure looks like he had AI write up some of his MAHA health report, including references to studies that don’t exist and misinterpreting the ones that did. But in more recent and rapid succession, he fired every member of the CDC’s ACIP panel, replaced them with anti-vaxxers, fired the head of the CDC after only a month on the job, and then concluded that pregnant mothers shouldn’t take Tylenol because it causes autism. And we haven’t even mentioned his revising of vaccination schedules, the defunding of mRNA vaccine research, or his disaster of a congressional hearing.

There are all kinds of pressures that Donald Trump refuses to bow to, to be sure. But the man does pay attention to public sentiment polling, no matter how much hand-waiving over “fake polls” he might espouse. And Kennedy’s public approval ratings are fucking terrible.

The findings come from the most recent Quinnipiac University poll released this month, which surveyed around 1,200 registered voters across the country. Exactly 33% of respondents said they currently approved of Kennedy’s stint as HHS secretary, while 54% disapproved. The numbers are a noticeable drop from a similar poll conducted earlier this year, prior to the internal collapse of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set off by RFK Jr.’s antivaccine agenda.

So, some caveats here, and from someone who is not steeped in horse race politics. First, this is a single poll. Polls are a snapshot in time and suffer all kinds of factors that can impact how accurate a snapshot they represent. Chief amongst them would be sample size issues and 1,500 respondents is not a huge sample size, though it isn’t tiny either. Second, the Trump administration at least likes to pretend like polls they don’t like are wrong, or fake, or that they don’t actually matter in the decision making process. And, third, Kennedy still enjoys majority support from Republican voters.

Unfortunately, these waning numbers for RFK may not mean all that much. According to the Quinnipiac poll, 71% of Republicans still approve of Kennedy as HHS chief. And while some members of the GOP have become more critical of RFK Jr.’s performance, especially following the CDC defection, many are still roundly in his corner—most notably President Donald Trump himself.

All of that is true. But the context around this is that plenty of GOP members of Congress are looking ahead to the midterms and some percentage of those same people are in districts that are either swing districts or not solidly safe GOP districts. And every bit of chaos that comes out of this administration, and HHS has produced a ton of that chaos, makes the reelection chances of those House and Senate members that much worse.

If you want the silver lining here, it’s that the American people are seeing through the propaganda to an appreciable degree. Kennedy, in particular, is a master manipulator of false information… but it isn’t working. The public is seeing through the chaff. And since Trump loves nothing in this world more than the accumulation of power, that might just move the needle.

Filed Under: cdc, donald trump, health and human services, maha, rfk jr.