Why Young Voters are Rallying Behind RFK Jr.

By Elsa Hjalmarsson Lyons, The Kennedy Beacon

Shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he was running for president, I started hearing buzz about his unexpected traction among young voters. A November Siena College/New York Times poll surveyed voters in six swing states: a 32% plurality of respondents under 45 chose Kennedy over Biden or Trump. That same month, a Quinnipiac poll revealed a surge of support for Kennedy among younger voters across the nation. 

This trend has continued – as recently as May, a NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll showed that Kennedy’s 42% favorability rating climbs to 57% among voters aged 18–34.

When these numbers first started appearing, the mainstream media was quick to pathologize young Kennedy supporters. Article after article depicted Kennedy as a modern Fagin, a master manipulator attracting a gang of juvenile delinquents. MSNBC, for example, ran an opinion piece in February on why Kennedy appeals to young male voters in particular. According to the article, these young men are obviously “disaffected socially” and afflicted with “specifically male outrage.” The authors briefly note that Kennedy’s “lead is consistent across race and gender,” but apparently find this irrelevant to their analysis.

Articles like that one made me want to search for another narrative, a better explanation for these numbers. What if we tried to understand what makes younger voters particularly receptive to Kennedy’s message, instead of assuming that they’re being manipulated? What would we learn about these voters, and what would we learn about Kennedy?

I began by seeking out other young people who are interested in the campaign. Jeb Allen is a 19-year-old from Florida. He discovered Kennedy through Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. When he first heard Kennedy speak, Jeb thought: “He’s getting heat from the left, he’s getting heat from the right, heat from the media corporations – if you’re getting heat from all these establishment media corporations, you’re probably saying something that they don’t want [us] to hear.”

Eloise Avery, 24, from New York, described the mainstream media as one monster entity, saying that it’s “really unfortunate that this corporate media conglomerate is just not very favorable [to Kennedy]. But I do think that Instagram and YouTube and him doing interviews with different podcasters and things like that has been really cool to see.” She added that “listening to him talk just made me not believe all the things on the Internet that people say about him.”

According to a May New York Times article, Kennedy polls particularly well among the one in six voters who said they get their news primarily from social media. This is probably because young voters who hear from Kennedy directly, like Eloise, quickly grow skeptical of the mass media narrative about him. They become attuned to its distortions and omissions, and they keep on seeking out new escape routes from mainstream information fortresses. Podcasts, certain YouTube channels, X accounts, and even enlightening TikToks can serve as underground tunnels toward independent thinking.

Sophie, 21, from Georgia, first heard about Kennedy on TikTok (she preferred I use only her first name). “That makes me sound really uneducated,” she said, but I found myself disagreeing. Sophie told me that she uses TikTok “to get exposure to stuff going on in the world, because everything is talked about on the app.”

In an age of polarization, social media can serve as a kind of mosh pit of information – a zone where colorful characters and diverse perspectives are still allowed to collide and rebound off each other.

Yes, there is censorship on social media platforms – especially those owned by Meta, Inc., as a recent lawsuit by the Kennedy campaign revealed. And yes, apps like TikTok and Instagram have a sneaky way of swallowing up our spare time. But when the major daily newspapers and cable news networks are hostile to alternative views, I think any platform that makes it possible for someone like Kennedy to speak directly to voters is a powerful tool. And if young voters are tuning in, maybe it’s because they’re hungry for something different, someone different – someone who entrusts them with nuance and subtlety rather than sticking to prepackaged party-wide talking points. Jeb weighed in on this: “I feel like the less people listen to cable news, the better the world would be, and the less bipolar our country would be – because the truth is always somewhere in the middle.”

Kennedy isn’t appealing to young voters by stoking a sense of alienation or rage – he’s daring us to join hands and march down the aisle between left and right. We’re ready for that because we’ve seen the way this binary cheats us of change. 

I spoke to another young woman, Sophia Palitti, 21, about this. She’s originally from New York, but now lives in Missouri. She said, “I think that a lot of young people are tired of picking between the two bad options.” Eloise echoed this sentiment, adding that one of the many reasons she hopes Kennedy will win is that she believes his victory would “dismantle the two party system.” Sophie shared a similar perspective. She said that she thinks young voters are “really accepting of change because we’ve seen the detrimental effects of both candidates that have held office.”

I suspect that one of the reasons Kennedy has found so much success with young voters is that he doesn’t pander. He doesn’t try to simplify things for his audiences, to win us over with isolated issues, like Biden claiming that Trump supports a nationwide abortion ban or Trump leaning hard on xenophobia. Instead, Kennedy challenges us to make connections, more like a good teacher than a good politician. His platform highlights the ways in which issues like chronic illness, endless wars, and the destruction of our environment intersect at the junction of captured regulatory agencies. When predatory corporate interests control the government, we’re all prey.

Eloise told me that this uniquely holistic approach to politics is a big part of what draws her to Kennedy. “I think that a lot of the things he talks about kind of all come together in a way, like a systemic change, an overhauling of this system that we’ve had,” she said. When I asked Sophia Palitti about which issues are most important to her, she made a similar point. “Something that I really like about him is that he’s anti-war and [against] sending all of our money to other countries,” she began. And of course, when we stop funneling all our resources into dominating the world by force, we’ll have what Kennedy calls a “peace dividend” to reinvest in the American middle class. “So that sort of ties together a lot of things, I feel,” Sophia told me.

As The New York Times reports, Kennedy often speaks about what he calls the “existential” issues that Americans are facing, like the $34 trillion national debt or our soaring rates of chronic disease. It turns out that young voters care about these issues – more than they care about hot-button topics like abortion, gun control, or the culture wars being fought over gender. A national Harvard Kennedy School poll from this spring asked young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 to indicate which of two randomly paired political issues is more important to them. “Inflation” had the highest rate of selection at 64%, with “Healthcare” following at 59%. “Corruption” landed just outside the top five at 52%, tied with “Protecting democracy.”

The poll didn’t ask about war (outside of the Israel-Palestine conflict specifically), but this is another existential issue that young voters are clearly invested in. All of the young people I spoke with were critical of the neoconservative attitudes that have led our country to favor hawkish policies over diplomacy. “I think that a good president is able to negotiate with anybody,” Sophie said.

When Jeb and I started talking about health outcomes in the United States, his voice swelled with urgency. He remembered reading in The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior that “in the richest country in the existence of the world we have the sickest children [compared to other wealthy nations], and there’s no excuse for the richest country in the history of humanity to have the problems we do.” 

Jeb spoke with passion about things like the seed oils and preservatives that can now be found on the ingredient lists of virtually all packaged foods – not to mention the toxic pesticides that don’t appear on the label. Kennedy understands that the contamination of our earth and the contamination of our bodies are symptoms of the same disease. He is the only candidate who has pledged to hold federal agencies like the FDA, USDA, and EPA accountable for the pollution of American food and soil. Issues like these may not be on the news every night or in the headlines every morning, but they are profoundly relevant and resonant for young Americans. As Jeb put it, “most of the issues Kennedy is talking about would have the biggest impact on our country.” Meanwhile, “there are some issues that get the most media time in America that just don’t matter! Like how much of an impact [are they] seriously having on your daily life. Seriously.”

I find it so encouraging to think that young people across the country are looking for someone who speaks to our real concerns. It’s equally encouraging that someone like that exists. As Eloise said to me, “I’m really looking forward to voting for someone who I want to be president, not someone who’s less bad than the other [candidate].” I couldn’t agree more – and I’ve never felt more proud of my generation.

Elsa Hjalmarsson Lyons is a student at Amherst College.