I have touted my “Ten Day Rule,” which appears to be gaining traction: “No matter if there’s a seemingly game-changing political event, there’s no need to get too enthusiastic or downcast about it until after ten polling (not calendar) days, when it will have washed through voters’ minds.  Then the polling will show the effect — if any.”

Experience has shown that in nearly all cases, the Access Hollywood and final Comey  statement being the clearest, the polling returns to the previous norm or thereabouts.  In that light, what to make of Trump’s trial and verdict?

As far as Trump and Biden are concerned, the polling so far shows minimal shifts, which could simply be noise.  On May 30, the Real Clear Politics head-to-head aggregate showed that Trump had a 1.1-point lead.  Ten polling days later, on June 9, it was +0.8.  The decline for Trump, such as it was, happened because left-leaning pollsters Yahoo News (Biden +2)  and Morning Consult (Biden +1) reported.  Of course, the aggregation includes polls taken well before the trial, and of the polls that reported after the trial, the aggregate is a tie.

The five-way polling (the over-time graph is clear) tells another story entirely.  On May 30, the aggregation was Trump +2.2, with Trump at 41.7%, Biden 39.5%, RFK Jr. 10.0%, and Stein/West combined at 3.8%.  On June 9, it was Trump +2.3 at 42.3%, Biden 42.0%, Kennedy 7.9%, and Stein/West 2.9%.

On 6/12, Trump was +2.9 and RFK Jr. down to 7.4%.  This represents the clear downward trend for RFK Jr., who had a high point of 16.7% in November 2023.  After the primaries concluded, and with the binary options obvious, and now with the trial appearing to bleed support to Trump from Trump voters who were tempted with the Kennedy option coming home, there appears little to stop Kennedy’s further decline.

This is made stark when only the post-trial polls are considered.  Of the four polls, Kennedy polls respectively 4%, 3%, 6%, 3%  for an aggregate of 4%.

History shows that third-party candidates rarely keep their initial early high level of support on Election Day.  There appears little reason to suspect that it will be otherwise for Kennedy.  With Kennedy apparently taking more support form Trump than Biden in Michigan, the only battleground state where this seems clearly the case, this would only be to Trump’s benefit.

Image: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.