It’s not just a protest vote. That’s one thing a group of Georgia voters considering third-party presidential candidates wanted to make clear during an NBC News Deciders Focus Group this week, produced in collaboration with Engagious, Syracuse University and Sago. Seven out of the 10 voters in the battleground state who participated, all of whom voted for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020, are currently planning to back independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while two support professor Cornel West and one backs Libertarian Chase Oliver. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive it weekdays. But as Margaret Talev, one of our partners in this project, told me: While we’ve heard from RFK Jr.-curious voters before, this group went further. "We’ve been asking our focus group participants about RFK each month, and most until now have seen him as an alternative to Biden or Trump or know the Kennedy name, but admit they don’t know much about his record or platform. The Georgia voters seemed different,” Talev said. "They indicated they’re learning details about his positions from vaccines to foreign policy and having opportunities to listen to or see more of him.” These voters didn’t have much nice to say about Biden or Trump. Biden’s age appears to be a huge sticking point with them, as is a concern that he hasn’t govern the way he said he would as a candidate (heard from both the left and the right). And for Trump, it’s his personality, as well as his conduct around the 2020 election — the attack on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated false claims that he won, particularly in Georgia. But the group praised Kennedy, not just for being an outsider, but for his legal career, environmentalism and rhetoric about taking on entrenched powers. And even among those not happy with his stance on vaccines, they still found reasons to support him. “So many people are voting against the other one, they’re voting for the lesser of two evils and I just don’t want to be that person," said Sherri D., a 50-year-old from Roswell who backed Trump in 2020 but is leaning toward Kennedy now. "I want to actually research and learn and I want to vote for the person, in my conscience, I truly want to win, even if they don’t have a chance or even if people think that they don’t have a chance,” she added. Read more from our latest voter focus group → |