The Official RFK Jr. VP Tier List
Ranking all the contenders to team up with America's most popular third party candidate in a generation.
A spectre is still haunting the 2024 presidential election—the spectre of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
As of this month, it has officially been half a year since the political-scion-turned-black-sheep-turned-social-media-personality entered the race as an independent. After he came in right out of the gate with the best polling for any third-party candidate since Ross Perot, commentators took a look at him, considered him, and decided he wasn’t worth talking about much. While I always found this attitude to be a bit too dismissive, there was some basis for it at the beginning. At the start, it wasn’t at all clear if Kennedy was actually serious about his candidacy, or if he could even manage to get ballot access if he was. His support, while striking on paper, appeared soft even by the standards of third-party candidates. To those that didn’t write him off entirely, the verdict was clear: wait and see.
Well, we’ve waited. After half a year of Kennedy 2024, all we have to see is a third-party candidacy as serious as any we’ve seen before. His numbers, while not as spectacular as they were in the few early polls that showed him in the 20s, are still holding strong in the double digits. And while his early campaign may have been defined by outlandish and embarrassing media stunts, he has since locked in, devoting his attention to an all-out and increasingly successful effort to secure ballot access nationwide. He’s put together mass canvassing campaigns. He’s started his very own shell parties. And now, he has officially confirmed that he will take the final step he needs to secure access in most of the country: declaring a running mate.
I won’t lie to you. I am very excited for this announcement. In the midst of an election that has been more on-the-rails than any other contest in several generations, it stands out as one of the few real moments of intrigue. The list of contenders is vast, both in quantity and range of personality. It is so vast, in fact, that it has led me to break a rule I have always followed for these lists. In my other political rankings, I have revealed the subjects over the course of the article. But here, the list is simply so unpredictable and eclectic that I think it’s worth going through the list of names at the start. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Scott Brown
Elon Musk
Ron Paul
Tony Robbins
Joe Rogan
Aaron Rodgers
Rob Schneider
Nicole Shanahan
Jesse “The Mind” Ventura
This is not a joke. Every single one of these figures has either been reported on as a possible candidate or is a close Kennedy associate who has endorsed his campaign. So, who amongst this cast of characters would help Kennedy the most? Who could render it dead on arrival? Read below to find out.
F Tier
Quarterback Aaron Fraudgers (I-NY)
So far, Kennedy’s campaign for president has been defined by two main dynamics. The first of these is his status as an outsider. With the two major party candidates being not only reruns being deeply unpopular reruns, there is a massive hunger for any kind of alternative. Kennedy, with his anti-establishment-coded last name and independent label, fills much of this need through his presence alone. This is by far the largest part of his appeal. His problem is that he is also forced to contend with the second of these dynamics: the fact that he is a complete lunatic. This fact stands to massively limit his appeal. If he is to succeed, he must lean into his popular outsider status, and away from his own insanity, as much as possible.
It is because of this that Aaron Rodgers is one of the worst possible selections Kennedy could make. There are a mountain of reasons why, but the first and most obvious one of this: he would make Kennedy’s campaign look even more unserious than it already is. At only 40 years old with absolutely no life experience outside of a football field, Rodgers would be a no-substance celebrity candidate in the worst way possible. For as much as people may joke about locally beloved sports heroes running for office, this rarely works out well in practice. When push comes to shove, voters end up prioritizing concerns about experience (and possible brain damage) far above any good sports memories they may associate with them. Just look at Lynn Swann in 2006 and Herschel Walker in 2022 for some high-profile examples, and keep in mind: both of those races were in states where the athletes played sports and were actually liked. With Rodgers on the ticket in a national election, Kennedy won’t even benefit from that. Instead, he’ll just end up associating himself with someone that the vast majority of football fans only remember rooting against—something that could very well prime them to root against him as well.
Along with this, there is another, far more severe problem. Rodgers, as we all know, is insane. This is not necessarily debilitating by itself. After all, there are countless successful insane politicians in America today. What makes Rodgers completely unviable is that he is known to be insane. He is a crank through-and-through, more famous in recent years for his advocacy for anti-vaccine conspiracies and 9/11 trutherism than his actual quarterbacking. While this might be semi-salvageable if he did it in an endearing, truth-telling way, Rodgers can’t even manage that. He’s associated with things like darkness retreats and Dune-style hyperbaric chambers, not ideas of independence or patriotism. It would be enough to make the two-party system look like the sane and stable option to even the most disillusioned voters.
Kennedy cannot afford this whatsoever. Whether he knows it or not, his saving grace so far has been how little people actually know about who he is and what he believes. The extent to which he’s able to hide this and be seen more as a concept than an actual person will determine how successful he is in November. Selecting Rodgers will render this balancing act impossible before the campaign even begins. It will immediately associate Kennedy with insanity more than anything else, very likely sending his campaign into a death spiral.
The only possible way I can imagine defending Rodgers within the context of this list is by arguing that he’s far from the most insane conspiracy theorist on it. This is quite true—we still have Joe Rogan, Rob Schneider, and Elon Musk coming up, after all. What makes Rodgers stand out even from this pack is the certainty that what we’ve seen from him so far is only the tip of the iceberg of the insane things he’s said and believed. It’s not hard to imagine that the story about his disbelief in the Sandy Hook massacre coming out immediately after he entered the RFK veepstakes is only a sampling of what’s to come if he’s named Kennedy’s running mate. It all puts him in a league of his own, even in comparison to what’s to come.
Podcaster Joe Rogan (I-TX)
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