RFK Jr. Drops Out, Endorses Trump
AP (“RFK Jr. suspends his presidential bid and backs Donald Trump before appearing with him at his rally“):
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his independent campaign for the White House and endorsed Donald Trump on Friday, a late-stage shakeup of the race that could give the former president a modest boost from Kennedy’s supporters.
Hours later, Kennedy joined Trump onstage at an Arizona rally, where the crowd burst into “Bobby!” cheers.
Kennedy said his internal polls had shown that his presence in the race would hurt Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, though recent public polls don’t provide a clear indication that he is having an outsize impact on support for either major-party candidate.
Kennedy cited free speech, the war in Ukraine and “a war on our children” as among the reasons he would try to remove his name from the ballot in battleground states.
“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” Kennedy said at his event in Phoenix.
However, he made clear that he wasn’t formally ending his bid and said his supporters could continue to back him in the majority of states where they are unlikely to sway the outcome. Kennedy took steps to withdraw his candidacy in at least two states late this week, Arizona and Pennsylvania, but election officials in the battlegrounds of Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin said it would be too late for him to take his name off the ballot even if he wants to do so.
Kennedy said his actions followed conversations with Trump over the past few weeks. He cast their alliance as “a unity party,” an arrangement that would “allow us to disagree publicly and privately and seriously.” Kennedy suggested Trump offered him a job if he returns to the White House, but neither he nor Trump offered details.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, this week entertained the idea that Kennedy could join Trump’s administration as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The announcement ended days of speculation and landed with heaps of confusion and contradictions from Kennedy’s aides and allies, an emblematic cap for a quixotic campaign.
NPR (“Robert F. Kennedy suspends his independent presidential campaign and backs Trump“):
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suspending his long-shot independent presidential candidacy. He announced Friday that he is seeking to remove his name from ballots in battleground states, and is instead asking supporters to back Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Kennedy — a scion of a famous American political family who is now known broadly as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist — vowed to upend the two-party system but failed to gain the traction needed to compete in the race.
Speaking in Phoenix on Friday, Kennedy said in an “honest system” he believed he would win the election and railed against the media and the Democratic Party for perceived slights against his campaign.
“In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path of electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” he said.
Throughout the lengthy address, Kennedy constantly bemoaned what he called attacks on democracy — while backing a candidate in Trump who tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
[…]
While his campaign launched with an ambitious plan to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, RFK leaned into conspiracies about America, the government and vaccines that appealed especially to a smaller swath of voters and those who do not normally cast a ballot.
In part due to his famous political name, Kennedy appeared poised to siphon votes from Democratic-leaning voters who soured on Biden’s age and perceived fitness for office, but Kennedy focused his efforts more toward communicating with the right.
Kennedy frequented right-wing podcasts and television shows, and unsuccessfully attempted to woo the Libertarian Party at their national convention. He saw a barrage of negative headlines overshadow his campaign, from allegations of sexual assault to eating a barbecued dog to a recent revelation he was responsible for dumping a bear cub in Central Park.
His campaign faced significant challenges obtaining access to state ballots, but it ran the most successful independent national ballot access effort in 30 years, navigating onerous state laws and fighting off well-funded legal challenges to submit more than a million signatures across 50 states. As of Friday, his campaign was on roughly 20 state ballots.
But those efforts did not translate to much electoral support, especially after Vice President Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee.
Kennedy dropped from a high of around 15% to the low single digits in national election polls. In the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, conducted earlier this month, he enjoyed 5% support.
The latest financial disclosures showed signs of Kennedy’s struggles, too, with the campaign ending July with $3.9 million cash on hand, $3.4 million in debt and a nearly $1 million refund to his running mate Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy California attorney who poured in $15 million of her own money to help with ballot access measures.
The Hill (“Kennedy siblings rip RFK Jr. for endorsing Trump: ‘A betrayal’ of family values“):
Members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extended family called it a “betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear” on Friday after the independent presidential candidate announced that he was endorsing former President Trump.
“We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future,” Kerry Kennedy wrote in a statement alongside four of Kennedy’s siblings. “We believe in Harris and Walz. Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”
“It is a sad ending to a sad story,” they added.
Ouch. In fairness, though, RFK Sr. has been dead more than half a century, so I’m not sure how relevant his opinions on the 2024 election are.
Regardless, Kennedy is a bizarre conspiracy theorist to whom people only pay attention because he’s a scion of America’s most famous political family, the brightest stars of which all died in their prime. Still, he speaks to a certain disaffected segment of the electorate in a way most politicians don’t.
My instinct is that his endorsement of Trump will have very little impact, indeed, on how people vote. Part of his appeal—indeed, that of any “third party” candidate—was providing an opportunity to cast a protest vote. That his polling has dropped so precipitously since Harris replaced Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee would seem a pretty strong indicator that his actual support was minimal.
History always repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.
Yeah, I know it’s by Karl Marx but he had some good lines in his day.
Trump embracing the “weirdness” charge.
@Argon:
RFK Jr’s lifetime of failing forward is also a textbook example of “the affirmative action of generational wealth” that Michelle Obama spoke of the other night. He and Trump are birds of feather.
They failed to add, “and extremely successful divorcee of Google co-founder Sergey Brin”.
OH joy, the Dead Bear Party candidate grifted to join Bone Spurious on the Grand Old Losers campaign.
Let me add that halting his campaign except in states where it doesn’t matter and where he left it too late to actually withdraw seems so RFK Jr. Apparently he thinks he can still scam a few bucks out of the rubes. Wonder what Trump kinda sorta promised him for kinda sorta pulling out.
There will unfortunately be a small but noticeable shift in the polls. But based on historical polls and final vote tallies for most 3rd party candidates, most RFK supporters were likely going to jump ship or simply not vote at all. In other words, the actual shift in the final vote probably will be pretty small. No way to prove that, of course. But in a close election, it could be the difference.
My question would be how much the actual endorsement (as opposed to simply dropping out) sways his supporters. I think I know a couple that were planning to vote for him, I could ask. They’re anti-vaxxers but otherwise I’ve gotten the impression they’re generally progressive, so we’ll see …
Meh.
This clown reminded me of Steve Forbes, another joker who went through life absolutely certain of his right to the presidency based completely on being raised in a life of wealth and privilege, and on being related to people that had accomplished big things, despite never had done much at all on their own.
@MarkedMan: Hmmm. Sounds like failing forward due to affirmative action of generational wealth. Also, too, Trump.
As teenager, RFK Jr. is said to have sneered, “Don’t pretend to understand me if you haven’t taken acid.”
The RF in RFK Jr. stands for “ratfucking”
@Stormy Dragon: heck there’s a K in there, too!
This is so deeply moving.
It’s warms my heart to know that Nicole Shanahan wasted … ummm, make that, ‘invested’ … $15 million dollars in RFK Jr’s efforts to position himself to sell himself out to Trump or Harris if either of them promised him a cabinet position in their administrations.
He was so principled. I’m going to miss him so much.
Oliver did a show on him recently. No matter how nutty you think he is he is probably worse than you think. As recently as a couple of years ago there is video of him claiming AIDS is caused by using too many poppers. The virus origin is just a false claim to make big money for pharma.
Steve
@al Ameda: Imagine having so much money that you are willing to waste millions on RFK. Jr. Not use it to help people, or even for a cause about ballot access, but on RFK, Jr.
I gotta think that the number of people who were actually going to vote for Kennedy because they liked what he said rather than as a protest vote against the old men is vanishingly small. If true his endorsement will mean nothing to him.
Also, anybody actually believe he is getting a cabinet position if Trump wins?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Not that dissimilar from Lex bezos using several of his many millions to hunt down and recover Saturn V firs stages from the bottom of the Atlantic. And I say this as someone who fully understands the value of artifacts to history.
@steve:
On statements I read on the news yesterday, Junior said something to the effect he could have won the election*, had the primaries not been rigged. And then made the comparison about his run in the Democratic primaries to that of his father and uncle.
The last is so disingenuous as to be not even wrong. The history of primaries and caucuses is a bit hazy, but ti’s clear that in the 1960 and 1968 elections they played a minor part. Officials in the parties in each state chose delegates and largely determined whom they’d vote for at the convention. Primaries were more like polling, or taken as advice from the base or the voters. In that era, some candidates skipped the primaries entirely.
*Maybe in a reversed-mirror version of the Bizarro Universe.
@Steven L. Taylor: For whatever it’s worth, Wikipedia tells us that “In 2022, Shanahan gave $70 million to Blue Meridian Partners, which makes grants to nonprofits that aim to help the impoverished.[36]”
I’m not sure that adding the weird dead bear guy to the team is a huge plus…
@anjin-san: You also can’t be sure it’s a huge negative. Who was going to get that spot on the team? Might be worse. Probably npot, but not outside the realm of plausibility.
This confirms that his whole plan was to hurt Dems. I wonder if Cheryl Hines will ditch him now. Good riddance.
@Raoul:
Hines is said to be repulsed by Trump.
Well, knock me down with a feather.
@steve: the worst thing was when asked about allegations that he had sexually assaulted his children’s babysitter, he responded by saying that he hadn’t been a Boy Scout and there are many other skeletons in his closet.
@Monala:
Wasn’t it his late brother Michael who had the affair with the 15-year-old babysitter?
@CSK: maybe they both have similar skeletons. link
@Monala:
It seems to run in the family. JFK was supposed to have impregnated a teen-aged babysitter.
@al Ameda:
No, we need to thank her for pouring that $$$ back into the economy instead of wasting it on buying SC Justices, although I personally would have preferred her funding homeless shelters or food banks with the same $$$.
Otoh, I imagine her ex-husband’s ire at how she’s frittering “his” $$$ is warming the cockles of her heart.
@Steven L. Taylor:
RFK jr. is by now a typical outcome in this Age of Trump. He’s all in on many conspiracies, and it was yesterday I believe when he said that if our primary system was corrupt and rigged that he would win a party nomination.
To me, he’s one of those people who, when you stop to listen to what he’s saying, about a couple of minutes in you’re thinking he makes some interesting points, but … let him go on for another 10-15 minutes and you begin to realize that he’s 12 donuts short of a Baker’s Dozen.
@al Ameda: *wasn’t corrupt and rigged
Edit to above
Maggie Haberman says that RFK Jr. and Trump are a perfect fit because they’re both transactional.
@CSK: Transactional is the new sociopath.
@Scott:
Yep.
@CSK:
The worms agree.
I guess the real question is who was left with more brain matter, Bobby or Rosemary? Because I can’t tell.
This. I expect many of his few remaining supporters will be furious not only that he’s deprived them of that opportunity, but he’s endorsed half of the establishment they wanted to protest against. Most of them will stay home in November, by which time Kennedy will be forgotten.
Unless Trump is deluded enough to make him a continuing member of his campaign team, which I expect would help Democrats.
@Kathy:
The change from has now shown itself in the context of weak party intitutions to control brand label that once certain informal barriers break down, to have been a serious error, faux democracy via simplistic ‘voting is good” without attention to realistic representativity of that (as in not represenative at all and thus not really healthy democracy at all, but the façade)
@Gustopher: Meme it into a negative, it certainly works well with the “buncho of weirdos” demarche.
James: “Still, he speaks to a certain disaffected segment of the electorate in a way most politicians don’t.”
A high of 4%?
Now at 2%?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: That’s good to know, but it really doesn’t change my assessment.