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.
