Off The Record
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Shocked The World With His Announcement
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quit his independent run for president on Friday and backed Donald Trump instead.
This is a late-stage change in the presidential race that could give Trump an additional boost from Kennedy’s fans.
Kennedy said that his own polls showed that his entry into the race would hurt Trump and help Kamala Harris, the Democratic choice. However, new public polls do not clearly show that he is having a big effect on support for either major party candidate.
He made it clear, though, that he was not officially ending his campaign. He said that his supporters could still support him in most states, even though they probably would not be able to change the result. Late this week, Kennedy took steps to withdraw his candidacy in Arizona and Pennsylvania. But in Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, which are all close races, election officials said it was too late for him to remove his name from the ticket, even if he wanted to.
Kennedy said that what he did was based on what he had talked about with Trump over the past few weeks. He called their partnership “a unity party” and said it would “allow us to disagree publicly and privately and seriously.”
Kennedy made his speech in Phoenix hours before Trump was going to hold a gathering in Glendale, which is close by. For a while, Trump’s campaign said that he would be joined by “a special guest.” However, when asked if Kennedy would be that guest, neither team replied.
Some people would have thought it impossible a year ago that a member of what is likely the most famous family in Democratic politics would work with Trump to keep a Democrat out of the White House.
Kennedy has said that Trump betrayed his supporters in recent months, while Trump has called Kennedy “the most radical left candidate in the race.”
On Friday, five members of Kennedy’s family said that his support for Trump was “a sad ending to a sad story.”
His sister Kerry Kennedy posted the statement on X. It said, “We want an America filled with hope and bound together by a shared vision of a brighter future, a future defined by individual freedom, economic promise and national pride. 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.”
Kennedy Jr. admitted that his choice had caused problems with his close family. He is the son of the late Attorney General and Sen. Robert Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He is married to the actress Cheryl Hines.
Kennedy said, “This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends. But I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do. And that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms.”
People who know about the efforts say that the Kennedy and Trump teams have been saying nice things about each other more and having talks behind the scenes in the past few weeks.
Both parties have spent months saying that Democrats are using the law to help themselves.
The two have also made public hints that they might be willing to work together to limit Harris’ chances.
During the Republican National Convention last month, Kennedy’s son shared and then quickly deleted a video of a phone call between Kennedy and Trump. In the call, Trump seemed to try to convince Kennedy to support him.
A person with knowledge of the efforts but not wanting to be named because they want to talk about private conversations said that close Trump supporters were quietly pushing Kennedy to drop out of the race and support the Republican candidate.
Trump told CNN on Tuesday that he would “love” Kennedy’s support and called him a “brilliant guy.” Additionally, he said that he would “certainly” let Kennedy work for him if Kennedy dropped out and backed him.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said this week on a podcast that his campaign might “walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump.”
She made it clear that she is not talking to Trump directly, but she did say that she thought Kennedy might become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in Trump’s government.
“I think that Bobby in a role like that would be excellent,” Shanahan said. “I fully support it. I have high hopes.”
Shanahan wrote on X earlier Friday that she is neither a Kamala Democrat nor a Trump Republican.
“I’m an INDEPENDENT American who is endorsing ideas, not a person or a party,” she wrote. “I will continue working to give a voice to the voiceless and bring power back to the people.”
Casey Westerman, 38, from Chandler, Arizona, said she believed Kennedy’s judgment and was going to vote for him at his event in Phoenix. She also said she would vote for Trump if Kennedy said that was who he was supporting.
The man who wore a “Kennedy 2024” trucker hat and voted for Trump in the last two elections said, “My decision would really be based on who he thinks is best suited to run this country.”
Kennedy ran for president in 2024 as a Democrat at first, but he quit the party last fall to run as an independent.
He had an incredibly strong base for a third-party run, thanks in part to voters who do not trust the elite and people who do not believe in vaccines because they have been following his work against them since the COVID-19 pandemic. But since then, his campaign funds have been tight and he is facing more and more legal problems.
New polls show that only a few hundred people back him. And it is not clear if he would even get that many votes in a general election, since third-party candidates often do not do as well as they did in early polls when people actually cast their ballots.
Trump would be hurt more by Kennedy staying in the race than by Harris’s. A study done by AP and NORC in July found that Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to like Kennedy. And people who liked Kennedy were much more likely to like Trump (52% vs. 37%).
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