It’s looking like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race on Friday, and that he will endorse Donald Trump.
Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, confirmed that “there’s been a lot of communication back and forth between RFK, between the campaign, between this campaign,” in an interview with NBC on Wednesday.
“Look, our argument to RFK, and I’ll make it right now, because, of course, he hasn’t dropped out yet, is, look, if you want a Democratic Party that protected American workers and stood for strong borders, maybe disagreed with Republicans on things like tax policy, that party doesn’t exist anymore,” Vance said.
Kennedy is scheduled to be in Phoenix, Ariz., for a campaign event on Friday. Trump, coincidentally, is scheduled to be in nearby Glendale, Ariz., for a Friday night rally.
It has been known for several weeks that Kennedy and Trump had discussed a possible role for Kennedy in a second Trump administration. The two met briefly on the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month.
ICYMI
Kennedy was polling in the mid-teens in the early part of July, but his support has eroded, dramatically, in the weeks since, and stands at 4.7 percent in the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average.
Kennedy is running as an independent, after briefly making a quixotic bid for the Democratic Party nomination.
The conventional wisdom is that his voter base is well right of center, though his mix of anti-vaxxers, environmental advocates and Bernie Sanders populists might end up splitting more down the middle than the pundits have been thinking.
With the race between Trump and Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris running tight right now – FiveThirtyEight has Harris up 3.3 percentage points – Kennedy could go from playing spoiler as a third-party candidate to kingmaker by endorsing Trump, should his endorsement throw a significant portion of his 4.7 percent into Trump’s camp.
There’s no guarantee of that, of course, given Trump’s general unfavorability with voters, and the issues that Kennedy himself is facing on the unfavorability front – his numbers have been dropping in the wake of revelations about the sexual assault of a former family babysitter, and a bizarre story involving a bear cub that he picked up on the side of the road and used to stage a bicycle accident in Central Park in New York City.
“Desperate men do desperate things,” Democratic National Committee senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. “RFK Jr. was recruited by MAGA, funded by MAGA, and parroted MAGA talking points. No one should be shocked if he formalizes his relationship in an attempt to maintain relevance.”
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Chris Graham
