Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sorta, kinda, dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Friday, and though he says he’s endorsing Donald Trump, he’s still encouraging supporters to vote for him, and he still thinks it’s possible he could end up in the White House.
In a surreal press event in Arizona on Friday, Kennedy conceded that he doesn’t have “a realistic path to electoral victory,” blaming “relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” and not his own missteps – not campaigning for the past six weeks, not being able to tamp down the fallout from reports that he had sexually abused a former family babysitter, and whatever that thing was with the bear in Central Park.
He stressed that he is not “terminating” his 2024 campaign.
“I am simply suspending it and not ending it,” Kennedy said. “My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris, and in red states the same will apply. I encourage you to vote for me.”
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This was all weird – he’s dropping out, but not dropping out, endorsing Trump, but encouraging his supporters to still vote for him – but it gets weirder, with the part about him somehow ending up the president at the end of all of this.
“If enough of you do vote for me, and neither of the major party candidates win 270 votes, which is quite possible, in fact, today our polling shows them tying at 269 to 269, I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election,” Kennedy said.
What he’s getting at there: in the unlikely event of an Electoral College tie, the winner would be determined by a vote of the House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation getting one vote.
That scenario, implausible as it might be, would seem to favor Trump, since Republicans hold majorities in more state delegations than Democrats do.
It’s hard to imagine, again, in that unlikely scenario, that any Republican delegations would pass aside voting for Trump to install Kennedy as the next president.
“Donald Trump last week stood and said, in front of a bunch of groceries and said, ‘I haven’t seen any Cheerios in a long time.’ I had Cheerios for breakfast. This was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and trying to get any logic out of that is, good luck with that,” Republican strategist Doug Heye said on CNN. “Because it’s, one, you can’t understand what he says, two, if you can understand what he says, it reminded me of a line from Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles.’ When somebody gets up and gives an indecipherable speech, he says, ‘Who can argue with that? That’s authentic frontier gibberish.’ And that’s exactly what that is.”
Another Republican strategist, Scott Jennings, said of Kennedy that “a lot of people think he’s a looney tune,” and warned the Trump campaign to “be a little careful” with respect to Kennedy.
“I mean, I’m old enough to remember when RFK was a liberal conspiracy theorist. Now, he’s more of a conservative conspiracy theorist. But the throughline is, he’s a conspiracy theorist,” Jennings said, adding: “Don’t make any promises you can’t get out of, because this guy, over the course of his career has been a, you know, a little bit … so, just be careful.”
Chris Graham: Will the RFK Jr.-Trump alliance swing momentum?
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