Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, shakes hands with Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally Friday.Ross D. Franklin/The Associated Press
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suspension of his American presidential campaign and his subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump is only the latest bizarre twist in a political year when expectations are toppled, precedents broken, and alliances shattered and remade.
While the ebullient delegates to the Democratic National Convention were making their way to airport departure lounges in Chicago, Mr. Kennedy did officially what his campaign earlier leaked but which still seemed an astonishing break with the legacy of, along with the Adamses and the Bushes, perhaps the greatest American political dynasty.
Put starkly, a member of a family of Democratic royalty threw his support to the candidate that the rest of his family – including two current ambassadors, three living former members of the House of Representatives and a onetime state lieutenant-governor, all related either by birth or marriage to the three Kennedy brothers who each served in the Senate and subsequently ran for president – abhor above all others.
With blasts at what he called the “censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Ag and big money” of the Democratic Party, he said Friday that his campaign was hampered by an “insurmountable tangle of arbitrary rules” and was the target of a co-ordinated offensive by the Democrats to wage “continual legal warfare against President Trump and myself.”
Speaking in Las Vegas moments later, Mr. Trump said the endorsement was “very nice” and that Mr. Kennedy was “a great guy” who was “respected by everybody.”
The eventual political consequences of Mr. Kennedy’s decision may be minimal. As Mr. Kennedy’s support has shrunk over the past several months, many of his onetime supporters – some of them “double haters,” in the phrase political scientists have come to apply to Americans who were unable to bear either Mr. Trump or President Joe Biden – abandoned Mr. Kennedy when Mr. Biden left the presidential race. They likely migrated into the Democratic camp and are a (small) part of the Harris surge. The rump likely lean to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Kennedy, who said he would have won the White House in an “honest system,” took steps to remove his name from the ballots in competitive states, but still urged his supporters to vote for him in non-competitive states where the outcome is all but certain.
An Ipsos poll conducted last weekend for The Washington Post and ABC News poll showed Ms. Harris with a three-percentage-point advantage over Mr. Trump in a three-way race, an edge that grew to four points when the choice was simply Mr. Trump and her. Many veteran Democrats have yearned for a one-on-one race with Mr. Trump, unimpeded by the presence of third-party candidates such as Mr. Kennedy, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Justice for All candidate Cornel West, even though the few votes the latter two might peel away from Ms. Harris are likely to be confined to ultraliberal enclaves of deeply Democratic states.
“There needs to be a clear up and down vote on Trump, undisturbed by third parties,” Richard Gephardt, a former Democratic House of Representatives leader, said in an interview. “It probably is a wash in the end because a lot of these people are going to stay home and not vote because they’re so ‘out’ on the whole system.”
The voters siding with candidates other than Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris held negative views of the former president, according to a late-July Wall Street Journal poll – but they were even more negative about Ms. Harris.
The timing of the Kennedy announcement very likely was a recognition by the son of the slain senator Robert F. Kennedy that he could not win the ballot access or sufficient sums of money needed to have a respectable showing. The agreement between the Trump and Kennedy camps also reflected an effort by the former president’s team to blunt the convention bump in poll ratings that often follow an enthusiastic national political convention like the one the Democrats just concluded.
The groundwork for the alliance between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump was laid months ago.
Even as the Kennedy campaign was beginning to attract adherents as it set out for an independent campaign for the White House, members of the Trump team were sending feelers, and then anxious pleas, to Mr. Kennedy, beseeching him to stand down from his campaign and to find a safe harbour inside the Trump effort.
And though the Kennedy campaign encountered problems getting their candidate’s name on state ballots for the November election, Mr. Kennedy either brushed aside or ignored these entreaties. Indeed, in recent weeks Mr. Kennedy reached out to the Kamala Harris camp, offering to endorse the Vice-President in exchange for a cabinet appointment – a quid pro quo that could run afoul of U.S. law. The Harris team refused to meet with the Kennedy campaign.
Mr. Kennedy, who calculated that Mr. Biden would eventually decline to run, began running in Democratic primaries only to discover, his associates charged, how comprehensively the party, beginning in the spring of 2023, had made it onerous if not impossible to gain ballot access. In his Friday remarks, he spoke of “a sham primary that was rigged against any serious challenge to President Biden.”
Cut off from primary debates, Mr. Kennedy had no opportunity to profit from the kind of halting performance the President experienced in June. Kennedy insiders believe that the party had deliberately shielded Mr. Biden from any kind of scrutiny in the primaries.
Eventually Mr. Kennedy saw that his only path was through an Independent candidacy, a conclusion buttressed by the fact that the preponderance of those who turned out to his events were Republicans who also liked Mr. Trump. That was another reason he abandoned his Democratic campaign in favour of an independent candidacy and it was the impetus for the early Trump efforts to manoeuvre Mr. Kennedy out of the race completely.
At the same time, Mr. Kennedy’s hard-line public support for Israel may have caused some disaffection among his Democratic-oriented supporters. He also had to battle deep family disapproval and the disappointment that came from being spurned by the people he grew up with.