The 2024 election campaign still has surprises in store. The cycle leaves a new twist in the script after the attack on Donald Trump and the exit of President Joe Biden from the race. The road to November 5 now leaves a Trumpist Kennedy. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy threw in the towel this Friday, ten months after having started his path to the White House. The environmental lawyer and renowned anti-vaccine activist closed the chapter this morning in Arizona, one of the seven states that will define the election on November 5. Kennedy, son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, will withdraw his name from the ballot in 10 entities to increase the chances of Trump returning to the White House.
It is still too early to tell how Kennedy’s withdrawal will benefit Trump. The independent had an average of about 5% in polls. Analysts have warned that it is difficult to gauge the true value of nonpartisan candidates in a two-party system. In 2016, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein boasted 9% and 3% before the election, but only managed 3% and 1% respectively.
On Thursday night, it was announced that the campaign of Kennedy, 70, had dropped the legal process to allow the nonpartisan candidate to run in Arizona, with a series of notarized letters. The news was confirmed by the state’s Secretary of State, which is responsible for organizing the elections. This despite the fact that Kennedy’s team recently announced that they had surpassed the number of signatures needed to get his name on the ballot. They submitted some 110,000 names to local officials, a figure far exceeding the minimum required of 42,000.
The newspaper The New York Times The report this week said that the hundreds of thousands of signatures, delivered in several boxes, were collected in Arizona with the help of a political action committee, a PAC, and not through volunteers. Federal law prohibits a campaign from coordinating with PACs, which called into question the legality of the signatures collected in a decisive territory.
The signs of the exit were clear. Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate, said in an interview on Tuesday that the campaign was already considering the possibility. “One option is to stay in the race and build a strong third party, but we run the risk of allowing a Kamala Harris and Tim Walz presidency because we take some votes away from Trump. Or we leave now and join forces with Trump and explain to our base why we are making this decision,” Shanahan said on the Impact Theory podcast.
These explanations came this morning at a press conference in Arizona. “I always told my voters that I would abandon the campaign to become a spoiler“Someone who has the ability to affect the outcome of the election without having any real chance of winning. And the information we have in my hands shows that I have become one, since I have no viable way of winning,” he said.
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Trump and Kennedy had been negotiating support for several months. The Washington Post The paper said in July that the teams were in communication and had even met in Milwaukee, where they both met. The paper said Kennedy was offering to drop out of the race in exchange for a position in the Republican’s Cabinet in 2025.
Shanahan speculates that this position could be at the Department of Health. “I think Bobby would do very well there, he has my full support,” he said in the interview. Both Kennedy and the Trump campaign have criticized Anthony Fauci’s role in the coronavirus pandemic and the pharmaceutical industry.
The campaign has left a string of scandals behind. Americans learned earlier this month, and in a shocking way, that Kennedy was responsible for a decade-long unsolved mystery in New York. Kennedy admitted that in 2014 he left the body of a dead bear cub in Central Park and made it look like it had been hit by a bicycle. He found the episode funny at the time, but in 2024 it was a revelation that he himself brought to light as damage control hours before the magazine The New Yorker make it known.
A journalistic investigation in May obtained the medical records of the candidate, who boasts of leading a healthy life, free of medication and maintaining a muscular body for a septuagenarian. The New York Times Kennedy claimed Kennedy suffered from a case of neurocysticercosis and that doctors had found traces of a dead parasite in his brain. When Kennedy divorced his second wife in 2012, he claimed he suffered from “cognitive problems” and short-term memory loss. After the revelation of the dead worm in his head, Kennedy took to social media to make light of it. “I can eat five more worms and still beat Presidents Trump and Biden in a debate,” he said on X.
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