RFK Jr.’s supporters could still alter a tight presidential race. Trump is banking on it

(CNN) — For the better part of the past year, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built and maintained a small but significant base of support for his quixotic White House bid, the two major parties wrestled with an increasingly pressing question: Whose presidential aspirations might be most damaged by an independent aligned with the conspiratorial right but bearing a famous Democratic name?

Now, with Kennedy having suspended his campaign, both parties will be closely watching who his followers gravitate toward in the closing months before Election Day.

Kennedy formally announced Friday that he was suspending his presidential campaign, saying, “I cannot, in good conscience, ask my staff and volunteers to keep working their long hours, or ask my donors to keep giving when I cannot honestly tell them that I have a real path to the White House.”

He then said he would “throw (his) support to President Trump.” Speculation around an endorsement of former President Donald Trump had earlier grown as both candidates were scheduled to appear in Arizona on Friday, and Trump teased a “special guest” at his event.

Though his odds of victory were quickly diminishing – a recent CBS News poll measured his support at just 2% – Kennedy’s decision to bow out 74 days before the election nevertheless presents another twist to a race already unlike any other. And amid a momentum shift that has catapulted the newly installed Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, into close contention with Trump, there is hope within the former president’s operation that Kennedy’s exit could prove decisive if certain battlegrounds are decided by thousands of ballots, just as they were in 2020.

It’s hardly certain what Kennedy’s backers will do. Whether many of them ever intended to vote for him or at all is difficult to gauge, and some may choose to sit the election out without an alternative on the ballot.

Still, the Trump campaign has long worried that Kennedy’s campaign, built on conspiracies and anti-vaccine rhetoric, pulled directly from their side, especially in a handful of key states. Trump’s advisers now see an opening to court some of Kennedy’s voters, particularly those Americans who sit at the overlap between supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ past presidential campaigns and the GOP’s anti-establishment right wing. There is a presumption among Trump’s team and his allies that conservative-leaning mothers – a demographic the Republican nominee has struggled to win over – could also be swayed. Women were more likely to support Kennedy than men, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, though other polls haven’t shown a meaningful difference.

As it became clear that Kennedy’s days in the race were numbered, several of Trump’s top allies, including his son, Donald Trump Jr., have maneuvered behind the scenes to arrange for an endorsement. Meanwhile, the former president has showered Kennedy in overtures, telling CNN he might find a place for his onetime rival in a future Cabinet.

“If he endorsed me, I would be honored by it,” Trump said Thursday on Fox News. “I would be very honored by it. He really has his heart in the right place.”

The Democratic National Committee and aligned outside groups have aggressively attacked Kennedy since the beginning of this year in an attempt to minimize his impact on the race. In a memo released Friday, Ramsey Reid, the committee’s operative keeping an eye on third-party candidates, argued that Kennedy dropping out wouldn’t affect the race, pointing to recent polls showing his support declining.

“Here’s what RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Donald Trump would change: nothing,” Reid said in the memo. “The little support that remains is soft, split across ideologies, and disproportionately among lower propensity voters.”

Still, amid the uncertainty, the Harris campaign extended an olive branch to Kennedy’s backers.

“If they were looking for somebody who’s actually going to fight for their interests, their values, or they’re looking for somebody who understood as it relates to the personal decisions that they make in their lives, the government should get the hell out of the way,” Harris spokesman Michael Tyler said, “then there’s a home for them in Kamala Harris campaign.”

An alternative to Biden and Trump

Kennedy first entered the race in April 2023 as a Democratic challenger to President Joe Biden. In October, he ended that bid and announced he would instead run as an independent candidate.

Armed with a storied family lineage – he’s the son of the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy – and a cult following from his years of environmental activism and as a leading purveyor of debunked vaccine conspiracies, Kennedy quickly found an audience of Americans disenchanted by the two major parties and a rematch between the two oldest presidents to hold the office.

Though his national support peaked in the teens and has lately fallen to low single digits, Kennedy’s campaign generated fears from both parties that he could tip a critical state or two.

At the Republican National Convention last month, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita told a room full of reporters that their internal polling predicted Kennedy siphoned slightly more votes from Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin but “much more from us” in Pennsylvania, whose 19 Electoral College votes are one of this year’s top prizes and could determine the election.

Asked why, LaCivita responded, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have waged an offensive against Kennedy over the past year, seeking to portray him as a spoiler for Trump by highlighting his ties to megadonor Timothy Mellon, who has donated to super PACs backing both Trump and Kennedy.

The DNC and Clear Choice PAC actively fought Kennedy’s efforts to get on the ballot in 11 states, each of them a battleground or a Democratic stronghold. Kennedy had won all of the legal battles he faced against Democrats in various states up until a New York judge blocked him from appearing on the state’s ballot earlier this month.

Kennedy’s campaign and its underdog operation had spent countless hours, not to mention tens of millions of dollars, working to achieve their goal of gaining ballot access nationwide. Kennedy has qualified for the ballot in 21 states, although it’s unclear whether his name will appear on ballots in those states without him in the race. On Thursday, he withdrew from the ballot in Arizona, the office of the state’s secretary of state told CNN.

If Kennedy drops out, he will have spurned several minor parties who nominated him as their presidential candidate to grant him ballot access in select states. The fate of those minor parties, who in some states earn ballot access based on performance in previous elections, could be in jeopardy.

From a nuisance to a real problem

Trump’s campaign went on offense early against Kennedy’s independent bid, labeling him a radical liberal and promoting his more progressive beliefs. The attacks escalated further in the spring of 2024 as more public and internal polling revealed that Kennedy took as much support from Trump as from Biden. 

By May, Trump’s advisers and outside allies went from viewing Kennedy as a nuisance to a real problem that needed extinguishing. Trump himself personally weighed in, urging undecided Americans not to cast a “wasted protest vote.”

Frustration mounted as well with the friendly coverage Kennedy enjoyed into the summer from conservative media – not only Fox News and Newsmax but also among conservative influencers.

“That coverage was a major reason Don Jr. began pushing for a way to get (Kennedy) to end his campaign,” a source familiar with the talks said.

Within Trump’s political orbit, an alliance with Kennedy was never far from a possibility.

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican operative close to the former president, suggested in the summer of 2023 that Kennedy could be a contender for a Cabinet post in a second Trump term. In April, a Kennedy campaign official based in New York was fired by the campaign after she repeatedly urged voters to vote for Kennedy to improve Trump’s chances of victory in blue states such as New York. To Democrats, the episode confirmed what they viewed as an uncomfortable coziness between the efforts behind Trump and Kennedy.

Privately, the lines of communication remained open between their extended political orbits. Discussions between Trump allies and advisers and Kennedy’s team began in the lead-up to the Republican convention in July. Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III, posted video of a friendly phone call between his father and Trump the same month.

During the conversation, the former president appeared to endorse false theories about the safety of vaccines – a longtime focal point of Kennedy’s public advocacy. The elder Kennedy apologized to Trump for the release of the video of their phone call, which was later deleted.

At an event last month, Kennedy acknowledged for the first time that his path to victory was shrinking and asserted that Trump was “highly likely to be the next president.”

Then, on Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, opened the door to “joining forces” with Trump to prevent Harris from winning the election.

Donald Trump Jr. had been pushing his father and the Trump campaign for weeks to encourage Kennedy to end his bid and endorse the former president, according to a source with knowledge of the conversations.

In addition to Trump Jr., former Fox News host Tucker Carlson – who is close to Kennedy – as well as businessman Omeed Malik, a Trump donor who has also given to Kennedy’s campaign, have helped facilitate the talks.

An endorsement, if it happens, could come as soon as Friday night at Trump’s Phoenix-area rally. Trump said Thursday that “no plans have been made.” Kennedy is scheduled to address “the present historical moment and his path forward” at an event not far away just hours earlier. It will be Kennedy’s first public event since July.

A mercurial figure

Internal conversations within Trump’s operation had for months focused on whether Kennedy’s endorsement would bring any benefit. Kennedy was a mercurial figure long before his run for president, and he has managed to amass more controversies during his 16-month-long quest for the White House.

In May, Kennedy disclosed for the first time that a parasitic worm once entered his brain and died, a period that led to “brain fog” and “having trouble with word retrieval and short-term memory,” he said. Later in the campaign, he sidestepped accusations published in Vanity Fair that he sexually assaulted a former nanny, telling a podcast he had “many skeletons in my closet.”

“I’m not a church boy,” Kennedy said when asked about the allegations.

The same Vanity Fair article also published an image of Kennedy, sent by him to a friend, which appeared to depict Kennedy pantomiming eating a dog carcass. Kennedy has denied the photo showed him eating a dog.

Earlier this month, Kennedy admitted that a decade ago he placed in New York City’s Central Park a bear cub carcass he found on the road upstate, an incident that appears tied to a 2014 episode that drew national attention.

However, any hesitance inside Trump’s campaign about a Kennedy endorsement eroded when Biden ended his campaign in late July and it became clear that Harris would likely top the Democratic ticket. It was at that point that more people in Trump’s orbit, including several of his most senior advisers, came to believe that Kennedy’s support would be an asset in a race that could be determined by the smallest of margins, two people close to the talks said.

“The team recognized that RFK Jr. could be more hurtful to Trump after that. It quickly became clear that pulling his voters to our side could give us an edge, and the talks happening in the background to secure his endorsement became more serious,” a source familiar with the talks told CNN.

While Trump has long espoused some of the conspiracies around routine inoculations that Kennedy has pushed for years – including the debunked links between certain vaccines and autism – the two were for a time on opposing sides of the coronavirus vaccine. Kennedy had made Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his implementation of Operation Warp Speed, the program to accelerate the manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines, a major theme of his early campaign.

As Kennedy’s campaign picked up support, Trump labeled the former Democrat a member of the “radical left” and attacked his environmental activism.

But in July, Trump and Kennedy spoke on the phone in the days after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. The day after the call, Kennedy and Trump met in person in Milwaukee on the first day of the Republican National Convention.

In those conversations, the candidates first discussed the possibility of Kennedy dropping out of the race and endorsing the former president in exchange for a role in a future Trump administration. Following those conversations, Kennedy said he would not drop out of the race.

Earlier this month, Kennedy’s campaign approached the vice president’s campaign about arranging a meeting to discuss endorsing her in exchange for a potential role in a Harris administration. That meeting never materialized.

Shanahan on Thursday lashed out at Democrats, suggesting they would be to blame if Kennedy’s supporters helped push Trump over the top in November.

Her “old Dem buddies,” she wrote on social media, are “terrified of the idea of our movement joining forces with Donald Trump.”

“Here’s an idea: stop suing us. Let us debate. Quit rigging the media and the polls. It’s a simple formula people – get with it,” Shanahan said.

This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Kristen Holmes, Kate Sullivan and Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.