Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the campaign trail in October.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intends to end his campaign for president, several outlets reported Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with Kennedy’s plans — spelling a likely end for the anti-vaccine activist and Kennedy family scion’s longshot bid for the White House.
Kennedy’s campaign said in an email Wednesday afternoon that he would “address the nation live on Friday about the present historical moment and his path forward.” The campaign did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on several reports that Kennedy would be dropping out.
ABC News reported that Kennedy would end his presidential bid by the end of the week, citing unnamed “sources familiar with the decision.” Within a couple of hours, other outlets had matched the report: CNN reported Kennedy would suspend his campaign at an event in Arizona on Friday, citing “a source familiar,” and NBC News similarly reported he intended to end his campaign, citing two sources familiar with the plans.
The stories differed slightly on whether Kennedy plans to endorse Donald Trump; multiple reports said an endorsement was likely, but stressed that talks between the campaigns were ongoing.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, previously expressed concern about running “the risk of a Kamala Harris and [Tim] Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump.” Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, has for weeks been making apparent overtures toward Kennedy, perhaps wary of the independent candidate’s impact on his own chances in November, and Kennedy has reportedly spoken with Trump about endorsing him and potentially joining a second Trump administration.
Kennedy’s outreach to Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign this month, on the other hand, was met with indifference , according to Kennedy.
For years, Kennedy ― son of the late senator, attorney general and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy ― has parlayed his family name and his credentials as an environmental lawyer into a successful career as an anti-vaccine activist.
Though he has sought to downplay his anti-vaccine views during his presidential bid, Kennedy nonetheless acknowledged the role those views played in his popularity.
“I’m proud to say that my supporters include both pro-lifers and pro-choicers, they include climate activists and climate skeptics, they include vaccinated and unvaccinated,” he said last year, announcing that he would be leaving the Democratic presidential primary field and running as an independent.
The “unvaccinated” constituency has formed a key pillar of Kennedy’s base, highlighting the impact of some (mostly conservative) politicians’ embrace of conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine. Kennedy spent much of his time on the campaign trail gabbing with media figures like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson on their podcasts .
“We need to start taking care of our own health and stop relying on the pharmaceutical paradigm,” said Kennedy, sitting alongside his wife, actor Cheryl Hines, on Russell Brand’s show last year.
Slipping Polls
Kennedy started his bid for the White House as a Democrat, filing paperwork to challenge President Joe Biden for the party’s nomination in April 2023 . He switched to an independent bid six months later, telling a rally of supporters at Philadelphia’s Independence Mall: “What really terrifies the elites, though, is not me, it’s what I represent ― a populist movement that defies left-right divisions.”
Though surveys months before Election Day are not predictive, early polls showed meaningful interest in Kennedy , who endorsed the “ spoiler ” label that both Democrats and Republicans applied to his campaign. A Quinnipiac poll in late October 2023 showed him at 22% support as an independent candidate running against Biden and Trump ― more than Ross Perot received in his 1992 independent presidential bid.
This summer, polls showed support for Kennedy in the low double digits, but he did not qualify to appear on the debate stage alongside Biden and Trump, having fallen short of CNN’s threshold for polling and ballot access in enough states to plausibly win the presidency. Both issues ― lack of popular support and lack of ballot access across several states ― remained key obstacles for Kennedy until the end of his candidacy.
Even before Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris for the top of the Democratic ticket, Kennedy’s numbers were trending in the wrong direction . But Biden’s withdrawal was a serious blow to the Kennedy campaign, which had initially been buoyed by “double-hater” voters who dreaded what had appeared to be an upcoming rematch between two elderly men vying for another term in the Oval Office. O ne New York Times poll, conducted around the same time as the Quinnipiac poll, found that a fifth of voters in battleground states held unfavorable views of both Biden and Trump.
With Harris, Democrats experienced a jolt of enthusiasm, and the appetite for Kennedy appeared to drop . On Aug. 14, Pew Research Center reported that “in addition to holding on to the support of those who backed Biden in July, Harris’ bump has largely come from those who had previously said they supported or leaned toward Kennedy.”
The drop in support likely wasn’t helped by Kennedy’s non-denials in response to allegations of sexual assault ― or by his bizarre admission that he once dumped a bear carcass in New York City’s Central Park.
Mixed Appeal
The implications of Kennedy likely dropping out of the race aren’t immediately clear, particularly in potentially election-deciding swing states where results could be determined by just a few thousand votes.
Part of the confusion comes from Kennedy’s political coalition. Though he started out as a Democrat, many of his early cheerleaders were Republicans, and several of Kennedy’s deepest-pocketed donors supported both his and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential bids, Axios reported . DeSantis once commented that, if elected president, he would “sic” Kennedy on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration.
Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, in particular, spent years promoting Kennedy’s views, and believed Kennedy’s presidential bid “could be both a useful chaos agent in [the] 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country,” CBS News’ Robert Costa reported in April.
To further muddy the waters, most of Kennedy’s significant financial supporters are difficult to profile. In March, Politico found that, of roughly 21,000 donors who’d given Kennedy’s campaign at least $200 since he switched to an independent candidacy, “74 percent of them did not make any political donations during the 2020 cycle.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a campaign event, soliciting signatures in support of getting his name on the ballot for the 2024 general election on Nov. 14 in Columbia, South Carolina.
As a candidate for president, Kennedy has pledged to stop the National Institutes of Health’s work on infectious diseases. Other policy priorities aren’t so clear. Kennedy said he personally favored a “Medicare for All” health care model, for example, but argued that actually pursuing that policy would be “too much of a heavy lift.” In August, Kennedy said he would support a nationwide abortion ban after the first three months of pregnancy ― only to walk back the position the same day. The flip-flops are part of a pattern for the candidate.
Kennedy’s remarks have often been inflammatory. In 2022, months before launching his presidential bid, Kennedy criticized vaccine mandates by saying that “even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” (He later apologized for the remark.)
In July 2023 , Kennedy falsely said of COVID-19: “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately ... COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (Kennedy said the New York Post, which first reported his remarks, was “mistaken,” and that he never believed the virus was “deliberately engineered” to target certain ethnicities. Still, he said, “it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons.”)
Members of Kennedy’s family have denounced his campaign due to his anti-vaccine work. Several of his siblings wrote on social media that they believed his candidacy was “perilous for our country.” (“There’s a lot of members of my family who are working for the Biden administration and they have their own opinions about issues,” Kennedy said of the denunciation.)
An Anti-Vaccine Candidate
Decades ago, Kennedy began promoting faulty research that claimed, falsely, to show a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. (Before HuffPost shuttered its unpaid contributor platform in 2017, Kennedy wrote several blog entries denigrating vaccines. Those posts, along with others spreading misinformation about vaccines, have since been removed from the site.)
Kennedy’s modern place atop a crowded community of anti-vaccine activists began with the publication of his piece “ Deadly Immunity ” in Rolling Stone and Salon in 2005. The article falsely suggested a link between a former vaccine preservative and autism, and accused the scientific community of conspiring to bury evidence of that supposed connection. Rolling Stone eventually removed the piece from its website and Salon issued a lengthy retraction, but the article made Kennedy a hero to the anti-vaccine movement. (Kennedy has stood by the piece through the years. Last June , he called it “my award-winning article” in a note to National Review.)
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Kennedy switched gears, falsely referring to the COVID-19 jab as the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Meanwhile, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he founded , doubled its revenue to nearly $7 million in 2020, according to The Associated Press . Kennedy reported a $516,000 income from the group, part of millions in overall income, in the year before he entered the presidential race.
Kennedy’s impact on American public life will likely long outlast his presidential campaign. Last November , the CDC reported that a record-high 3% of children entering kindergarten had received a vaccine exemption from their state.
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