Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to speak Friday concerning the future of his long-shot campaign. Kennedy will be speaking in Phoenix, the same day former President Donald Trump will be in the area holding a rally in the all-important swing state of Arizona. Adding fuel to the rumors, ABC News reported Wednesday that Kennedy plans to drop out of the race by the end of the week.
Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, made headlines earlier this week when she expressed interest in the possibility of dropping out and endorsing Trump.
“There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw more votes from Trump,” she said on Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory podcast. “Or we walk away right now and join forces with Trump and explain to our base why we’re making this decision.”
A Trump-Kennedy partnership makes electoral sense.
Trump has previously expressed interest in bringing Kennedy into his administration. Both men have also been viciously attacked by the Left. Both value individual liberty far more than Vice President Kamala Harris, and both view the so-called deep state as the enemy and are skeptical of America’s interventionist foreign policy. The pair do have profound policy differences, namely, Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his choice to empower COVID-19 task force leader Dr. Anthony Fauci. With the pandemic, lockdowns, and forced vaccinations in the rearview mirror, perhaps Kennedy views other issues facing the nation as more pressing.
Kennedy’s support has dwindled following the Democratic Party’s choice to remove President Joe Biden from the top of the ticket. Harris shares her boss’s policy positions and has been a part of every disastrous move by the administration, from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal to her tiebreaking vote in the Senate on the Inflation Reduction Act, which sent consumer prices through the roof. With no discernable difference in policy, blue-no-matter-who Democrats must have found their line — senility. Now that the party has a sentient leader, left-wing voters seem to have come home in droves. Harris has closed the polling gap with Trump in short order and brought swing states such as Georgia and North Carolina back into the fold.
Jill Stein and Cornel West are nonfactors, and the Libertarian Party nominated a left-winger who poses little to no threat to the GOP, making Kennedy the only wild card in this race. Trump’s electoral ceiling is 46.9% of the popular vote, which he took in his 2020 losing effort against Biden. Kennedy’s 3-5% would almost certainly flip most, if not all of the battleground states in Trump’s direction.
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Both major parties are led by unpopular candidates who are unlikely to reach 50% of the vote, making this election much like the United Kingdom or Israel’s parliamentary system.
A Trump-Kennedy alliance would be a natural progression, and if the GOP’s tent is big enough to house both Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC,) surely there is plenty of room for Kennedy.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.