RFK2 suspends campaign, endorses Trump

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I find only the first half of the thread title to be comprehensible.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is setting aside one ambition and making room for another.

On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer the campaign was weighing whether to “join forces” with Trump and suggested that Kennedy would do an “incredible job” as secretary of health and human services. Trump later told CNN that he “probably would” appoint Kennedy to some role.

“I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it,” Trump said.

(Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, said Wednesday that there was no quid pro quo deal to offer Kennedy a Cabinet post in exchange for his endorsement and that any conversations about a future role would be separate.)

Neither Kennedy nor his campaign responded to requests for comment on just what he would do if he were nominated and approved by the Senate to serve in a position former HHS Secretary Alex Azar described as having “a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen,” at the head of a department with a more than $1.5 trillion budget.

By historical comparisons, Kennedy, a famous anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist, would be an odd pick for HHS secretary. Previous appointees have had varied backgrounds in medicine, government, law and public health. The current secretary, Xavier Becerra, served as attorney general of California.

Kennedy, also an attorney, practiced environmental law and founded Children’s Health Defense, which is now the most well-funded anti-vaccine organization in the country. During the pandemic, he became the purveyor of wild conspiracy theories, often aimed at public health officials in the agencies he now seeks to lead. Kennedy has criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for Covid’s death toll and said Fauci should be prosecuted if he committed a crime. He has also said the attorney general should force editors of medical journals to publish retracted studies.

HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. On the campaign trail, in podcasts and in news interviews, Kennedy has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.

The agencies have become “sock puppets” for the industries they regulate, Kennedy told NBC News in an interview last year, in which he laid out his plans for public health if he were elected president. Faced with another pandemic, Kennedy said, he wouldn’t prioritize the research, manufacture or distribution of vaccines.

“The priority should be finding treatments that work and building people’s immune systems,” he said, falsely adding that “vaccines have probably caused more deaths than they’ve averted.” He mentioned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments — which he says worked against Covid, even though numerous studies say they didn’t.

Kennedy’s campaign has been supported and led by the anti-vaccine movement he helped build. In November, he credited activists at Children’s Health Defense, which he chaired until he took leave to run for president, for boosting his campaign. Accepting an award at the group’s annual conference, he said he would stop the National Institutes of Health from studying infectious diseases, like Covid and measles, and pivot it to studying chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes environmental toxins, a category in which he places childhood vaccines, to be the major threat to public health, rather than infectious disease.

“I’m going to say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said at the time. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime target of the anti-vaccine movement, said a Kennedy reign over HHS — a department tasked with overseeing health policy, providing and regulating care, sponsoring medical research and training, and communicating with the public during emergencies — would be disastrous.

“He no doubt will try to perform studies that prove his views and thus further weaken America’s trust in vaccines and, no doubt, try to eliminate all mandates,” Offit said. “He said he doesn’t want to study infectious diseases. He would eliminate studies around real problems and gear them toward what he thinks the problems are, independent of what good data show.

“It doesn’t matter whether the data show that he’s wrong; he’s still going to be convinced that he’s right,” Offit continued, referring to Kennedy’s focus on proving the harms of vaccines that have repeatedly been proven to be safe. “In no way would this advance human health.”

In Kennedy’s interview with NBC News last year, he sharply criticized the FDA, the NIH and the CDC and said he would “unravel the corrupt corporate capture of these agencies that turned them predatory, against the American public.” He said he would boot the officials in charge and appoint people who would “turn them back into healing and public health agencies.”

He declined to name names, but he has surrounded himself with those on the fringe of public health. He has praised “brave dissidents,” including discredited vaccine scientist Robert Malone, and Dr. Pierre Kory, who was stripped of his certification by the American Board of Internal Medicine this month for promoting and peddling false cures for Covid. Kennedy posted that doctors like Kory “help clear away the smoke of corporate profiteering so that we can see clearly the causes and solutions to the chronic disease epidemic.”

Last year, candidate Kennedy told a group of anti-vaccine doctors and influencers assembled for a health policy roundtable that he would surround himself with “dissidents.”

“Have faith and watch what we do,” he said. “I think you’ll be pleased.”

Kennedy’s exit may help Trump where it matters the most
Trump probably has the most to gain from Kennedy dropping out. Kennedy has increasingly endeared himself to Republican voters while struggling to get the same support among Democrats and independents. And polls conducted in recent months, including since Biden dropped out of the race, suggest that Trump would pick up more of Kennedy’s supporters. Any margin would likely be small — but potentially significant.

Republicans tend to see Kennedy more favorably than Democrats, and those with favorable views toward him tend to have more favorable opinions of Trump than of Harris, according to a July AP-NORC poll conducted before Biden dropped out.

Several national polls conducted since Harris became the presumptive nominee have also tested a race between Harris, Trump, and Kennedy, as well as a two-way race between Harris and Trump. Trump tends to get a bigger bump than Harris when Kennedy is excluded.

In an August Reuters/Ipsos poll of registered voters, for instance, Harris received 42 percent support, Trump 37 percent, and Kennedy 4 percent, while 15 percent supported another candidate, weren’t sure who they would support, or weren’t sure if they would vote at all. But when voters were pushed to select either Trump or Harris, 49 percent backed Harris and 47 percent Trump — a 10 percentage point boost for Trump.

Trump had a similar edge with Kennedy voters in a July Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll. In a three-way contest, Harris earned 44 percent support, Trump 47 percent, and Kennedy 10 percent. In a head-to-head poll, Harris earned 48 percent and Trump 52 percent.

It may seem like the advantage Trump gains when Kennedy is out of the picture is relatively small. But Biden won in 2020 by exceedingly narrow margins in six key battleground states; in Arizona, it was by less than 11,000 votes. On the margin, Kennedy’s supporters could make a difference, depending on where they’re distributed.

In Arizona, for example, Kennedy is polling at about 6 percent, according to The Hill’s polling average. Of course, he might not have actually won that large a vote share if he had decided to stay in the race there; third-party candidates tend to poll much better than they actually perform on Election Day, when their supporters are confronted with the reality that their preferred candidate won’t win. But that vote share would have been more than enough to have swung the 2020 results in the other direction.

The same is true in other swing states, where polling suggests a very tight race. An early August New York Times/Siena survey of registered voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found Harris leading Trump 46 percent to 43 percent when respondents were given all third-party candidates to choose from. When asked to pick between just Harris and Trump, the gap tightened to 48 and 46 percent, respectively. Those states are likely to be key, given their high electoral college vote count — and in most scenarios, Harris would need all three to win.

Harris’s entry into the race likely limits the impact of Kennedy’s exit
While Kennedy’s supporters may still be able to make an important impact on the margins, their power to drag the Democratic nominee’s polling down seems to have diminished substantially.

Before Harris became the nominee, there was a much larger than usual number of disaffected voters who didn’t like either Biden or Trump and just wanted someone — anyone — as an alternative. A theoretical no-name candidate as an alternative to Biden and Trump got about 10 percent in Ipsos polling conducted earlier this year.

Kennedy provided an alternative for a while. But when Harris stepped up, that undermined his appeal — at least among Democrats.

“There were some wavering Democratic voters who just thought Biden was too old, or they didn’t like him, and Harris is just a more appealing candidate for those kinds of people,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Kondik said it’s possible that Biden may have ended up winning back those voters anyway if he had stayed in the race and had a typical post-Democratic National Convention bump.

But at this point, Kondik said, he would not be surprised if the third-party vote share in the election ends up being about 2 percent of the electorate, as it was in 2012 and 2020. Before Harris became the nominee, political analysts were projecting that it would be closer to the nearly 6 percent share third parties got in 2016, which some analysts argued doomed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

“For all the talk about third parties in this election, a combination of the most prominent third-party candidate dropping out, in addition to the increased favorability of the two major party nominees, means that there’s just going to be less of a market for third-party candidates,” he said.

Kennedy could make more of an impact as a surrogate for Trump. He could help the former president with certain demographics, such as young men who listen to prominent personalities such as Joe Rogan, who has praised Kennedy.

But the Trump campaign might also be wary of attaching itself too closely to Kennedy’s brand: If the brain worm and the bear incident weren’t enough, he has been disavowed by members of his own famous family and now peddles conspiracy theories not just about the Covid-19 vaccine, but his father’s killer, 5G cell phone transmission, fraud in the 2004 election, and more.

“The Democratic refrain against Trump and [his running mate JD] Vance is that they’re ‘weird,’” Kondik said. “Kennedy doesn’t make them less weird.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to an accusation that he sexually assaulted a family babysitter at his home by brushing off the incident, asserting that he is not a “church boy” and had a “very rambunctious youth.”

In a wide-ranging report by Vanity Fair, the former employee accused the independent presidential candidate of groping her in 1998.

Eliza Cooney, who was hired in the fall that year as their part-time babysitter, was 23 years old at the time of the alleged incident. She moved into the Kennedy’s home in Mount Kisco, New York, to take care of their children and assist RFK Jr., who was married to Mary Richardson at the time, at his environmental law clinic at Pace University.

Cooney alleged that Kennedy, then 45, touched her leg during a business meting, and a week later, appeared shirtless in her bedroom and asked her to rub lotion on his back. The woman further alleged that months later, as she was looking through the kitchen pantry, Kennedy came up behind her and groped her hips, rib cage, and breasts.

The assault was interrupted, said Cooney, when a male worker walked into the kitchen.

When speaking to Saagar Enjeti on the Breaking Points podcast, the presidential candidate called Vanity Fair‘s article “a lot of garbage” and proceeded to defend himself. “Listen, I’ve said this from the beginning. I’m not a church boy. I am not running like that. I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” said Kennedy, adding, “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.

“So, you know, Vanity Fair is recycling 30-year-old stories. And, I’m not, you know, going to comment on the details of any of them, but it’s, you know, I am who I am,” he said.

When asked if he denied the “nanny situation” or not, Kennedy replied, “I’m not going to comment on it.”

The story published by Vanity Fair also details allegations involving images sent to friends including the claim that during his marriage to Richardson, Kennedy would text friends photos of nude women. Although his friends assumed he had taken the photos himself, they were unsure if the women had “consented to having their genitalia photographed, let alone shared with other people.”