If you haven’t seen, just in the last hour or so there are indications that RFK Jr is planning to drop out of the race and endorse Donald Trump. Kennedy’s campaign has put out word that he’ll be giving a speech about the “path forward” in Phoenix. And people are noting that Trump is supposed to be in Phoenix Friday too. The reporting suggests that the Kennedy people are signaling something like an endorsement. But who knows. That’s what it looks like to me. But we will know Friday, if not sooner.
A few points on this. The first one is that there’s some evidence that Kennedy is now hurting Trump more than Harris. Obviously Trump thinks so or he wouldn’t be trying to get Kennedy to drop out. Polls suggest that the balance changed after Harris got into the race. The more Dem-adjacent supporters basically went to Harris. So in this still very tight race, this could hurt Harris in the horse race numbers.
The second thought is that Kennedy is now down in the three- to five-points range. It’s not clear to me that when you’re down to that level of support your supporters really have what journalists would understand as coherent policy agendas or worldviews that would make their actions predictable in this way. So I wouldn’t assume we have any idea how this affects the race.
Third point. Assuming this is an endorsement, it is unquestionably a Trump campaign effort to launch a game-changing event right after the Democratic convention and thus stomp out whatever momentum comes out of it. Unfortunately for them, there’s nothing like having spent your convention railing against a guy who’s no longer running. But that’s what they’re trying to do.
My final thought is that Kennedy is so weird and now so universally recognized as weird and this endorsement — if that’s what it is — would appear so corrupt that I’m not sure it really plays as a positive. When I say corrupt, he’s been pretty visibly asking each campaign basically what their best offer is. In any case, it could shave down some of Harris’s lead. Or maybe not. We’ll see.
