RFK Jr's chaos campaign to support Trump
He says he doesn't want to be a spoiler, but he's spoiling pretty hard.
🚨 This special, five-edition week of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. If you aren’t one already, please sign up to support our independent journalism. 🚨
On August 23, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his presidential campaign. Citing the war in Ukraine and the “war on our children,” as well as “relentless, systematic censorship and media control,” the scion of the famous Democratic political family announced his support for the Republican candidate.
“These are the principal causes that persuaded me to leave the Democratic Party and run as an independent, and now to throw my support to President Trump,” he added.
In reality, Kennedy had tried just a week earlier to sell his support to the Harris campaign in exchange for a position in her cabinet, preferably as Secretary of Health and Human Services. After getting laughed out of the room, Kennedy decamped to Team Trump, where the candidate wouldn’t commit to a cabinet post, but was at least willing to appear publicly with him.
And Kennedy wasn’t really dropping out, either.
"In about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I'm going to remove my name, and I've already started that process and urge voters not to vote for me,” Kennedy said that day in Phoenix.
In fact, Kennedy is working hard to be a spoiler for Harris, fighting to keep his name on the ballot where it could harm the vice president’s campaign and to remove it where his appearance might hurt Trump. It’s a remarkably shameless ploy for a man who spent his career as an environmental attorney and is now willing to get in bed with a politician who thinks windmills cause cancer and fossil fuels are the future.
North Carolina
Before Kennedy suspended his campaign, polls showed him winning somewhere between three and seven percent of the vote in North Carolina. Now the race between Trump and Harris is tied, with gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s implosion threatening to damage the entire Republican ticket.
North Carolina is clearly a battleground state, and, despite his promises in Phoenix, Kennedy has fought tooth and nail to get his name off the ballot there in hopes that his supporters will hand the state’s 16 electoral votes to Trump. And the state’s Supreme Court — which just so happens to be dominated by Republicans — is delighted to help.
The deadline to withdraw from the ballot in North Carolina was August 22, the day before Kennedy’s announcement. Kennedy finally completed the paperwork to withdraw on the 28th, at which point the state election board told him he was too late.
State law requires absentee ballots to be provided to oversees and military voters 60 days before the election, falling this year on September 6. The federal deadline for overseas ballots to go out is September 21. But printing up dozens (if not hundreds) of different ballot layouts to accommodate every local race takes weeks, so when Kennedy filed suit in Wake County Superior Court on August 30 demanding to be removed from the ballot, Judge Rebecca Holt rebuffed him, noting that his request would force the election board to violate both state and federal law.
“Removing Plaintiff from the ballot and reprinting the ballots will necessarily mean that voters have at least two fewer weeks in which to vote,” she wrote. “Together, these harms greatly outweigh the negligible harm that Plaintiff will suffer by appearing on North Carolina's ballot after the suspension of his presidential campaign in North Carolina.”
A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like Liz takes resources. To support this work, please click the button below and become a paid subscriber.
But Kennedy appealed, and the North Carolina Supreme Court disagreed. In a remarkably handwave-y ruling, the conservative justices found that the interests of the voters “disenfranchised” by Kennedy’s continued presence on the ballot outweighed the millions of dollars it would cost to reprint the ballots, as well as the right of overseas voters to receive ballots in timely fashion as a matter of federal and state law.
It should be noted that Trump’s cronies, such as John Eastman, argue that the 2020 election was “stolen” because courts in swing states like Pennsylvania changed the rules close to the election, largely as a result of the pandemic. So even if there was no specific evidence of fraud, they insist that the vote was somehow illegitimate. Kennedy persuading the court to let him remove his name from the ballot after the statutory deadline is different because … reasons.
New York
In New York, Kennedy’s shenanigans predate his withdrawal from the race. In fact, they go back to May 28, when the candidate submitted his nominating petition listing his home address as a house in Katonah, New York.
Kennedy has been married to actor Cheryl Hines since 2014, and the pair reside together in California at the address he listed as his home back in 2023 when he declared his candidacy. But in the interim, Kennedy picked billionaire anti-vax activist Nicole Shanahan as his running mate. Shanahan also resides in California, and unlike Dick Cheney, she wasn’t keen on upping sticks to comply with the 12th Amendment’s mandate that electors must cast at least one vote, either for president or vice president, for a candidate who "shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.” (This is commonly but mistakenly understood as a prohibition on the president and vice president being from the same state. Here it would have meant that, had Kennedy won California, he’d have forfeited the state’s electoral votes.)
Kennedy got around this problem by listing the house in Katonah as his home, magically transforming himself into a New York resident despite the fact that he doesn’t own it and never spent a night there until after his candidacy was challenged in court.
At trial, Kennedy claimed that he was a New Yorker in his bones, no matter where he actually lived; that he really did live in the house in Katonah; and if he didn’t, it was his lawyer’s fault for letting him say he did — all while desperately maneuvering to keep his wife off the witness stand.
Justice Christina Ryba was deeply unimpressed.
“Given the size and appearance of the spare bedroom as shown in the photographs admitted into evidence, the Court finds Kennedy’s testimony that he may return to that bedroom to reside with his wife, family members, multiple pets, and all of his personal belongings to be highly improbable, if not preposterous,” she wrote, adding that “using a friend’s address for political and voting purposes, while barely stepping foot on the premises, does not equate to residency under the Election Law.”
Ryba kicked Kennedy off the ballot in New York, after which he appealed to the state’s intermediate and high courts. When that failed, he filed in US District Court and then the Second Circuit. On Saturday, he bellyflopped into the US Supreme Court asking it to order New York to put him back on the ballot. And while New York is clearly not a swing state (despite Trump’s inane chest thumping), Kennedy’s desperate efforts to get back on the ballot there highlight his deeply craven political calculus.
“This Court has long recognized the constitutional ‘right of voters to associate and to have candidates of their choice placed on the ballot,’” he argues in his SCOTUS petition. “Absent immediate, emergency relief, over 100,000 New York voters who signed the invalidated Kennedy petition will be irrevocably deprived of that right.”
According to Kennedy, voters in North Carolina are disenfranchised by having his name on the ballot. But voters in New York are disenfranchised by not having his name on the ballot. No wonder this guy’s own family has disowned him and urged everyone to vote for Harris.
Wisconsin
No state shatters Kennedy’s “No spoilers!” claim better than Wisconsin, where the only way to get off the ballot after August 27 is to die. But laws were no barrier in North Carolina, so Kennedy is currently trying it with the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
He sued to get his name removed and lost at the trial court in Dane County. He appealed, but now the Wisconsin Election Commission successfully petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to hear the case on an expedited basis. In the meantime, the deadline to mail absentee ballots was September 19, which means that ballots with Kennedy’s name on them are already in the hands of voters.
But, as VoteBeat reports, the former candidate has a solution for that. He wants election officials to individually affix stickers to millions of individual ballots to hide his name.
As the case moved forward, the appeals court asked representatives for Kennedy and the election commission on Wednesday: “Does it matter if ballots with stickers on them have not been tested with voting equipment?”
“No. It doesn’t matter,” attorneys for Kennedy responded. “We should presume this could be done.”
They added that the clerks were only speculating when they said stickers would cause problems because they haven’t tested it.
Election officials were aghast, envisioning stickers coming loose and gumming up the tabulators or damaging ballots entirely.
“All it would take is a small portion of the sticker to fall off in the scanner to render it unusable for the entirety of Election Day,” Wood County Clerk Trent Miner said in a court declaration reported by VoteBeat.
Worse still, the machines are not warrantied for ballots with after-market modifications, so repairs would be the responsibility of the individual counties.
It seems highly unlikely that the state’s high court, which is dominated by liberals after the elections of Justices Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz, is going to turn the state’s ballots into a Lisa Franks collection. But the fact that Kennedy would even ask for such a thing, glibly shrugging off the very real possibility that it could unleash chaos, is damning. In fact, it looks like a thinly veiled pretext to create exactly the kind of delay and confusion that Republicans pointed to in 2020 and 2022 as evidence that the election was stolen.
Trump and his cronies are still pointing to a tabulation error in Antrim, Michigan, that was resolved within hours as proof of a plot to algorithmically generate phantom votes for Biden. They claim that election officials in Arizona deliberately damaged Republican ballots by letting voters mark them with Sharpies. Perennial candidate Kari Lake has argued in court that a printer error in Maricopa County, which forced the votes to be tabulated centrally, rather than at some precincts, cost her the election. And five minutes after endorsing Trump, Kennedy is now in multiple courts trying to inject maximal chaos into as many states as possible.
What are the odds that the man who sees conspiracy theories everywhere is actually conspiring to gin up a pretext to claim the election was stolen? As his wife’s former costar might say, “Pretty, pretty good.”
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate this post, please support Public Notice by signing up. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
RFK has the concept of being a candidate, but really he is just a spoiler. Trump is using him as he uses Trump. So glad that the Harris campaign felt that they could do better than him. I suppose he could get the disgruntled about Gaza votes. Someone needs to spell out to people protesting about Gaza what their personal lives will be like under Trump. At best he will just deport them to who knows where, at worst they will be put in the concentration camps for immigrants, and others whose citizenship he wants to strip. In any case, there is going to be no more attending any US university. There is a reason Mitt Romney is planning to move abroad if Trump wins, and that reason is because Trump says he is going to do these vengeful things and he will if elected which is still too close to call. Here is conservative Tim Miller recent convert to Democratic party, discussing why Mitt Romney is worried about staying in the US with a Trump presidency. https://youtu.be/PEbJPflnsZE?si=84m2_7vWZtB3BKrf
Excellent. So glad I subscribed. Sharing to widen ypur reach!