Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump on Friday after suspending his troubled independent campaign for president, saying he was withdrawing his name from the ballot in battleground states.
He announced his plans in a speech in Phoenix that also castigated the mainstream media and accused the Democratic Party of “abandoning democracy” and engaging in “continued legal warfare” against him and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump was expected at an Arizona rally later in the day, and his campaign had told supporters to expect a “special guest.”
Mr. Kennedy’s announcement was pre-empted on Friday by his own legal team, in a filing in a Pennsylvania court case challenging his ballot access in the battleground state. A lawyer for Mr. Kennedy wrote that the campaign was dropping its opposition to the complaint “as a result of today’s endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of President of the United States.”
Mr. Kennedy, 70, the scion of a Democratic political dynasty, ran a campaign that combined populist economic rhetoric, isolationist foreign policy leanings and government skepticism. He found a base of support among Kennedy-curious independent voters and disaffected Democrats and Republicans.
He began his presidential campaign last year as a Democrat, seeking to challenge President Biden for the nomination. But when he found his path there blocked — which he blamed on the Democratic Party — he embarked on an independent campaign that unnerved both major parties, as allies of both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump feared he could siphon support from their candidate.
In recent months, Mr. Kennedy’s campaign had become almost singularly focused on ballot access: As an independent presidential candidate, he had to get on each state’s ballot separately, which required hundreds of thousands of signatures and tens of millions of dollars.
The effort was largely bankrolled by his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley investor who was once married to Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and whose arrival on the ticket in late March brought an immediate and much-needed cash infusion. To date, she has put more than $14 million into the campaign, campaign finance records show.
Through the spring and summer, as Mr. Kennedy began to get on state ballots, his poll numbers, once in the double digits, began to soften — a trend that is often seen among third-party and independent candidates as the general election approaches. By the end of August, polls put him at around 5 percent nationwide. And his campaign was running out of money, campaign finance filings showed.
An environmental lawyer, Mr. Kennedy has become better known over the past two decades as a prominent opponent of vaccine mandates, promoting widely refuted claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism and railing against what he called the “corporate capture” of the federal government by pharmaceutical companies.
On the campaign trail, he was known for his heterodox political views on a range of issues: He opposed U.S. aid to Ukraine, supported Israel’s war in Gaza and argued for sealing the southern border. He changed his position on abortion several times, ultimately landing on restrictions tied to fetal viability.
He eagerly claimed the mantle of his family legacy, often talking about his father, Robert F. Kennedy, and uncle John F. Kennedy, even as his own family members disavowed his candidacy, backing President Biden and publicly denouncing his bid.
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