Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to end his troubled independent presidential campaign this week, according to three people briefed on his plans, and is in talks to throw his support behind former President Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Kennedy’s campaign said on Wednesday that he intended to address his “path forward” in a speech from Phoenix on Friday, the same day that Mr. Trump is expected to hold a rally in nearby Glendale, Ariz.
Three of the people briefed on Mr. Kennedy’s plans emphasized that no plans were final, and that the iconoclastic Mr. Kennedy could still change his mind, but said that plans were in the works for him to appear alongside Mr. Trump on Friday. Some people close to Mr. Kennedy were still arguing against an endorsement, according to two of the people.
Mr. Kennedy’s backing of Mr. Trump would be the culmination of weeks of discussions, brokered by high-level intermediaries, between the two men.
On Tuesday, Mr. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said the ticket was considering endorsing Mr. Trump; hours later, Mr. Trump said he would welcome it.
On Wednesday afternoon, in a text message, Ms. Shanahan said Mr. Kennedy “will be making multiple important statements,” focused mostly on the Democratic Party. “Nothing is confirmed until Bobby speaks. As of now we are still in.”
Mr. Kennedy’s departure from the race would be the end of one of the more bizarre and surprisingly durable third-party presidential bids in modern American history, and it would remove an unpredictable element that could have tipped the outcome of the race.And his endorsement of Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, would be a stunning turn for a scion of one of America’s most storied Democratic families.
Mr. Kennedy began running for president last year as a Democrat, challenging President Biden. He later embarked instead on an independent campaign that unnerved both major parties, which feared that he would siphon critical support from their candidate.
In recent weeks, as his campaign’s money ran low, Mr. Kennedy’s support in national polls, once in the low double digits, plunged to about 5 percent. It was nowhere near sufficient to have a shot at victory, but still enough to potentially affect the results of the election, depending on his numbers in key swing states.
While the Democratic Party had dedicated substantial resources to contesting his candidacy, including legal challenges to his ballot-access effort, recent polls suggested that he was drawing votes primarily from Mr. Trump, and that his presence in the race helped Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr. Kennedy spent much of his career working as an environmental lawyer but became known in recent years for his opposition to vaccines and for his promotion of conspiracy theories and right-wing misinformation. Many members of the Kennedy family condemned his candidacy and took to the campaign trail this year to support Mr. Biden’s re-election.
Conversations between the Kennedy and Trump camps began around the Republican National Convention in July, two people briefed on the discussions said, and picked up in earnest after the assassination attempt. There was talk of a possible role for Mr. Kennedy in a second Trump administration, if he were willing to drop out and endorse the former president, three people briefed on the discussions said. (Mr. Kennedy later said that he had tried to reach out to Ms. Harris through intermediaries and had been rebuffed.)
Running as an independent meant that Mr. Kennedy was forced to scramble for access to every state ballot, and in that effort, he was remarkably successful — even if it came at great expense and, in the end, became the singular focus of his campaign. As of this week, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket was on the ballot in 19 states, with applications filed in more than a dozen others, and more likely to follow.
But he faced legal challenges to ballot access in several states, and had recently been blocked from the New York ballot after a judge ruled that he had used a “sham” New York address to maintain his residency, an issue that seemed poised to imperil his ballot access elsewhere.
As news of his departure from the race broke, Mr. Kennedy sat in court on Long Island waiting to testify in a separate lawsuit challenging his spot on the state ballot. Two women had sued his campaign accusing it of employing subcontractors who deceived citizens as they gathered signatures to qualify him for the New York ballot. He did not respond to questions about whether he planned to exit the race.
Testimony in the trial has spotlighted chaos, discord and mistakes inside the campaign’s efforts to get Mr. Kennedy on the New York ballot. The New York Times reported in May that paid signature gatherers had been folding over the tops of petitions to conceal the names of Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Shanahan, and that some had claimed they were gathering signatures for Democrats and generic third-party candidates.
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