The latest YouGov poll for The Economist, has Kamala up 46-43% over Señor T, with RFK, Jr's rapidly shrinking campaign at 3%. Asked if they have a favorable of unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, 25% of Democrats, 32% of independents and 51% of Republicans said favorable and 59% of Democrats, 36% of independents and 35% of Republicans said unfavorable.
It’s been obvious for some time now that Kennedy, who has lost whatever momentum he ever had and who has been unable to raise money or even get onto state ballots, would be dropping out. He offered Trump and Kamala an opportunity to promise him a top level job in return for an endorsement. Kamala turned him down and, of course, Mr. Transactional said OK, which is probably illegal. NBC News reported that “Polls show that a Kennedy withdrawal would probably help Trump more than it hurts him. But if it does, it’s at the margins— though small margins have ended up deciding recent presidential elections.”
So… tomorrow, when he and Trump will both be in Phoenix, expect Kennedy to drop out and endorse Trump. “The campaign,” reported CNN, “said Kennedy will ‘address the nation’ Friday morning, without sharing details of what he will be speaking about… Kennedy’s speech will come days after his running mate, [billionaire and lunatic] Nicole Shanahan, said in a podcast interview on Tuesday that the campaign is considering whether to ‘join forces’ with Trump to prevent the ‘risk’ of Vice President Kamala Harris winning the election… [O]n Tuesday [Señor T] expressed openness to Kennedy playing a role in a future administration if he drops out and offers his endorsement. ‘He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him for a very long time,’ Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes. ‘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.’”
Kennedy and Trump have grown warmer toward each other in recent months after initial attacks earlier in the campaign. A prominent vaccine skeptic, Kennedy has frequently criticized Trump for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his implementation of Operation Warp Speed, the program to accelerate the manufacturing of Covid vaccines. Trump previously labeled Kennedy a member of the “radical left” and attacked Kennedy for his environmental activism.
But in July, Trump and Kennedy spoke on the phone in the days after Trump was shot in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. A video of part of the phone call was published on social media by Kennedy’s son, in which Trump appeared to agree with Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. The day after the call, Kennedy and Trump met in person in Milwaukee on the first day of the Republican National Convention.
In those conversations, the candidates first discussed the possibility of Kennedy dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump in exchange for a role in his administration. Following those conversations, Kennedy said he would not drop out of the race.
Earlier this month, Kennedy’s campaign approached Harris’ campaign about arranging a meeting to discuss endorsing her in exchange for a future role in her administration. That meeting never materialized.
The independent campaign has provoked concern from both Democrats and Republicans about Kennedy’s potential impact on the presidential race, where narrow margins in a handful of battleground states could determine the winner. While it’s unclear whether Kennedy has attracted more support from voters who backed President Joe Biden or Trump in 2020, the Kennedy campaign has said in recent days they believe they draw more support from voters who have previously backed Trump.
There are reports today that Kennedy's wife, Cheryl Hines, is strongly against him endorsing Trump.
Yesterday a trio of Washington Post writers reported that Kennedy is “getting closer” to announcing a Trump endorsement and that a “person familiar with the conversations says Kennedy has indicated to the Trump team that he plans to endorse Trump... The latest moves follow a clear shift in the public posture of the Kennedy campaign following a last-ditch attempt, through intermediaries, to reach out to the Harris campaign in early August. The Kennedy campaign commissioned polling to show how Harris could improve her standing in the race if she announced that Kennedy would have a cabinet level position, and then attempted to share those results with the Harris team. Harris allies have rebuffed requests for meeting, and dismissed Kennedy as a ‘MAGA-funded fringe candidate.’ Following that statement, Kennedy and his allies have grown increasingly fierce in their denunciations of the Democratic Party.”
[The Kennedy Trump] discussions, including an in-person meeting in Milwaukee, included possible jobs that Kennedy could be given in a second Trump administration, either at the Cabinet level or posts that do not require Senate confirmation. The discussion also included the prospect of Kennedy leaving the race and endorsing Trump, according to people familiar with the talks.
Those conversations reached no conclusion at the time, in part because of concern from the Trump campaign about the legal propriety of exchanging a government job for an endorsement. Days later, Kennedy blasted Trump during a press conference in Massachusetts, calling Trump’s selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate “a salute to the CIA and the intelligence community and to the military industrial complex.”
“Trump has a connection to the American people, a populist connection, but in many ways it is the same populist connection that we saw with the DNC over the last year, concealing the real purpose of their objectives,” Kennedy said, in reference to his criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s handling of the Democratic nominating contest.
Days later, Kennedy went on News Nation and suggested the reporting about his talks with Trump was not accurate. “Is it true that you offered, in a phone call with Trump, to get out of the race in exchange for a job in the administration?” Host Chris Cuomo asked.
“No, that is not true,” Kennedy replied.
Shanahan said Tuesday that she thinks Kennedy would make an excellent secretary of Health and Human Services under Trump. Both Kennedy and Shanahan have denied any conversations with Harris about a similar arrangement, after she rebuffed Kennedy’s attempts to set up a meeting.
Thomas Edsell had a must-read column in the NY Times yesterday, Trump Isn’t Finished, although it seems like the words “with us” were edited out of the title. “The damage inflicted on the nation during Donald Trump’s first term in office pales in comparison with what he will do if he is elected to a second term. How can we know this? The best evidence is Trump himself. He has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to tear the country apart... The most important reason a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, Trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to ‘appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family’; and that he intends to ‘totally obliterate the deep state’ by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his ‘retribution’ agenda.”
Edsell offered a quote from Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor:
“All the dangers foreign and domestic posed by Trump’s cruelly vindictive, self-aggrandizing, morally unconstrained, reality-defying character— as evidenced in his first presidential term and in his unprecedented refusal to accept his 2020 electoral loss— would be magnified many times over in any subsequent term by three factors.
“First, he has systematically eroded the norms and the institutional guardrails that initially set boundaries on the damage he and his now more carefully chosen loyalist enablers are poised to do in carrying out the dangerous project to which they are jointly committed.
“Second, their failures to insulate themselves from electoral and legal constraints during the dry run of 2017-21 have led them to formulate far more sophisticated and less vulnerable plans for their second attempt at consolidating permanent control of the apparatus of our fragile republic.
“And third, their capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power— if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6.”
Edsell reminded his readers that “In 2016 and for much of his first term, major elements of the Republican Party viewed Trump with deep suspicion, repeatedly blocking or weakening his more delusional initiatives. That’s no longer the case. ‘The Republican Party is fully and totally behind Trump— the epicenter of election disruption— even after two impeachments, an insurrection and a criminal conviction, Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton, pointed out in an email, adding: ‘The support that Trump received after Jan. 6, and the entire effort to overturn the election, demonstrates that much of the GOP is fine with doing this. Now that the party knows what insurrection looks like and has given its stamp of approval by nominating Trump, we know that this is officially part of the Republican playbook.’ One thing is clear: Trump would assume control of the White House in 2025 with far more power and far fewer restraints than when he took office in January 2017.”
He ended the long piece with a quote from Yale historian Timothy Snyder: “Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.”
The national polls are meaningless as of course Kamala will win the popular vote.
yeah. important. but two fallacies:
"(The nazis') capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power— if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6.”
He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison.
Limitless autocratic power has been ceded by YOU ALL already. Your pussies haven't done shit about anything, especially the capture of the courts and their inevitable activism. Biden was almost begged to expand the court. didn't even try. If …