Last month, Kennedy said he was suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing Trump.
Judges in Michigan and North Carolina have sided with former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s bid to remove his name from 2024 ballots to help Donald Trump.
Kennedy suspended his campaign last month and endorsed the former president, quickly drawing a rebuke from siblings and other members of his famous Democratic family for backing the GOP nominee.
While Kennedy urged supporters to vote for him in states where his name remained on the ballot, he vowed to withdraw from ballots in swing states where he believes he could act as a “spoiler” and help Vice President Kamala Harris defeat Trump.
In North Carolina, where Harris is hoping to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win since 2008, already printed absentee ballots were ready to be put in mailboxes on Friday before an appeals court granted Kennedy’s last-second request to force election officials to remove his name.
An appeals court in Michigan issued a similar ruling on Friday, ordering state officials to remove Kennedy’s name even though Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson previously declined to do so because the request was made after a state deadline.
Political analyst and Dillard University professor Robert Collins told Newsweek that he did not think Kennedy’s name being on or off the ballot in either state was “going to make very much difference at all at this point in time.
