Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will likely still appear on the Nevada ballot in November even though he appears poised to end his campaign Friday morning.
State law requires any request for a candidate withdrawal to be made in person by the candidate seven business days after the filing deadline — which was on Aug. 9 for independent presidential candidates — meaning Kennedy would have had to withdraw by Tuesday, Aug. 20, to get off the ballot. The secretary of state’s office said Thursday that it had not received any such request from Kennedy’s campaign.
A still-pending lawsuit from the Nevada Democratic Party to kick Kennedy off the ballot would presumably be the only way he would be removed from the ballot.
Kennedy’s potential inclusion on the ballot means he could still play spoiler in Nevada’s expected nail-biter of a presidential race. While his polling has taken a hit since President Joe Biden exited the race last month, he is still polling at around 5 percent in the Silver State, a margin large enough to affect the results. State and national surveys have tended to show Kennedy’s presence on ballots helping Vice President Kamala Harris more than former President Donald Trump.
It also serves as an ironic coda to the monthslong legal saga related to Kennedy’s ballot access in the Silver State.
His initial ballot petition was considered invalid for not including a running mate, as required under Nevada law — which his campaign said amounted to corruption because it was operating on faulty advice from the secretary of state’s office — and his campaign is still engaged in a now effectively moot lawsuit related to that decision. Its second petition was rescinded after misspelling “United States” and the third petition gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, which the campaign celebrated as having defeated an “attempt to block ballot access in Nevada.”
The Nevada Democratic Party has led an effort to kick Kennedy off the ballot on the grounds that his affiliation with other political parties violates the state’s legal requirements for independent candidates. At the time of the lawsuit, Kennedy was a registered Democrat in New York (he now has no party affiliation) and is running as a member of a third party in a host of other states.
A hearing on that case was held Thursday.
Kennedy, the environmental lawyer nephew of John F. Kennedy who rose to prominence for promoting anti-vaccine conspiracies during the pandemic, has run a freewheeling independent campaign for president after initially running as a Democrat last year. He made two stops in Las Vegas, one at a February rally and the other at the annual FreedomFest conference, which is billed as the “world’s largest gathering of free minds.”
