Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s (RFK’s) name will not appear on ballots in North Carolina or Michigan following emergency orders Friday from courts in both states, in a pair of major wins for former President Donald Trump.
RFK suspended his longshot third-party bid for the White House and threw his support behind Trump, shaking up the political establishment because of the Kennedy family’s dynastic status in the Democratic Party.
While Kennedy could not win the White House under any realistic scenario, polls showed him with sufficiently high single-digit strength to potentially change the outcome between Trump and Kamala Harris in certain battleground states — including Michigan and North Carolina — depending on which major-party candidate he siphoned more votes from.
Political allies of Kamala Harris hope to keep RFK on the ballot in certain states, including both of those states, calculating that he will draw more ballots away from Trump than Harris in those states.
The matter became urgent in North Carolina, where the first absentee ballots are scheduled to be mailed out to voters.
The North Carolina court ruled that RFK’s name will come off the ballot in that state, ordering the trial court presiding over the matter to order the State Board of Elections to print and ship ballots that do not list Kennedy as a candidate.
Harris’s allies can still appeal the order to the North Carolina Supreme Court.
Although Michigan’s absentee ballots are not yet set to go out and so the matter was not quite as urgent there, it is nonetheless a major development, while Democrats will likely attempt to take it to the Michigan Supreme Court on an emergency basis.
The cases are Kennedy v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, No. 24CVS27757 in the North Carolina Court of Appeals and Kennedy v. Secretary of State, No. 372349 in the Michigan Court of Appeals.
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Klukowski is a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @kenklukowski.
