Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes an announcement on the future of his campaign in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. August 23, 2024.
Thomas Machowicz | Reuters
Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear on the ballot in Michigan in November, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Monday, a decision that could boost the national candidacy of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court overturned the state’s Court of Appeals ruling on Friday, which had removed Kennedy from the state’s ballot against the wishes of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
The majority decision by the high court on Monday was unsigned. But the text of the order implies that five of the seven justices who considered the case voted to keep Kennedy’s name on the ballot.
Harris, the vice president, leads the former president Trump in Michigan polling averages regardless of the number of candidates. But her edge over Trump shrinks in a head-to-head matchup there.
Michigan’s 15 votes in the Electoral College — the entity that selects the winners of the U.S. presidential elections — is the second-highest number of any swing state, after Pennsylvania.
When Kennedy suspended his campaign on Aug. 23 and pledged to support Trump, he said he planned to remove his name from ballots in swing states — among them Michigan — where doing so would benefit Trump.
Kennedy, who was nominated by the Natural Law Party in Michigan, sued Secretary of State Benson after she rejected his request to remove his name.
Benson in her decision cited Michigan law, which says that minor party candidates who accept a nomination cannot withdraw from an election.
The majority in the Michigan Supreme Court, in its ruling Monday, wrote that Kennedy “has neither pointed to any source of law that prescribes and defines a duty to withdraw a candidate’s name from the ballot nor demonstrated his clear legal right to performance of this specific duty.”
“Thus, [Kennedy] has not shown an entitlement to this extraordinary relief,” the court majority said in its ruling.
The two justices who dissented from the ruling, Brian Zahra and David Viviano, wrote that by keeping Kennedy on Michigan’s ballot, “the Secretary of State is improperly and needlessly denying the electorate a choice between persons who are actual candidates willing to serve if elected.”
The dissenters in their last words underscored how significant the majority ruling could be to the outcome of the presidential race.
“We can only hope that the Secretary’s misguided action — now sanctioned with the imprimatur of this Court — will not have national implications,” they wrote.
Wisconsin and North Carolina also denied Kennedy’s request to remove his name from the ballots there.
As in Michigan, Kennedy sued officials in those two other states seeking to drop his name from their ballots.
A North Carolina appeals court on Friday sided with Kennedy, ordering the state’s election officials not to mail out ballots with his name as they had planned to do on that same day.
Paul Cox, the general counsel for North Carolina’s elections board, wrote in a memo to county election directors on Friday that “no decision has been made on whether this ruling will be appealed.”
A judge has yet to rule on Kennedy’s lawsuit in Wisconsin.
In Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Harris’ polling leads over Trump either shrink or she falls behind him in a head-to-head race instead of one with six candidates, according to RealClearPolling.
Kennedy successfully withdrew his name from ballots in four other battleground states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia.
But polling shows that in Georgia and Nevada, a two-way race may increase Harris’s chances — not Trump’s.