(NewsNation) — After encouraging his supporters not to vote for him, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received nearly 594,000 (about 0.4% of the popular vote) and zero electoral votes.
RFK Jr. was on the ballot in every state except Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming.
In late October, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal to remove RFK Jr. from the presidential ballot in two battleground states.
Kennedy wanted to get off the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan after dropping his independent bid and endorsing Republican Donald Trump. He argued that keeping him on violated his First Amendment rights by wrongly implying he still wanted to be elected president.
Michigan and Wisconsin said removing his name so late in the election season, with early voting already underway at the time, would be impossible. More than 1.5 million people in Michigan had already returned absentee ballots, and another 264,000 had voted early, state attorneys wrote in court documents. In Wisconsin, over 858,000 people have returned absentee ballots.
The justices did not detail their reason in an order rejecting the emergency appeal, as is typical. One justice, Neil Gorsuch, publicly dissented in the Michigan case.
RFK Jr. suspended his independent campaign in August.
Kennedy said his internal polls had shown that his presence in the race would hurt Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Kennedy cited free speech, the war in Ukraine and “a war on our children” as among the reasons he would try to remove his name from the ballot in battleground states.
Prior to Donald Trump’s Nov. 5 victory, Kennedy said Trump asked him to reorganize federal health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should he win the 2024 presidential election.
“He’s asked me to clean up the corruption number one,” Kennedy said during a town hall with NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. “Number two, end the conflicts of interest, return those agencies to their rich tradition of gold standard, empirically-based, evidence-based science, evidence-based medicine, and to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
