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Like the juice from a decapitated, rotting whale seeping through the roof of a minivan onto children below, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to be a spoiler for Donald J. Trump have mostly been splashing back into their faces.
But Trump and his worm-brained buddy got handed a win in North Carolina late Monday night, with the state supreme court deciding 4-3 that RFK Jr.’s name should be removed from ballots after all. Coincidentally right after a new poll shows Kamala Harris winning there! Mail-in ballots have already been printed and were supposed to have already been shipped, per North Carolina state law that required them to be sent out by September 6. (Aggravatingly, the deadline for requesting removal from the ballot and the deadline for sending ballots out are the same day.) According to state elections board lawyers, it’ll cost about $1 million to reprint them all, and mail-in voting will be delayed by at least two weeks, blowing past the state’s own legal deadline. But oh well, said the North Carolina supreme court, small prices to pay to keep some stupids from getting confused and disenfranchising themselves!
You’ll recall on August 23, the dog-eating bear-smuggling conspiracy-theory-loving lunatic RFK Jr. “suspended” his bid as an independent candidate and endorsed the guy he’d previously called a “sociopath,” a “buffoon,” and a “bully.” And Trump had called him a “Democratic plant” and “liberal lunatic.” But they bonded over a shared delusion that 20-pound babies are getting horse-sized vaccines, and forged some kind of deal that was definitely not a quid pro quo of any sort, how dare anyone suggest such a thing?!
In Kennedy’s endorsement speech of Trump, in between bizarrely obsessing about how girls don’t go through puberty when they’re 19 years old these days and groaning about how some Democrat cabal had been censoring him some kind of way, he announced his plan try to stay off the ballot in 10 battleground states, just to fuck shit up and help Trump out.
Holy crap, what a creeper. Anyway, in the same speech he also said,
“My name will remain on the ballot in most states. If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me, without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states the same will apply. I encourage you to vote for me […] but, in about 10 battleground states where my presence would be a spoiler, I’m going to remove my name.”
And that’s what he’s been trying to do, to varying degrees of success.
Previously!
In Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, Kennedy succeeded in getting himself and his “Natural Law Party” removed from the ballots, and in Georgia, he was removed by a judge, because he was strongly suspected of lying about living in a $500-a-month room in a foreclosed house in Katonah, New York, instead of the $6.6 million house next door to Dr. Dre and Gwyneth Paltrow that he owns in Brentwood.
However, Wisconsin and Michigan have told him it’s too late, his name is staying on the ballot, which is good news for easily confused antisemitic conspiracy theorists who are fans of smallpox and measles, but bad news for Trump. Wisconsin has strict rules where the only way to get off the ballot past the deadline (which this year was August 6) is if a candidate literally dies. And in Michigan, the state supreme court overturned a lower court order which had let RFK Jr. dictate the ballots on a whim; the state supreme court countermanded with an unsigned order saying pretty much just “nah.” Because what part of “under state law, candidates who are nominated and accept a minor party’s nomination ‘shall not be permitted to withdraw’” did RFK Jr. and that lower court not understand?
Is now a good time to mention there’s still other spoilers to contend with? Like the Green Party’s Jill Stein. Yep, she’s back, and smelling more like a Russian asset than ever! Remember how she was boosted online by Russia in the 2016 election, has parroted Russian talking points, met with with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and in 2015 dined with Putin himself? In 2016 She got 31,000 votes in Wisconsin, and Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes. And she’s appearing on all those 10 swing state ballots, except for Georgia. In Michigan she’s reportedly tied with Kamala Harris in a poll of Muslim voters.
Then there’s Chase Oliver, the Libertarian. Remember how the Libertarians booed the shit out of Trump at their convention, and trolled him with rubber chickens? Oliver was the guy they ended up nominating at their edgelord party, and Oliver and Stein are both polling at about one percent in Pennsylvania. Not a lot, but with razor-thin margins, those wackos could actually make a difference. And Cornel West, he’s never polled above two percent, but he’s on the ballot in 14 states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan — thanks to some pals in the Republican Party who did that for him. Thanks, pals!
Add up all the wackos, and they add up! It’s wild that such an important election could be decided by such hair-thin margins, but as the Russian proverb goes, a chain is only as strong as its stupidest link.
[Carolina Journal/ Forbes/ AP]
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