Kennedy said he would work to remove his name from ballots in 10 swing states where he believes he does not have a chance of winning but where his presence on the ballot could affect the outcome in favor of the Democratic ticket led by Vice President Kamala Harris.

He said he would remain on the ballot in other states where the outcome is less in question, and encouraged his supporters to still vote for him there — suggesting an outlandish possibility that an electoral college tie between Trump and Harris could result in him being named president.

At the same time, Kennedy said he was “joining the Trump campaign” after Trump promised, if he wins, to bring him into his administration to combat chronic illness among American children — which Kennedy has long suggested is due to “Big Pharma” and “Big Ag” pumping “toxins” into the nation’s food supply.

“President Trump has told me that he wants this to be his legacy,” Kennedy said. “I’m choosing to believe that this time he will follow through.”

Kennedy also said Trump promised to tackle two of his other top priorities — by immediately ending the war in Ukraine and by confronting political and media “censorship,” which both he and Trump, famous wealthy men with powerful platforms, routinely claim to be victimized by.

Trump did not immediately respond to Kennedy’s announcement Friday.

Kennedy’s announcement came in a nearly 50-minute, grievance-laden speech in which he claimed he would have won the presidency in a fair race, that national media had become “mouthpieces” for Democrats, and that Harris’ elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket was the result of a “palace coup.”

The move by the scion of America’s greatest Democratic political dynasty to back a Republican who many Democrats loathe was expected, given recent remarks from him and Trump that they would be open to an alliance, efforts by Kennedy’s team to begin removing his name from ballots, and a Pennsylvania court filing earlier in the day where Kennedy noted a looming endorsement of Trump.

The decision promised to have an immediate effect on the tight race between Trump and Harris. Both hoped to benefit — or at least not suffer too much — from the coming realignment of Kennedy’s supporters.

How that shift will play out remains unclear.

A Pew Research Center poll this month suggested that Harris has already picked up some would-be Kennedy supporters. It appeared that backing came in some measure from women and nonwhite voters who previously were leaning toward Kennedy.

But Trump allies say the Kennedy endorsement would be a victory for their candidate. “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade claimed Friday morning that Trump would pick up a critical 2 or 3 percentage points with Kennedy’s support. That would be enough, Kilmeade said, to swing the race back into the GOP’s favor.

Trump is campaigning in Arizona on Friday and posted on social media that he would have a “special guest” at an afternoon rally. On Thursday, Kennedy withdrew from the ballot in Arizona.

Kennedy, a 70-year-old Los Angeles resident, entered the race in April 2023 with a burst of media attention. He showed unusual strength in some early polls for a candidate with no experience in elected office. But his support flagged after Harris emerged last month as the Democrats’ apparent nominee.

Kennedy’s thoughts about leaving the race became public in recent days, when his vice presidential running mate, Nicole Shanahan, discussed those talks. She said Kennedy might accept a position in a Trump administration, in particular if he thought it could help combat what she called an epidemic of chronic disease.

The transition to Trump stalwart will be greeted with skepticism in many circles, given Kennedy’s political DNA and his past description of the Republican as “unhinged” after Trump went on a social media tirade, accusing Kennedy of being a “Democrat plant” and “wasted protest vote.”

“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged,” Kennedy wrote on X in April. “President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”

Kennedy’s partial exit from the race comes 16 months after he stood before the media in Boston, scene of many political triumphs for previous generations of the Kennedy clan, which included his father — the U.S. senator from New York and U.S. attorney general — and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

The longtime environmental attorney initially ran as a Democrat. But by October 2023, Kennedy said that he would run as an independent, because party nominating rules made it too difficult to compete, particularly against an incumbent like President Joe Biden.

Many members of his famous family have taken public stands against his campaign, endorsing the Democratic ticket.

After his speech Friday, five of his siblings — Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Courtney, Kerry, Chris and Rory Kennedy — issued a joint statement reaffirming their support for Harris.

“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” they said. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Kennedy suggested in his own remarks that his endorsement of Trump also may not sit well with others in his family, including his wife, actor Cheryl Hines.

“This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends, but I have the certainty that this is what I’m meant to do, and that certainty gives me internal peace, even in storms,” he said.

He did not say what those “difficulties” were.

Kennedy said his independent status would allow him to break the grip on power held by a virtual “uniparty” — the Democrats and Republicans — and that he would be in a better position to cut out-of-control government spending, to take on “Big Pharma” and other corporate interests and to invest more in reversing America’s epidemic of chronic illness.

Even after his shift to an independent campaign, and as he courted support from smaller political parties, polls showed Kennedy unable to move within reasonable striking distance of his big-party rivals.

Kennedy argued that he should be allowed into the June debate between Biden and Trump, but he could not persuade the other candidates or networks that he had earned a place on the stage.

Kennedy’s campaign also spent abundant time and money trying to qualify for the ballot in all 50 states. He suffered a setback last week when a New York judge ruled he shouldn’t appear on the ballot in that state because he listed a “sham” address on nominating petitions.

Though he presented himself as a pragmatic problem solver not beholden to big interests, Kennedy’s views on some issues — particularly vaccines — were extreme. A particularly problematic example: when he compared Biden’s vaccine policies to the Holocaust. He suggested that Jews, including Anne Frank, had more freedom under the Nazis than Americans living with COVID-19 mandates.

That drew rebukes from many Jewish groups and even a complaint from Hines, who called the Frank reference “reprehensible and insensitive.” Kennedy apologized.

Though born into what some viewed as an American political “Camelot,” Kennedy struggled as a young man, particularly with his 14-year addiction to heroin. The candidate sought to use that ordeal to his advantage, saying that his 40 years in recovery made him uniquely qualified to bring new solutions to the nation’s addiction crisis.

But other aspects of his past, including his relationships with women, became fodder for new criticism.

That included the revival of a 2013 New York Post story, after the tabloid somehow acquired a journal that RFK Jr. allegedly kept in 2001. It included a log of 37 women whom he had sex with when he was married to Mary Richardson Kennedy, the Post and other outlets reported.

(Kennedy’s wife had killed herself in the year prior to publication of the story, but she had reportedly found the journal at some point.)

Early last month, reports about the disturbing behavior resurfaced in a Vanity Fair profile, in which a former family babysitter described how Kennedy groped her when she was in her early 20s and taking care of Kennedy’s four children with Mary. Text messages revealed that the candidate apologized to the former babysitter after publication of the article, though he told reporters he recalled nothing about the alleged misconduct.

Then, in August, a New Yorker profile revealed an odd Kennedy prank. As a grown man, the man known — like his father — as Bobby once retrieved a dead bear cub from a roadside and deposited the corpse in New York’s Central Park. The carcass provoked a mystery that consumed the city a decade ago.

Kennedy faulted both Biden and Trump as he crisscrossed the country, trying to spark the kind of momentum his father did in the 1968 race for the White House. But he increasingly lashed out at Biden and the Democrats more, infuriated by the challenges they lodged to his ballot petitions.

As recently as Wednesday, the candidate sent messages like a man still in the fray. One came via a video posted on social media, when he invoked Abraham Lincoln and said “we must realign ourselves with the founding spirit of our nation.”

On Thursday, Shanahan again nodded to the duo’s possible exit from the race. She seemed to relish the way some of her friends pleaded with her not to support Trump.

“My old Dem buddies have been flooding me with frantic calls, texts, and emails,” she wrote on the social media platform X. “The message was clear: they’re terrified of the idea of our movement joining forces with Donald Trump. When I point out what the Democratic Party and their super PACs have done to sabotage our campaign, their response is always, ‘but Trump is worse.’ Here’s an idea: stop suing us. Let us debate.”

She then suggested, without providing evidence, that the Democrats somehow were “rigging the media and the polls” — the sort of accusations Trump has made many times in the past.

_____

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Candidates in the November race for mayor also went absent from the pages of the 152-year-old news outlet. Ditto non-coverage of a police staffing shortage so serious that the police chief said the department might not have enough cops to respond to all complaints of theft, fraud, vandalism, prowling and prostitution.

The Salinas Californian missed those stories, understandably, because it employed only one journalist until December. That’s when the paper’s last reporter quit to take a job in TV. The departure marked the latest and perhaps final step in a slow-motion unwinding of what used to be the principal local news source in this city of 163,000.

Owned by the largest newspaper publisher in the nation, Gannett, the venerable Californian now carries stories from the chain’s USA Today flagship and its other California papers. The only original content from Salinas comes in the form of paid obituaries, making death virtually the only sign of life at an institution once considered a must-read by many Salinans.

The lack of local reporting has drawn complaints from the mayor, a county supervisor and everyday citizens who say the public life of their community has been diminished by the lack of a dependable source of local news.

“As a subscriber, seems like they are all gone & all local news has vanished from its pages! The end of an era??” Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo recently wrote on Twitter, adding in another tweet: “Hoping they were hiring others soon instead of giving up on serving our community.”

Trish Triumpho Sullivan, owner of Salinas’ Downtown Book & Sound, said the newspaper’s retreat feels especially ironic in the hometown of John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who once worked as a war correspondent.

“He understood the power of a story to create positive change,” said Sullivan, who has lived in Salinas for more than 40 years. “Without a local paper in our city, we’ve lost the power to tell the stories of people in our city and the city itself. We’ve lost the power of storytelling.”

An editor who previously helped oversee the Salinas paper from another Gannett newsroom 300 miles north referred questions to the company’s corporate office in McLean, Va.

“The Californian has deep roots in Monterey County and the greater Monterey Bay area,” Lisa Strattan, senior director of the company’s Center for Community Journalism, said in a statement. “And we remain committed to providing resources to our newsroom while relying on our USA Today Network to ensure continued coverage.”

The company’s corporate PR office acknowledged “staffing challenges in certain newsrooms” but pledged that Gannett is “developing strategies to support these markets, including communities such as Salinas.” None of the 57 reporting jobs recently listed on the chain’s online hiring board were for work in Salinas.

The emptying of the Californian’s newsroom epitomizes the ongoing struggles for the American newspaper industry, a shift felt acutely at small-town papers. Newspaper revenue nationally plummeted 52% from 2002 to 2020, with much of the income from advertising shifting to Internet giants such as Google and Facebook. In the dozen years after 2008, newspaper newsroom employment fell 57%.

Gannett’s downsizing accelerated after the company’s 2019 merger with GateHouse Media to form a company that owns roughly one-fifth of all daily newspapers in America. Gannett employed 11,200 people at the end of 2022, regulatory filings showed, a 47% decline from three years prior.

It took years of layoffs and dispirited resignations for the Salinas Californian staff to finally tick down to zero.

The Californian’s newsroom buzzed with about 35 journalists in 1999 — and not just hard news reporters but writers specializing in sports and features and a separate opinion department, a former editor recalled. The paper staffed the major beats and looked after the public’s business, from the City Council and local schools to crime and downtown development.

When President Clinton made an election-season stop in 1996, for instance, his campaign did not pick up the $50,000 in overtime for Salinas police and sheriff’s deputies. The paper dogged the White House until the president’s reelection campaign coughed up the money, recalled then-editor Catharine Hamm, adding: “That was such sweet justice.”

With advertising, production and other operations included, the newspaper employed about 120 people. But when the Great Recession hit, ad sales swooned and the staff shrank by about a third. By 2016, the paper had gone from six days a week in print to three. The following year, it moved out of its historic downtown building, graced to this day by a mural of Steinbeck superimposed over the Californian’s front pages.

Still, with a handful of reporters and a photographer, the Californian managed to write about challenges such as housing and homelessness. Reporter Kate Cimini chronicled the rising cost of death, most poignantly with the story of a onetime Salinas activist, terminally ill, who had to raise money to pay for her own impending funeral.

The newspaper also could inspire, in one instance with news of a local 14-year-old who became the second-youngest player to sign a professional contract with Major League Soccer; in another, with the story of a Zapoteco farmworker who at the age of 58 earned a college degree from Cal State Monterey Bay.

Still, by last year, the Californian’s staff had been gutted. As reporters left for other papers or got out of the business altogether, there was no move to replace them. By then, the paper’s print circulation — 11,000 on Saturdays a decade ago — had slipped to about 2,500.

Salinas is not the first city where Gannett has let a newsroom wither. The weekly Mt. Shasta News has no full-time local reporters, relying on freelancers and a Gannett daily in Redding, one of the chain’s editors said. Axios reported in January that the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota, after 93 years in publication, had lost its last reporter.

Journalists inside Gannett have seethed as the company devoted money to other priorities, including compensation for CEO Mike Reed of nearly $8 million and a plan to buy back up to $100 million of the company’s stock.

“The journalists at these papers are at their wit’s end,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild, a unit of the Communications Workers of America. “The way that you run and grow a news business is you employ local journalists who cover stories that the community cares about.”

The erosion of the Californian’s local staff also sapped its sister publication, El Sol, a Spanish-language outlet that translated the paper’s work. Gannett quietly shut down El Sol last September.

What happens when a town loses its local news?

In Salinas, it’s meant high school athletes lost a marquee platform. The struggles and triumphs of the immigrants who labor in the region’s storied lettuce and strawberry fields have gone unreported. No more shared celebration of community events, or stirring coverage of the crowds showing up hungry at food banks in a region teeming with agricultural bounty.

The list of missing stories only grew in recent weeks: an unidentified man run over and killed by a train in early March; a court order against a labor contractor to pay $460,000 in back wages and penalties to farmworkers; a dispute over whether the Saturday shutdown of Main Street is hurting businesses.

Sullivan, the bookstore owner, launched a petition opposing the street closure, saying it has cost her and other merchants dearly. In the old days, the Californian would have covered the issue and likely printed her letter of protest, she said. But no more.

“It’s all the local happenings that aren’t covered; the watchdog on local government and the politicians that is missing,” Sullivan said. “No one is looking at conflicts of interest. They could be running wild. … Now we’re left reading the tweets of people who go to City Council meetings.”

Dennis Donohue, a former Salinas mayor who heads an incubator for agricultural technology, said the community is missing an objective and trusted information source to help frame important public policy debates. “There’s a void in the daily life of the community,” Donohue said, “not having that constructive presence.”

Locals have turned to other outlets. Many said they now look primarily to the Monterey County Weekly for news. The Monterey Herald, owned by the rival MediaNews Group, covers county news and some Salinas stories. KSBW-TV focuses on the Central Coast and offers highlights of high school sports.

A group of journalists from the region founded Voices of Monterey Bay in 2017 to try to fill the gap. Its stories, though infrequent, sometimes look at weighty issues such as the harm “pesticide drift” poses for vulnerable residents. The outlet’s early coverage of COVID-19, translated into Spanish, attracted many readers and proved the continuing high demand for quality information, said Claudia Meléndez Salinas, a Voices founder and former reporter at the Californian.

But Salinans said none of the other news outlets focus on their community with the intensity the Californian once did.

Per the new normal, the only local news in the Californian on a recent Wednesday was five paid obituaries. “I am not being macabre, but if you ask a lot of people, that is the main reason they would buy the paper,” said Jim Helm, a longtime swim coach. “But Salinas is the county seat. It’s a big town. I don’t know why they can’t come up with something more.”

Mary Duan, a former editor of the Weekly, said its hard to know what stories are being missed because reporters are not on the beat, asking questions, filing public records requests.

“They say democracy dies in darkness,” Duan said. “And we are in absolutely dark times in Salinas.”

(c)2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The discovery by scientists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife gives them hope that the population of the small carnivore could be expanding, or at least occupying a broader range than previously believed, increasing the fox’s chance of survival.

“It’s really exciting to find not only that they’re still here, but that they’re in many more places than we initially thought they were,” said Julia Lawson, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The state agency detected the creatures on four occasions with three survey cameras near Taboose Pass, east of the John Muir Trail, between 11,400 and 12,000 feet of elevation. The sightings happened between April and June of last year, extending the known range of the animals more than 100 miles south.

At 8 pounds, the fox is not much larger than a house cat. Its extraordinary hearing enables it to find small rodents, even when the prey is covered by a layer of snow. The fox’s coat ranges in color from red to granite, with fluffy fur once prized by trappers, who would sell the pelts to be made into coats and stoles.

Hunting and trapping of the creatures decimated the population to the point that scientists and conservationists believed for much of the 20th century that the species had been eliminated from the Sierra.

Trapping was banned in 1974, and the fox was listed as threatened in California in 1980. In 2021, the federal government listed the Sierra Nevada population as endangered. (A distinct population of foxes in the Cascades continued.)

The discovery of a small population of the foxes at Sonora Pass in 2010 alerted conservationists that the creatures still had a foothold in the Sierra, toward the north end of Yosemite National Park.

Researchers have been working since then to better understand where the foxes live in hopes of designing a conservation plan to increase their chances of survival.

In 2018, remote cameras detected foxes at six sites within the Mono Creek watershed, southeast of the town of Mammoth Lakes. Researchers collected scat samples, indicating the presence of two females and one male. The samples also helped determine that the male had traveled more than 70 miles south from Sonora Pass to the Mono Creek area.

The California wildlife agency collaborated on the study with the UC Davis Mammalian Ecology and Conservation Unit, the California Department of Water Resources, Southern California Edison and officials in multiple national parks and national forests.

“These new detections are very personally gratifying and are a real payoff for all the hard work our staff has put in,” said Fish and Wildlife biologist Brian Hatfield, lead author on the research. “From a conservation standpoint, this shows that the Sierra Nevada red fox is more widely distributed than previously believed.”

Lawson said that wider distribution “means that they’re more resilient to a catastrophe or disease — something that could wipe out a population in one place. With populations scattered throughout the mountain range, you have a better chance of the species surviving.”