Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receives 600,000 votes despite withdrawing from the presidential race

Robert F. Kennedy Junior withdrew from the presidential race to publicly support the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. However, election authorities did not remove Kennedy from the ballot in all states. On Election Day and in early and mail-in votes, he was on the ballot in two key states. More than half a million people voted for him.

In all, and with midday counts on the East Coast, Kennedy totals of 599,000 votes. That's almost as many as those for the Green candidate, Jill Stein, who barely topped 600,000.

They are also more than those of the Libertarian candidate, despite the fact that Robert Kennedy Jr. abandoned the electoral race and asked his followers loud and clear to vote for Donald Trump. Half a million of them did not understand him correctly.

Despite this, Donald Trump managed to position himself as the winner in all the swing states. In Wisconsin and Michigan, Kennedy was on the ballot.

In the city of Detroit, 26,694 votes went to Kennedy. This figure represents almost a third of the margin that Trump currently has over Harris.

In turn, in Wisconsin, 17,675 votes were cast for Kennedy Jr., representing 0.5% of the total votes counted. In this case, where Harris is trailing Trump by only 30,000 votes, the presence of Kennedy on the ballot could have really hurt Donald Trump.

It happened in two states where some polls were projecting a 1- to 2-point lead to the Democrat, and others at least a tough battle to take the electoral votes.

However, with the same data in the other states, even a Harris victory in Wisconsin and Michigan with the Kennedy factor would not have got the Democrat to the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House.

On the ballot by judge's decision

In October of this year, the Supreme Court rejected an emergency appeal to keep Kennedy off the Wisconsin and Michigan ballots.

Kennedy argued that keeping his name on the ballot violated his First Amendment rights by wrongly implying that he still wanted to be elected president.

Michigan and Wisconsin said removing his name so late in the election cycle, with early voting already underway at that point, would be impossible.

In Michigan, more than 1.5 million people had already returned their mail-in ballots and another 264,000 had voted early, the state's lawyers wrote in court documents.

In Wisconsin, more than 858,000 people have returned their mail-in ballots. The justices did not detail their reasons in an order rejecting the emergency appeal.