There is A Spoiler Officially Challenging President Biden. Here's Why We Need to Take That Seriously.
Maybe 2024's election will be different, but third-party spoilers rarely work in our favor.
If Jill Stein hadn’t run for president on the Green Party ticket in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been president.
If Ralph Nader hadn’t run for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000, Al Gore would have been president.
If Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t re-run for president on the Bull Moose party ticket in 1912, William Howard Taft would have been re-elected.
I love Dr. Cornel West.
I do not love he decided to run for president on the “People’s Party” ticket.
Apparently neither did he.
Because a mere two weeks after announcing his candidacy for the obscure People’s Party, West has already abandoned it for the republican-funded Green Party.
https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/1668781531849199616
If he is sincere about “taking on the corporate duopoly” of republicans and Democrats—not a spoiler — he would run as a Democrat to the left of Joe Biden.
Running as a third party candidate will only serve to siphon off votes for President Joe Biden, thereby paving an easier path for the republican nominee, which could, believe it or not, be Donald Trump.
I doubt this is the outcome Dr. West wants.
Even Socialist publication Jacobin published a piece recently urging Dr. West to take the fight directly to President Biden as a Democrat.
I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather see replace the deeply mediocre Joe Biden as president of the United States — to, as West said in a recent appearance on Democracy Now!, become “the head of Empire to help dismantle it.”
Unfortunately, West is planning to run on the ballot line of an obscure third party. I doubt that as many as 1 percent of American voters even know that the “People’s Party” exists.
That’s a shame. West’s message is important, and if he’s going to spend the next year pouring his considerable energies into a run for the presidency, he should do it in the place where he could bring it to the largest audience that’s realistically available to him. He should challenge Joe Biden in the race for the 2024 Democratic nomination.
Every election cycle there bubbles to the surface complaints about our two-party system.
Many argue both the Democratic and republican parties are too irredeemably corrupt to expect any changes.
They claim both parties “are the same;” voting for either is a “lesser of two evils.” Therefore, “voting for a third party” is the only logical “solution.”
According to the Mueller Report, these are talking points that came out of the Russian-linked Internet Research Agency troll farm that sowed discord during the 2016 elections and helped Donald Trump into the White House, and were nearly successful again in 2020.
After all, some claim, if enough of us vote third party, we might elect another Abraham Lincoln, who received only 40 percent of the popular vote for the newly formed republican party back in 1860.
Romanticizing the outsider seems to be part of the American ethos.
We adore those who challenge the system.
Many countries practice parliamentary systems, where multiple political parties hold seats. But like it or not, the United States practices a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system, relegating third-party candidates — particularly those seeking the presidency — to the inevitable status of “spoiler.”
We don’t have to like it.
It’s just the way it is.
It’s why Bernie Sanders did not run for president as an Independent or Socialist.
It’s why Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), were elected on the Democratic party line, not Socialist.
It’s why DSA-endorsed candidates all over the country are running — and winning — as Democrats.
It’s why there has never been a Green Party member in Congress.
Even though the Democratic party is the party of working Americans, committed to strengthening the middle class and lifting up the poor, let’s face it, getting in bed with Wall St., big tech, big pharma, and the military industrial complex isn’t what most Americans want.
While it might seem appealing to maintain our sanity, checking out isn’t the answer.
It only emboldens republicans who absolutely do not want us to vote, who win when Democratic voter turnout is low.
Since it is one fewer vote for the Democrat, a third-party vote is essentially a vote for a republican.
Nevertheless, there are more than 54 political parties in the United States.
37 of them have run presidential candidates.
Only two have produced them.
For several years, third parties, particularly the Green Party (of which I was once a member), have been republican tools to lure would-be Democratic voters into voting for candidates other than Democrats.
It’s another form of voter suppression the GOP has made its stock in trade.
By exploiting a superficial “purity test,” it is able to create the illusion voters are really “voting,” when in fact all they are doing is casting fewer ballots for the party that has consistently fought for minimum wage laws, labor unions, public education, healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy, pollution regulations, voting rights expansion, gun safety, civil rights.
The list goes on.
https://twitter.com/JenMolina46/status/1595405606365630468
If Dr. West is serious about his agenda and seeks to move President Biden and the Democratic party in a more progressive direction, he should take his cue from the candidate he supported, Sen. Bernie Sanders, about whom, none other than former Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, wrote:
By running as a Democrat, Sanders declined to become a complete political masochist, and he avoided exposing his campaign to immediate annihilation by partisan hacks. Because if he had run as an independent, he would have faced only one question daily in the media, as I did: “Do you see yourself as a spoiler?” The implication being, of course, that he had no chance of winning. His popular agenda would have been totally ignored by a horse-race-obsessed mass media, which would have latched on instead to a narrative in which Sanders was unfairly hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances against whichever Republican wound up with the other major-party nomination, as if any Democrat is automatically entitled to the votes of progressives.
The post-Sanders campaigns Democratic party is better and more progressive because of outsiders like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who introduced concepts like Medicare for All and tuition-free college to the mainstream where they could not be ignored.
Maybe 2024’s election will be different, but third-party spoilers rarely work in our favor.
That being said, should Donald Trump run as a third-party challenger against the growing field of republicans, that would be just wonderful.
Thank you, Ted! I totally agree and feel deeply that if we are unhappy in our Democratic Party “family”, we need to get right into the middle of it and work for the changes. That tough process is really far more Democratic than stepping out and being a third, ineffective party. We might rather have second platforms within our party so greater emphasis can be placed on issues and strategies. We should all work hard under our Big Tent to make our home vibrant and forward looking. I appreciate you bringing this topic of third parties to our attention.