In a recent column, I argued that President Joe Biden would probably beat Donald Trump if they faced off in the 2024 election. However, there is a recent development that could make me eat my words: the appearance of third-party candidates who could steal a lot of votes from Biden. The Green Party and a new bipartisan group known as No Labels have both announced they will field highly competitive candidates*. In a contest in which, according to the latest Times/Siena poll, Biden and Trump are tied, the former Democrats who may run as third-party candidates could take away votes from Biden and help Trump win the election.
That is what happened in 2016, when Jill Stein, the former Democrat who ran as the Green Party candidate, got 1% of the popular vote. What is more important, Stein won by a margin greater than the national average in three swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin), which helped Trump win in the Electoral College. This time around, the Green Party may have an even stronger candidate. Cornel West, 70, a well-known former Harvard professor who is a frequent guest on television for discussion of African American issues, has announced that he will seek the nomination of the Green Party.
West is more progressive and better known than Stein, which means that he could do better with younger voters and African American voters than she did. Conversely, No Labels has not even announced their candidate, but they may be courting West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is conservative on financial issues and could take moderate votes from Biden. The bipartisan No Labels donors have been billing themselves as the “anti-Trump alternative.” They have attracted the attention of centrists who don’t like either Trump or Biden, or who feel that the two potential candidates would be too old to be president; Biden will turn 81 next year, and Trump will turn 78. Reflecting the alarm in Democratic circles, a pro-Biden group called MoveOn is circulating a petition urging Democrats to denounce the No Labels movement, calling it an “irresponsible” effort.
“Their candidate cannot win, but they can and would serve as a spoiler that could return someone like Donald Trump to office. I therefore commit to opposing a No Labels third-party ticket in 2024 for the good of the country,” the MoveOn petition says. Without strong third-party candidates from the center-left in the race, I still think that Biden would be preferable in the election next year. The economy is better than many had predicted, unemployment is close to historic lows, the stock market has recovered, the U.S. is leading a global revolution in artificial intelligence, Biden has rebuilt the transatlantic alliance that Trump had almost destroyed, and the Biden administration is in sync with the majority in the U.S. on issues such as abortion, the rights of minorities and the fight against climate change.
Furthermore, Trump’s latest indictment, on charges that he actively tried to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020 election, will not help him in the general election. In an ABC/Ipsos poll published one day after the indictment for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, 65% of U.S. adults said they think the charges against Trump are serious, including 51% who say that the charges are very serious. Naturally, Trump claims that the charges against him are a plot by Biden to prevent a Trump victory in 2024. But Trump’s argument is very weak, given that the main witnesses against him in the Jan. 6 case are all Republicans. More than that, they were high-ranking officials in his administration, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General Bill Barr.
But as often happens with messianic demagogues, Trump still enjoys strong support from his base; he can win the Republican nomination and he could become a serious rival to Biden in 2024. If the Green Party or No Labels candidates steal enough votes from Biden, they will go down in history as the idiot narcissists who helped Trump return to power and possibly finish off U.S. democracy.
*Editor’s Note: The No Labels group has said it is considering running a candidate for president in 2024, not that it will.
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