‘Principled’ 3rd parties principally spoilers

Think I have something good to report, people. No, it’s not about how to get your kids Taylor Swift tickets in Tokyo.

My news is Dean Phillips is not going to run as a thirdparty candidate for president. OK, you’re thinking that you’ve had more thrilling news from the grocer on banana prices. But follow along for a minute.

Phillips is a representative from Minnesota who campaigned very energetically in the New Hampshire presidential primary. If you want to run for president and it doesn’t look as if your party is going to nominate you, you have two real choices. You can do what Phillips is doing: keep competing in the primaries and hope voters will embrace your message. Or you can get yourself on the ballot in November as a third-party candidate.

We’ve already got several people taking that last option. So far, fortunately, they don’t exactly look like major contenders. It’s everyone from the vaccine vigilante Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Chase Oliver, a candidate for the Libertarian line who won about 2% of the votes in the 2022 Senate race in Georgia.

But the third-party threat is always worrisome when it comes to messing things up. We’re still haunted by the saga of 2000, when Al Gore was pitted against George W. Bush. Ralph Nader made one of those principled third-party runs. Everything came down to Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes while Nader got nearly 100,000, most of which would undoubtedly have gone to Gore otherwise.

A while ago, Phillips sounded as if he might be taking the old Nader route. He opted instead to run in the primaries. Send out some good thoughts to Representative Phillips, please. If only there were more people following his lead — talented Democratic officeholders like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or high-achieving members of Congress. Imagine the great race the Democrats could have if Biden, 81, decided he was stepping down. It’d be further evidence he was a terrific president.

But if the choice winds up being Biden versus Trump, a third-party candidate could get just enough votes to screw up the outcome. “I don’t think anybody has ever won as a third-party presidential candidate,” said Bernard Tamas, an elections expert at Valdosta State University in Georgia. “Unless you count Lincoln.”

Third parties, he added, often just use running for president “as a way of forcing issues onto the table,” like the Green Party has been doing for years. The Green Party pursues important environmental causes, and that was its mission in 2016, when its presidential candidate, Jill Stein, won enough votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to cost Hillary Clinton the White House.

Leave this to the primaries. You don’t want to go down in history as the progressive candidate whose third-party run drained just enough votes from Biden to put Trump back in the White House. (Looking at you, Cornel West.)

And then there are the dreaded No Labels people, who already have a slot on the ballot in several states and might give Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia its line. Now, the idea of Manchin as president is pretty terrifying, but in the real world, the most No Labels could do is take votes away from Biden. Bottom line: If you hope to be president, run for a major party nomination. Otherwise, there’s always 2028.