We’re all watching the wrong 2024 presidential race
Iowa and New Hampshire are over as former President Donald Trump aims for inevitability as the Republican nominee for president.
After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, Trump’s horse race with former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley goes round and round with vigorous news coverage.
We were hit with a blizzard of coverage last week for the Iowa caucuses, where less than 15% of registered Republican voters engaged in the process as subzero temperatures descended with the candidates.
Haley finally began ramping up criticism of Trump ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. File that under: too little, too late.
The real action is in November’s general election when third-party contenders who can’t win can still influence who loses. We’re all watching the wrong race.
The electorate is antsy. President Joe Biden won in 2020 by promising the restore the normal order of government that went so stupendously awry during Trump’s one term. But now Biden is deeply unpopular.
Again, voters face an election where the choice is less about whom you support and more about whom you oppose.
While all this unwinds, third-party types are already deep into planning for the general election and pitching especially hard to the country’s largest voting bloc – Americans who identify as independent.
The math here looks like bad news for Biden: Third-party candidates seem far more likely to draw from his pool of support then to tap into Trump’s base.
Which third-party candidates should we be watching?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t going to be president. But his campaign can tilt the margins if his independent bid, which preempted his initial Democratic primary push, gets on the ballot in enough states. He filed paperwork last week to form the “We the People” party to push that process.
Kennedy is best known as a controversial conspiracy theorist who doubts the effectiveness of vaccines. But he brands that with one of the best-known names in American politics, an imprimatur that rings nostalgic with some older Democrats.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found Biden and Trump tied at 35% each in a general election rematch while Kennedy took 18% and 17% said they would back another candidate or were unsure. About 13% said they just won’t vote.
Biden’s remaining Democratic primary challengers – Rep. Dean Phillips, of Minnesota, and self-help spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson – are locked in a race for irrelevancy.
Jill Stein lingers like a hangover for Democrats. The Green Party’s nominee for president pulled in just enough 2016 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to swing them to Trump.
Stein is back for more this year. Her campaign has virtual training scheduled for Monday to show volunteers how to help her get listed on state ballots. The team said she’s already on the ballot in 20 states and is aiming for the other 30, plus Washington, D.C.
Look for state-based Democratic parties to explore legal loopholes to knock the Green Party candidate off the ballot, as they may have in Pennsylvania in 2020 to avoid a repeat of those critical 2016 margins.
Green Party officials howled with outrage, calling the legal challenge “voter suppression.” But they were playing a game with rules. Want to win? Don’t give your opponents opportunities to beat you.
Cornel West, a progressive activist and academic, seems to be running the least organized of the third-party efforts. But he loves a television camera and the chance to deride Biden as a disappointment. That could chip away at the president’s support on the left spectrum of his party.
No Labels, a nonprofit pushing for ballot access for what it hopes will be a third option in November, went on the offensive last week, filing a complaint with the Department of Justice that claims hardball politics being thrown at would-be contenders and political consultants active in the movement amount to illegal harassment.
No Labels has been assailed for the past year by critics who contend that a centrist “unity ticket” it desires will draw votes from Biden, helping Trump take back the White House.
The group, which critics note does not disclose who funds it, has repeatedly insisted it does not want to play the spoiler. But it sure looks to be headed in that direction.
Nobody wants this Biden vs. Trump rematch
Let’s recap: A dark-money group is looking for a path to significantly impact American politics in a way that could very well create a result it claims it does not want. And it wants the Justice Department to force people to stop being so darn mean about it.
No Labels said Thursday it has already secured ballot access in 14 states and hopes to increase that to 32 states before deciding whether to back a presidential candidate. That candidate would be responsible for getting on the ballot in the remaining 18 states.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut and a founding chair for No Labels, said Haley would “deserve serious consideration” as a candidate if she expressed interest.
Poll after poll show that voters just don’t want what they certainly will get – a 2020 redux of Biden versus Trump.
Gallup’s annual Governance poll in October found support for a third-party candidate at 63% among U.S. adults, the third time it rose above 60% since 2017. That’s driven by a sense that Democrats and Republicans do “such a poor job” running the country.
Gallup also has reported that 43% of Americans identified last year as political independents, making them the largest voting bloc in the country.
Jeff Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told me that voter dissatisfaction with both major party candidates is driving these sentiments. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, voters tended to look positively on both parties and their presidential candidates.
Then came Trump’s presidential contest with Clinton. “In 2016, we had the least popular candidates running for office,” Jones said. “We may set a new record in 2024.”
That seems like a safe bet. And all the more reason to start paying close attention to November right now.