RFK Jr can’t win. But he and Cornel West may put Trump back in the White House
A RECENT series of six swingstate presidential polls offered Democrats and President Joe Biden a welcome dose of optimism. The head-to-head matchup with former president Donald Trump had Biden winning Wisconsin by a point and tied in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
With the usual warning about the accuracy of polls this far out, a gentle breeze in the blue direction would give the president all three states and enough Electoral College votes to win reelection.
But the same Bloomberg/ Morning Consult poll contained a dire warning. When minor party candidates like Robert F Kennedy Jr, Jill Stein and Cornel West were added to the mix, Biden’s narrow lead in Wisconsin became a two-point loss, a tie in Pennsylvania flipped to Trump by six points and Michigan remained dead even. Such an outcome would return Trump to the White House.
This poll is not an outlier. A Quinnipiac Poll conducted the same week put Biden ahead by three points nationally, but when respondents could choose among Kennedy, Stein or West, Trump pulled ahead.
In nearly every public presidential survey this year, two truths are evident: minor party candidates don’t stand a ghost of a chance of winning, and the addition of minor party candidates moves the outcome towards Trump.
That is why we are ringing the third-party alarm. In a race certain to be close, third-party candidates not only pose a problem for Biden, they also may be his biggest hurdle to re-election.
The last two elections showed that Trump has a vote ceiling below 50% of the electorate. He did not reach 47% of the popular vote in either of his presidential races and secured a smaller share of the national electorate in both runs than Mitt Romney did in his loss to Barack Obama in 2012.
In Trump’s Electoral College win over Hillary Clinton, he carried the same share of the popular vote as Michael Dukakis and John McCain got in their presidential losses.
Trump was aided in 2016 by the presence of minor party candidates, who won a small but decisive 5.6% of the electorate. In 2020, Trump was ruined by their absence.
In a pure head-to-head matchup, Biden would be a prohibitive favourite because enough voters under no earthly circumstances will ever pull the lever for Trump.
But that is not the contest we will see this year. At a minimum, three minor party candidates are actively seeking to appear on the ballot. Every one of these candidates will hurt Biden.
West and Stein will each run from the extreme left and likely garner a paltry number of votes. Not all of their voters would support Biden, but none of them would support Trump. In 2020, 44,000 votes in three swing states gave Biden the presidency. Stein and West, even with relatively few votes, could put Trump in the White House.
A No Labels “unity ticket” would have been far more damaging. Biden is president because he throttled Trump by 30 points among selfidentified moderates, according to 2020 exit polls. A No Labels ticket featuring a Republican and a Democrat could have taken three Biden votes for every two Trump votes, a potentially gamechanging boost.
Thankfully, both Chris Christie and Joe Manchin rejected No Labels’ enticements to run, citing their fear of aiding Trump.
And the organisation announced on Thursday that it was dropping its effort to field a presidential candidate.
The lessons from 2016 and 2000 are clear: minor party does not mean minor impact. No-hope candidates can change the outcome of an election, even by garnering a relative handful of votes.
It’s incumbent on partisans to raise the alarm on today’s crop of spoilers.
It’s also vital that the media make clear to voters that none of these third-party candidates can win – and that supporting them would mean throwing away your vote and helping bring about the catastrophe of Trump’s return to power.