A new danger threatens Joe Biden on his way to re-election in the 2024 presidential elections. According to analysts, the president and his party have every reason to fear that a third option with a candidate of some excellence will damage the his fragile advantage against a Donald Trump surviving his serious but for now innocuous problems with justice.
“The majority of Americans today do not want a rematch of the 2020 election. If they continue to feel this way in 2024 and a viable path to victory for a unity vote is seen, No Labels will offer the majority of common sense in the United States the option of promoting that candidacy to the White House”.
This is what the “without labels” group founded in 2010 as a third way to, from the center, “accommodate” discontent with Democrats and Republicans, says on its website. Those responsible for No Labels reject the polarization and excessive partisanship in both major formations; they say they defend the nation and its army above all; they advocate for a tireless dialogue, and in this respect they boast of being behind the bipartisan parliamentary group that in the last two years encouraged the approval of different consensus laws. They also assure that they will have moderate figures from both sides. It is not for nothing that the organization was founded by the former Finance Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Nancy Jacobson, and the Republican strategist Mark McKinnon.
No Labels will hold an event in New Hampshire this coming week that will be headlined by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin — Biden’s biggest headache during the passage of his ambitious social spending and climate change plan, which Manchin forced him to cut. The senator has not clarified whether he will seek re-election to the Upper House and has not ruled out an independent candidacy for the White House.
No Labels is not the only third way. African-American academic and activist Cornel West has launched a feverish campaign to be nominated presidential candidate by the Green Party with a left-wing discourse based on the defense of social justice.
Third parties have a long history in the United States; marginal and insignificant in the achievement of results in the presidential elections but important because of its incidence in the tie breakers of contested elections. And today the field is more prepared than ever for its success to represent a serious threat to the two great parties. Now, 44% of Americans declare themselves “independent”, compared to 31% who claimed to be independent twenty years ago, according to a recent Gallup poll. And many other polls show that 60% to 70% of voters reject Trump and Biden running again.
The demographic studies are alarming for the Democrats. Since the end of May, five surveys analyzed by the FiveThirtyEight center have assessed the impact of the potential candidacies of No Labels and the Green Party of West. And they all agree on something: while in a Biden-Trump face-off that excluded those alternatives the Democratic president would get a slight advantage or at least tie with the former Republican president, in the scenario of an election with West or Manchin in contest Trump would gain an advantage because he would benefit from a vote steal that would affect Biden much more, whether the main competitor was Manchin or West.
In the Biden party, these days they are remembering the effect that the candidate of the Green Party in 2016, Jill Stein, had in the fight between Hillary Clinton and Trump. Although Stein received just over 1% of the vote, his results in the decisive states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were key for the Republican. Obama’s former top adviser, David Axelrod, underlined this on July 7 in a widely discussed tweet in Washington: “In 2016,” he wrote, “the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the ‘election towards Trump. Now, with Cornel West as a candidate, they could easily run again. There is a risk.”
Regarding the third centrist way, Greg Schneiders, former assistant to President Jimmy Carter and several times adviser to the Democrats in the White House and the Senate, told The Washington Post: “No Labels, same as Trump”.
Also eloquent are the opinions of some supporters or explorers of a third way who are now qualifying their positions in the face of the possibility that an alternative candidate will benefit the ultra leader. “There is no greater threat to this country than the possible re-election of Trump,” said USA Today, founder of the center-left think tank T h. A third candidate “cannot win the presidency; it hasn’t happened in 247 years and it won’t happen in 2024,” Bennett added. But this candidate “could act as a decoy and increase the odds that Trump will win again”, he specified.
William Galston, co-founder of No Labels, left the group because he disagrees with the possible launch of a third candidacy. Even if the intentions were good, he said, such a candidacy “would make Trump’s return to the White House more likely,” and he wants no part of anything like that.
In other words: the hell of American politics, like the old proverb, is full of good intentions.
