A rare analyst to have glimpsed Hillary Clinton’s defeats against Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Marie-Christine Bonzom has covered seven presidential elections and five presidencies. At the invitation of Dutyshe occasionally puts her expert eye on the 2024 presidential campaign.
As Joe Biden and Donald Trump move towards a new duel in the November 5 election, the ground has rarely been so fertile for a candidate from another party.
The historic day of February 8 confirmed this. That day in Washington, Trump’s ineligibility to appear on the ballot, sought by Biden’s allies in several states of the Union, was debated at the Supreme Court. Not far from there, the special prosecutor responsible for investigating the classified defense documents taken by Biden since he was a senator justified his decision not to indict him by indicating in particular that the “faculties” of the outgoing president are so “diminished » that a jury would consider him unfit to stand trial.
The Biden-Trump duel has long been rejected by the majority of Americans. Trump’s candidacy will be further defeated if he loses in one of the most serious cases that brings him to court. The rejection of Biden marked a turning point after the prosecutor’s revelations, the first official confirmation of what Americans have been seeing for months by observing their president. In a rare consensus, 86% of Americans now think Biden is “too old for a second term.”
Faced with this unprecedented rejection of the presumptive candidates of the major parties, an opportunity appears for the first time since 1992.
That year, an unpopular Republican president, George HW Bush, was pitted against an inexperienced Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. The other choice was Ross Perot, socially libertarian, fiscally conservative, and anti-system. Perot obtained 19% of the votes cast. Carried by a growing wave of discontent with political elites, he thus established a record for a third-party presidential candidate in the United States.
Today, the ground is even more fertile. The space is wider between the duopoly candidates since the two major parties have migrated ideologically towards their respective ultras. Citizen anger is at its peak since 63% of Americans are demanding more choice, judging that the Democratic and Republican parties “represent them poorly”. Moreover, if most of the voters of 1992 still identified with the major parties, the “party” of independent voters is today the first in the country.
Aware of this historic opening, third-party candidates abound in this presidential campaign.
A monumental task
Among them, the main independents are Cornel West, a famous black philosopher close to Bernie Sanders, and Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., nephew of President Kennedy, who left the Democratic Party after being ostracized by the White House and its allies as as Biden’s internal rival.
Small party candidates include Jill Stein, already a Green candidate in 2012 and 2016, Claudia de la Cruz and William Stodden for the two socialist parties in the United States, and Peter Sonski for the American Solidarity Party, a Christian Democratic party. .
The largest of the smaller parties, the Libertarian Party, will nominate its candidate in May. However, at the California Libertarian convention, which runs through Sunday, the party has invited West, Stein and RFK Jr. to speak, while the latter and Libertarian national president Angela McArdle discuss a common “ticket”.
As for the centrist No Labels movement, it plans to choose among 13 Republican and Democratic personalities to launch its campaign in the event that the Biden-Trump duel is confirmed.
For any candidate outside the parties that control political life, the task is monumental. The Democratic and Republican parties have, in each state they lead, forged an electoral system that benefits them, notably through the gerrymandering of constituencies and the number of voter signatures required for a third-party candidate to appear on the ballot.
In some ways, the task is even more difficult than in 1992. Perot was able to participate in the televised debates with Bush and Clinton. But since then, the organization formed by the duopoly to plan the debates has locked the admission criteria. Furthermore, the American media, intoxicated by the hyperpolarization maintained by the major parties, hardly cover third-party candidates, except to denigrate them.
In other ways, the task is a little easier. In addition to the dominance of independent voters, fed up with the duopoly and the desire for a broader political offer have in fact intensified.
Reject the duopoly
At this point, RFK Jr. is, by far, the best placed of the third-party candidates. He claims he can win with only a third of the votes cast. Drawing on Perot’s experience of having his electorate spread across too many states to win seats in the Electoral College, he is focusing his campaign on key states and those that allocate their college seats to the proportional (Nebraska and Maine). Moreover, if he allied himself with the Libertarian Party, RFK Jr. would access the ballots in the 39 states where this party is automatically recognized (ballot lines).
No Labels, which targets ballot lines in 32 states, makes the same calculation as RFK Jr. The centrist movement estimates that a candidate obtaining a little more than a third of the 60% of voters in key states who reject a Biden-Trump duel would win in college and would be therefore elected.
Major parties treat third-party candidates and their projections with contempt and ridicule. Singularly, the Biden camp brought out the eternal accusation of spoilsport (spoiler) against Democrat Marianne Williamson (now out of the race), No Labels (not yet in the running), West, Stein and especially against RFK Jr., who, on average in the polls, brings together 16% of voting intentions against Biden and Trump.
As Stein says, “the very notion of spoilsport is undemocratic, because it implies that the voter does not have the right to choose who he or she votes for.” The accusation of spoiler is also historically unfounded since the best third-party candidates of the last fifty years, Ross Perot and previously John Anderson against Carter and Reagan, drew most of their votes from independents, abstentionists and voters who had already given up supporting the candidate of ‘a big party. Furthermore, the Democratic and Republican parties have only themselves to blame if, despite the overwhelming advantage given to them by the electoral system they created, they struggle to win a large majority on the value of their candidates, their records in power and their ideas for the future. After all, the principle of choice that underpins the free market and governs other sectors in the United States must be applicable to politics as well.
No Labels also notes that “after the extraordinary day of February 8, with questions surrounding Trump’s ability to participate in the vote and Biden’s mental ability to exercise his functions, the necessity and urgency to offer voters greater choice are becoming more evident every day.
Americans no longer want to resign themselves to “voting for the lesser of two evils” (“ the lesser of two evils »). In this historically favorable year for a third candidate, it will be up to them to align their actions with the rejection they express towards the duopoly and the two men who embody it.