The Real Reason Democrats Should Fear a Third Party

Democrats profess to be terrified of a Donald Trump presidency. Presidential historian Michael Bescloss is positively hysterical about the prospect.

Entirely possible that a 2024 third-party candidate could, intentionally or not, tip this nation toward a fascist Presidential autocracy.

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) July 17, 2023

A “presidential autocracy?” I would hasten to point out that it’s Democrats who wanted to pack the Supreme Court and are now pushing a revolutionary theory that would destroy judicial review. But that’s just me.

Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe is even more emotionally unhinged at the prospect of a Trump win.

Third party candidates like RFKJr, Cornel West, possibly Joe Manchin, are the biggest threat to our survival as a free people who govern ourselves https://t.co/jocthxxFVf

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 18, 2023

Beschloss, Tribe, and other Democratic hysterics are worried about a third-party candidate running strongly enough in some battleground states to take votes away from Joe Biden, allowing Trump to win those states — and the presidency.

But why should Democrats worry? Biden is an incumbent president. The economy is doing better. And the job situation is positively glowing.

So what’s the problem? Biden can’t be worried about Robert Kennedy or Marianne Williamson. They’re his only Democratic Party competition and are on the fringes of his party.

But there are many warning signs for Biden that make 2024 look a helluva lot like 1980. That was the year that Jimmy Carter — the last one-term Democratic president — got wiped out by Ronald Reagan.

Joe Biden is equally as unpopular as Carter was. There are also vast concerns about Biden’s age and cognitive abilities that are not going to go away and will probably only get bigger going forward. Worries about the war in Ukraine hang over his administration and are likely to increase as the conflict drags on. The Federal Reserve continues to jack up interest rates, trying to beat down inflation, with more rate increases on the way. And Biden’s vice president — one heartbeat away — gives no one any confidence she could step in and do the job.

“Depending on the poll,” FiveThirtyEight noted earlier this month, “somewhere between one-third and half [of Democrats] have said they don’t want him to run again—as have a clear majority of independents.”

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Does this open a path for a third-party spoiler?

Reason.com:

The third-party bogeyman haunting Tribe’s dreams has mostly been a pussycat ever since Donald Trump shocked the world by winning the 2016 presidency, in an election featuring the highest combined non-Democratic/non-Republican vote (5.73 percent) in two decades. (While many Democrats remain convinced that the Green Party’s Jill Stein and her 1.07 percent of the popular vote cost Hillary Clinton the election that year, many Democrats remain wrong.)

Faced post-2016 with intense negative polarization and the widespread fear that Trump is either an existential threat to democracy or the undeserving scapegoat of institutional elites, voter turnout boomed in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential election, and the 2022 midterms, while shrinking the third-party electorate in the 2020 race by two-thirds. For as long as Trump has remained an active threat—and he’s still polling nationally more than 30 percentage points ahead of his nearest GOP competitor—Trump-averse independent-leaners have mostly resisted the temptation to vote rogue.

It’s not third parties that Democrats should fear. It’s their own voters who are repulsed by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Talk of replacing Biden will probably grow louder over the next year and could reach a crescendo if Biden falls ill or starts tumbling on a regular basis. But it’s still a bad bet to think Biden won’t be the nominee in 2024. There are so many powerful people who have invested so much into a Biden presidency and a media perfectly willing to downplay any sign of decline in Biden’s mental state. The Democrats are going to ride Biden’s coattails as long as possible.