Wildcard candidate who could be a ‘spoiler’ for the 2024 US election

Voters have made clear in multiple polls that they don’t want a rematch between Biden and Trump

Washington:

Americans haven’t elected an independent president since George Washington, but the public, fed up with two historically unpopular front-runners, appears more interested than ever in a possible tilt in the 2024 election. Plenty of wildcards are more open-minded.

Voters have made clear in multiple polls that they do not want a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and are willing to take a hard look at the growing number of politicians considering independent or third-party campaigns.

Analysts say the chances of winning the White House in November are slim, but some so-called “spoilers” could sway a close election.

Democrats are particularly concerned that a wildcard candidate would hurt their prospects, recalling how Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein derailed Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

Stein is once again campaigning alongside several candidates seeking to upend the two-party system, including racial justice activist Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure who poses the biggest threat to the status quo. candidate.

Douglas MacKinnon, a political consultant and White House aide during the Reagan era, believes John F Kennedy’s nephew is shaping 2024 into a true three-way race, noting that numerous experts have expressed doubts about the 2016 election. Republican Trump has no hope.

“Kennedy’s words and warnings now resonate with young American voters,” McKinnon wrote in an op-ed in the political newspaper The Hill.

“So much so that he’s now ahead of both Biden and Trump in that demographic.”

Biden is more seriously injured than Trump

With neither major party having a truly competitive nominating process, this year’s campaign will be one of the longest in history.

Biden and Trump have drawn clear battle lines, although recent polls from the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Massachusetts Amherst show more than half of voters are dissatisfied with reelection in 2020.

Views remain divided over which candidate is more threatened by the scion of America’s most prominent Democratic dynasty, whose conspiratorial views on vaccines and hostility to Ukraine aid have left Trump Poppy was happy.

Biden and Trump are nearly tied in RealClearPolitics’ polling average, but including Kennedy, he gained 17 percent to Trump’s 5-point lead.

Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, warned that polls often exaggerate support for independents, who often start with lofty ambitions that then fizzle out.

But he added: “Polls that include all potential third-party candidates generally show Biden being hurt more by them than Trump.”

Conservatives tend to agree.

“Kennedy poses a legitimate threat to Biden because he focuses on issues that matter to millennial voters and Gen Z voters,” said Charlie Kolean, a right-leaning political operative and chief strategist at RED PAC.

“We’re seeing a focus on issues like government transparency, fiscal responsibility and increasing economic opportunity win elections across the country.”

“Incredibly arrogant”

Kennedy, Stein and West are likely to join a host of other hopefuls, possibly including anti-Trump conservative Liz Cheney.

Meanwhile, the self-styled centrist group No Labels is creating a “unity vote” to unleash if the two parties choose to “unreasonably divide the presidential candidates” – a move criticized by Democrats as a vote against Trump Pu’s boost.

Kondik said the difficulty for candidates outside the two-party system is finding the money and resources to get on the ballot, let alone win.

But wild-card candidates can sway an election by garnering sizable votes in a handful of tight battlegrounds.

In 2016, Stein won just 1% of the vote, but her margin of victory in several battleground states was larger than Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton.

A Senate report found that Moscow promoted Stein heavily on social media, leading Clinton to call her a “Russian asset.”

“Voters do have the right to choose who they vote for,” Stein told cable network NewsNation last month, angrily denying what she believed were accusations that favored Trump in 2016.

“And to try to shoehorn two candidates who are really for the economic elite — two zombie candidates from two zombie parties — onto the electorate… I think that’s very arrogant.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)