The United States last week advanced another step closer to a straight Biden-Trump rematch with the announcement by the avowedly non-partisan group “No Labels” that it would not be fielding a presidential candidate. It has not made any endorsement, although its national director, Joe Cunningham, said that he personally would be voting for Biden.
For the last year or so, No Labels, drawing on the (entirely justified) widespread dissatisfaction with the two likely major party nominees, has been searching for a high profile candidate who could head a third party ticket. An impressive list of names have been mentioned and ruled themselves out, among them Nikki Haley, Joe Manchin, David Petraeus, Larry Hogan and Chris Christie.
It was always clear that the sort of voters who might be attracted by such a bipartisan campaign would be much less likely to be Trump supporters, and that therefore its effect would be to hurt the Democrats and risk throwing the election to Trump. Unless, that is, the No Labels candidate was so popular that he or she could actually win the election, and the chance of that was, to put it mildly, not very great.
Some of the No Labels people seemed to either not care about that or be in denial about it, including one of its leaders, former senator Joe Lieberman. But after Lieberman’s death last month the organisation apparently took a more candid look at itself and decided that the presidential project just wasn’t going to fly. As Cunningham put it, “No Labels was looking for a hero and a hero never emerged.”
There is still at least one other major independent candidate in the race, namely conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr.* Six months ago when we looked at Kennedy he had just abandoned the Democratic Party to run as an independent. He has since named Nicole Shanahan, a tech industry lawyer, as his running mate and has continued to draw support of around 10% in a number of opinion polls, although they are notoriously unreliable for third-party candidates at this stage of the campaign.
It’s become increasingly obvious that Kennedy’s main enmity is towards the Democrats and that one objective of his campaign (if not the main one) is to hand Trump the election. But that objective risks being self-defeating: the more he is identified as a pro-Trump candidate, the less likely he is to attract voters who would otherwise have voted against Trump, and therefore the less likely he is to actually assist him.
Most probably Kennedy’s influence on the election will be small either way; even getting on to the ballot in most of the swing states will be difficult. There is still a chance he could win endorsement from the Libertarian Party, whose descent into madness makes it not a bad fit, but that would probably alienate him further from the left-leaning voters that he wants to attract if he is to help Trump.
The US, however, seems destined to keep having close elections, so even a small influence could end up being decisive.
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* There is also left-wing Black intellectual Cornel West, who after an abortive attempt at the Green Party nomination is now running with his personal vehicle, the “Justice for All Party”. But he is barely registering in the polls and his chance of getting onto the ballot in more than a handful of states seems slim.
The World is Not Enough 
Thanks for this, Charles. Excellent analysis, as always.
So what is your assessment of the likely impact of Trump’s upcoming trials – which are exposing his poverty as well as his criminality – along with his ongoing tawdry grifts and scams?
Have these actually set the scene for sweeping Democrat victories – in state contests as well as nationally – which will give progressives a four-year window, at the minimum, truly to transform the nation?
Yes, that seems a lot to hope for, but what are the chances?
Must be above zero.
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Thanks Alan! I think the trials will hurt Trump, and I think his chance of winning the election is small. But Biden at 81 is a poor candidate; while I think his chances are much better than the markets are currently saying, he’s no certainty, and I think it’s unlikely to be a big win. Maybe bigger than 2020, but not by much – the party divisions are just so rigid now that it’s very hard to get a big swing.
So certainly a non-zero chance, but I think pretty small. And if it does happen, I’d say the agenda should be less about transforming the nation & more about shoring up the foundations of its democracy. But perhaps they amount to the same thing.
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If you think there’s been a better President than Joe Biden since 1945, I’d be interested to know what makes you think so
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I’m not making any judgement about his record as president, but I think he’s a bad candidate for a second term: his approval ratings are very low & he’s just too old. I fear he’s taking a big risk.
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To be clear on what it is I’m commenting on, I quote:
There’s a difference between the question ‘How good a President would Joe Biden make [in a second term]?’ and the question ‘How strong a candidate will Joe Biden be for the Democratic Party in the 2024 election?’
If US voters are trying to answer the first question, then I don’t think they’d be justified in a low evaluation of Joe Biden just because he’ll be four years older in a second term than he was in a first term. It’s fair to regard it as making some difference, but not as making much difference. If his performance in his first term deserves to be rated highly, then it’s not reasonable to suppose that being just four years older would make him a great deal worse. The voters certainly wouldn’t be justified in a low evaluation just because he has low approval ratings: his approval ratings provide no independent information about how good a President he’ll make in a second term.
If the Democratic Party is trying to answer the second question, then in itself his age should not be a major factor in their evaluation. It’s true that he’s old, and that it’s fair in a very general way to consider age as something which affects performance, but we don’t have to think about it in a very general way because we have specific information which makes a difference. Joe Biden will be running against Donald Trump, and the age difference is less than four years! If Donald Trump wins, he will be older at the end of his second Presidential term than Joe Biden is now; Donald Trump is older now than Joe Biden was at the beginning of his first Presidential term. There might be some point in saying that Joe Biden’s age is a more important factor because of the ludicrous degree of attention that the American media (or some of it) is paying (particularly when they aren’t paying the same kind of attention to Donald Trump’s age), but then again it might be fair to think that if it weren’t his age the American media would just find some other factor to pay a ludicrous amount of attention to. If the media is going to be unfair the Democratic candidate no matter what, that’s just something the Democratic Party has to be prepared to fight against regardless of who they nominate.
If somebody wants to conduct a comparative evaluation weighing the actual Joe Biden against a hypothetical potential candidate Boe Jiden who is just like the actual Joe Biden except for being substantially younger and having higher approval ratings, then they will have to decide how much the evaluation should downgrade Boe Jiden for the fault of not existing. If we could go into the lab and construct our candidate from whatever materials we liked, we probably would want to construct one substantially younger than Joe Biden, but we can’t do that, we have to choose from the options available, and if we’re doing that then it’s not clear to me what it could mean to say that dissatisfaction with Joe Biden is justified.
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I think the second question is the one that the party needs to answer, and there seems to be ample evidence that swinging voters do regard his age as a substantial disadvantage. (In a way that they don’t as much with Trump, presumably because Trump already has so many other disqualifying factors.) Whether or not they’re justified in that is, from the party’s point of view, beside the point.
Sure, some of the media are, as you say, “going to be unfair the Democratic candidate no matter what,” but you’re trading off a hypothetical future invented negative against a current actual (if unfair) perception of one.
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The hypothetical invented negative is no more hypothetical than the hypothetical alternative candidate. So long as the alternative candidate is purely hypothetical, that alternative candidate has no actual negatives, only purely hypothetical ones; but as soon as there is an actual alternative candidate, that candidate will come with actual negatives. As I observed before, the hypothetical Boe Jiden I described earlier would be a clearly superior candidate, but the party can’t dump Joe Biden in favour of Boe Jiden because Boe Jiden doesn’t exist. Any Democrat can do the same thing I can do and imagine a better candidate, but imagining is one thing and finding another.
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