Last week, I’d argue, was one of the best stretches the Biden re-election campaign has had in a while. Not because of anything he did, or that Donald Trump did, but because things went very badly for a couple of the pesky third-party candidacies threatening to muck up the presidential ballot.
On Thursday, the “No Labels” campaign announced that it is giving up its quest to accomplish whatever it previously intended to achieve by fielding a candidate. The group had apparently been rebuffed by every potential candidate it pursued.
This turn of events was glad news to Team Biden, and likely their doing as well, at least in part. The campaign, and its allies in the Democratic National Committee and elsewhere, had taken the threat of a No Labels presidential ticket very seriously, and emissaries are known to have been dispatched to talk possible recruits—your Chris Christies, your Larry Hogans, your Joe Manchins, even your Andy Beshears—out of commiting such folly.
Of course, the demise of No Labels could provide an opportunity for one of the other non-major-party candidates to gain traction. To discourage this from accruing to his own benefit, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. immediately launched an extended rake-stepping tour. By Friday afternoon, he was disavowing a statement he had released earlier in the day disavowing the fundraising email his campaign had sent the day before.
Meanwhile, Cornel West continues his self-imposed obscurity and lack of funding, and his chances of appearing on many state ballots seems to have ended when he walked away from a potential Green Party nomination back in October. That party is now poised to put forward Jill Stein for the third time. At least for now there appears little danger that she will make more of a dent than she did in 2012 and 2016; if that changes, the opposition research files are still available.
There is still time for a wealthy candidate to jump in, Perot-style, and buy a path to qualifying for most states’ ballots. It’s too late in a few states, notably North Carolina, and the process is harder than you might think, but if there are any Howard Schultz types out there with advisors cooing sweet test polling numbers in their ears, it could be done.
So far though, tamping down the third-party threat is going remarkably well for Team Biden—especially since, in the opinion of some observers, that team was a little slow putting together a dedicated team to fight on that front. It was just last month that the Democratic National Committee put former Buttigieg communications director Lis Smith on the in-house communication effort, and that Biden 2020 deputy campaign manager Pete Kavanaugh formed the Clear Choice PAC to run the outside game.
Better late than never though, as last week showed. It's quite possible that No Labels would have come up empty and RFK Jr. would have embarrassed himself without any help, but Team Biden showed it can play roles both in running interference, and amplifying negatives.
Don’t expect them to break up the band now that No Labels has folded its tent, at least according to folks I’ve spoken with close to the effort.
There is still a real fear that Kennedy will get on ballots in swing states, spend money raising his profile, get taken seriously thanks to his family name, and manage to keep some percentage of left-leaning, low-information voters from hearing about his lower-than-low-information opinions.
So for the moment, the focus seems to be on challenging Kennedy’s attempts to qualify for state ballots, and on pushing anti-Kennedy stories into the news media—particularly stories that would repulse anti-Trump voters. If you heard this week about Kennedy’s New York state director boasting of her desire to prevent Biden from winning, thank the team over at the DNC.
"We're going to make sure everyone is playing by the rules and voters are educated about RFK Jr. being propped up by Trump's biggest donor to be a spoiler in this race," says DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni.
Why bother?
West and Stein, certainly, are unapologetically trying to peel left-leaning voters away from Biden. Both are thus far underfunded, generally ignored by most media outlets, and not running impressive campaign organizations. But, both are actively seeking to parlay their histories of Israel criticism to capitalize on progressive disillusionment with Biden on the Gaza war.
And, while some suspect that Kennedy could ultimately hurt Trump more than Biden, that’s hard to know until we see where he gets on the ballot, and how he chooses to spend whatever large sum his campaign decides to burn.
To top institutional Democrats, it’s all a math problem. They believe that Trump can’t rise much above 46 percent of the popular vote on election day. Thus, the only thing that can defeat Biden is if more than eight percent of the vote pool go to neither of the two main candidates.
Several recent polls show the minor candidates combining for roughly 10 to 12 percent of the vote—the vast majority of that going to Kennedy. To Team Biden, that justifies an investment of time and resources in opposition.
I’m not sure I buy the math, but certainly on a state-by-state level it’s not hard to imagine Biden losing a close swing state, or more than one, because of votes that would never have gone to Trump, but went to someone other than Biden.
I also don’t sense that the effort indicates any panic or overreaction to the threat; it seems like they’re putting a proportionate amount of resources and attention on this one front of the campaign wars.
But, unsurprisingly, there’s a round of media reports reading as much drama as possible into the new Team Biden campaign against the minor campaigns. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Politico, and others have had headlines just since last week’s No Labels news, on how third-party campaigns “could doom” Biden, how Biden faces “serious danger” from them, and how they pose a “threat to” Biden. NBC News said that Democrats are “freaked out” about it.
In a way, this might work to Biden’s advantage: he certainly wants voters to believe that the election is likely to be too close to go wasting their precious ballot on an also-ran.
I do wonder whether there is a risk of increasing cynicism from having several Presidential candidates roaming the country lecturing about the uselessness—if not outright evils—of the two major parties and their candidates.
West recently described the major-party choice as a candidate who will start a civil war against a candidate who will start World War III. Stein declares it a “badge of honor” to be blamed by Democrats for playing spoiler in the 2016 election. Kennedy recently suggested that Biden is a threat to the survival of democracy.
There is disaffection and resentment to tap into, and it might not be societally healthy to have Presidential campaigns pandering to that. Even among those who don’t ultimately support any of the other candidates, it might lead to more tuning out and, in democratic participation terms, dropping out.