AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
With about 16 months to go until the 2024 presidential election, the third-party candidacy of left-wing academic Cornel West is showing signs of potentially becoming a major roadblock to Joe Biden’s quest to retain the White House.
West, who announced his campaign for the Green Party nomination this June, is an outspoken leftist who is notably running to the left of Joe Biden and Democrat Party leadership on a wide slate of issues. According to West’s website, his top campaign priorities include far-left favorites like Medicare for All, guaranteed public housing, and deep cuts to military spending.
“In the spirit of a broad United Front and coalition strategy, I am pursuing the nomination of the Green Party for President of the United States,” West wrote in a June 13 tweet, touting his ambitions to “empower precious poor and working people here and abroad.”
Though many Americans might be inclined to wave off West’s candidacy as a fringe effort with no real political or electoral staying power, his bid is becoming a significant concern to Democrats.
“In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” argued liberal political commentator David Axelrod in early July. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business.” Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison agreed: “This is not the time in order to experiment. This is not the time to play around on the margins.”
According to a late June poll conducted by Echelon, if West, Trump, and Biden each win their respective parties’ nominations, Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden in 2024—and by an eight-point margin in swing states. An additional poll conducted by Emerson further corroborates this finding—reinforcing the notion that a West nomination would likely chip away at Biden’s share of the vote rather than Trump’s.
Why, then, some might ask, would West—a committed leftist who shares many political priorities with the Biden administration—risk handing the election to Trump?
One possible explanation could be West’s devotion to ideological purity over the coalition-building and compromise that generally defines presidential politics.
For instance, West recently condemned Biden as the “architect of the mass incarceration regime in the 1990s” for his sponsorship of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Although most far-left Democrats and the media have been willing to ignore and even actively cover up Biden’s previous hardline stance on crime, West has accused Biden of committing a “crime against humanity” against black Americans.
West opposes mainstream Democrat positions on other issues as well, primarily foreign policy. His website makes pledges to “stop all foreign military aid” and “disband NATO” – two policies that are decidedly at odds with the Democrat Party’s current interventionist sympathies.
Surprisingly, some of West’s policies also overlap politically with Republicans: his campaign website calls for switching to “hand-counted paper ballots,” which Trump and other Republicans have also supported.
As such, West might not be bothered by the possibility that he could spoil the election for Biden—an attitude that is almost certainly infuriating Democrat leadership.
To make matters worse for the Biden team, Jill Stein, the Green Party’s nominee in 2016 who received nearly half a million votes, is now actively involved with West’s campaign, granting his presidential bid more credibility.
But if the threat West poses wasn’t alarming enough for Democrats, Biden’s electoral hopes could be even further diminished by the prospect of another third-party bid pushed by centrist group No Labels, which is reportedly working to run a moderate ticket with someone in the mold of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) or former Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD).
“If Cornel West ends up with even half of his current support, he will double Stein’s share, imperiling Biden’s reelection chances,” wrote a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank. “If a No Labels candidate were also in the race, the hill Biden must climb would be even steeper.”
If these trends hold true, conservatives should be doing everything in their power to ensure West is on the general election ballot next November.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
