A third-party presidential candidate on the left enters the fray
It’s Cornel West, running as a candidate from something called the People’s Party:
“I enter in the quest for truth, I enter in the quest for justice, and the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice — what I’ve been trying to do all of my life.”
West, a philosophy professor and longtime vocal progressive advocate, said his campaign would focus on health care, living wages, housing, reproductive rights and “deescalating the destruction of the planet, the destruction of American democracy.”
West would be running to the left of Biden. I wouldn’t think there’s much room to squeeze in there, but as a black man he would at least win the intersectional sweepstakes over Biden. I don’t expect West’s campaign to go anywhere, but I suppose he could take a few far leftist votes away from Biden.
I sometimes fear that, if Trump doesn’t get the GOP nomination, he would run third-party and get a lot more support than West ever will – and quite enough to hand Biden the presidency on a silver platter.
West (infamous for petty academic disputes and his association with horrid unlistenable so-called “rap music”) is a garden-variety hard-leftist of a moderately Afrocentric nature. While it is possible that one or two of his positions might appeal to a person who is not enamored of either party, his support for reparations (in the past, perhaps still) should disqualify him, as there can exist no more insanely idiotic policy proposal.
There are bigger clowns on the left, but to be a scholar, clown, and president, oh my!
BHO led the way.
quite enough to hand Biden the presidency
Biden or any other Dem has the Presidency already. There is no state but Georgia which can flip from blue to red, because there is no close state besides Georgia which went blue in 2020 and has reformed the election laws that allowed for that blue victory. The Dems are in charge of the ballot-counting in the blue cities that tip the margin in any of the close states (again, excepting Georgia).
It’s not about “turning out” votes by persuading voters, it’s about counting ballots which can be obtained in many ways other than by persuading a voter to pick on candidate or another.
I wish that he could be a big-time spoiler for the Demos, but he will probably fizzle out.
Frederick:
You have ignored the fact that I carefully wrote “on a silver platter.” The meaning of that is that he would win by a huge margin, much more than otherwise.
Do you really think most people here are unaware of what you’re describing?
Cornel West is an ass, but he is black so he is holy. Harvard and Princeton faculty, but I have never run across anything that describes his teachings or course content, just his academic rank. If I were a kid again, I surely would not apply to any of the Ivies; their faculties make my skin crawl. I went to college to learn, not to be converted into a snake, a low life form that moves around on its belly. CRT was invented at Harvard Law in 1974!
Here’s the only prediction I will make:
Whatever West’s overall number of votes and whatever ‘spoiler effect’ (if any) it will have, demographically, his support will come overwhelmingly from post-graduate educated whites in deep blue cities.
This will not even be a blip on the radar for anyone else.
Neo,
He won by 7 million votes last time- that was a platter, perhaps bronze, but a platter.
Cornel West is an ass, but he is black so he is holy.
He’s the Ayatollah Assaholla.
You have ignored the fact that I carefully wrote “on a silver platter.” The meaning of that is that he would win by a huge margin, much more than otherwise.
I’m having a hard time understanding why you apparently think I misrepresented you in some way. I didn’t argue with your ‘silver platter’ qualification because I didn’t think it was very relevant, is all, not because I was trying to misrepresent anything you said. Since you think it’s important I address it, I will.
In 1980 or 1992 or even 2004 winning by a big margin might have meant something more than the fact of winning at all. But the Constitution does not award extra Presidential powers to candidates racking up a bigger margin.
If Biden, or any other Dem, really had some kind of popular mandate like FDR is supposed to have had, then it would be a sign that he could probably get away with sweeping changes like FDR did, but that extra power would be coming from the knowledge that most people were in favor of those things he wanted to do. The margin in those days was evidence that the popular mandate existed, it did not create or bestow a popular mandate.
But elections no longer work this way. The country is 50-50, several times in the last 20 years a President has won with LESS than 50%, and there is never going to be some sweeping mandate for Biden. A third-party candidate is not going to make Biden supported by much more than 50% of the electorate, and the 50-ish percent that doesn’t support him may have voted for 50 different people but they will all consider his victory less-than-legitimate, and it won’t mean anything to anyone if he got twice the ballots of the second-place finisher, because he’s still only going to have a bare majority if he has a majority at all.
Do you really think most people here are unaware of what you’re describing?
Quite a few of the regulars here seem to think that getting the right candidate and the right message will turn it around. But it’s a different world from the one we grew up in. If Schoolhouse Rock and Mr Smith Goes to Washington were ever the way things worked, that’s not the case now.
Biden v. Republican (DeSantis?) v. Trump v. Manchin v. West?
It could get interesting.
Cornel and Jr.
What a team thet will make.
Frederick:
You seem to think there is no margin of victory that the left can’t overcome through cheating. I think it has to be at least somewhat close for cheating to be a factor that matters. Therefore, there could be a margin of victory of a magnitude that cheating could not overcome. If Trump were to run third-party, I think that margin of victory would be even less likely to be achieved by the GOP, no matter how unpopular Biden might be. And he is very unpopular.
In addition, you seem to think that if Biden were to win by a very wide margin it would have the same effect as a narrow victory by a hair, in terms of what he could do with that victory. I think a huge victory gives the Democrats bragging rights to claim a mandate to do almost literally anything, plus if many Trump 3rd-party voters were so disaffected that they didn’t vote for the GOP candidates for Congress either, Democrats would be more likely to control Congress as well. Unchecked power for the Democrats.
I think everyone here has a pretty high level of cynicism about elections at this point, but that your level of cynicism is even higher. It seems to me that you believe that only your own level of cynicism is justified and that the others are naive. I don’t agree. I think a GOP win is highly unlikely but not absolutely impossible, and that there’s no reason to make it even more unlikely than it already is by Trump running 3rd party. I also think that it is more likely than not that he will be the nominee of the GOP, so the entire question will be moot. And I think that if he is the nominee he will lose the general, but that won’t tell us anything about whether some other GOP nominee might have won.
Your last paragraph in your most recent comment on this thread is a good example of the kind of condescending “you’re all so naive” attitude to which I am objecting. No one here thinks “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” is the world in which we now live, and you are insulting them to discuss the situation as though they aren’t aware of this fact. You’re welcome to be the most cynical of all, and perhaps you are correct to be so cynical, but it doesn’t mean other people are as naive as you seem to think they are.
@neo:Therefore, there could be a margin of victory of a magnitude that cheating could not overcome.
Such a margin is theoretically possible, sure, but given the history of the last 16 years how likely is it that it’s very different? And there’s not one margin of victory, is there? You have to win beyond the margin of cheating in numerous critical geographically limited electoral districts in order to win the Electoral College, don’t you?
I think a huge victory gives the Democrats bragging rights to claim a mandate to do almost literally anything,
They always claim this, at least in every election I can remember (going back to 1980).
It seems to me that you believe that only your own level of cynicism is justified and that the others are naive.
Is it wrong for me to think that something I believe is right? I mean, don’t you believe that only your level of cynicism is justified and that mine is excessive? It’s not usual, is it, to believe things you don’t think are right?
condescending… insulting
Tone doesn’t come across well in text-only formats. My comments are above-average civil, even when people are not civil to me, and given that I don’t think I merit the adjectives you’re using here.
Cornel West is the font of the single stupidest public utterance I have ever encountered. In 2002, he tangled with Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers. Summers urged West — who was a black-studies [phew] professor at Harvard — to engage in serious scholarship, instead of recording rap CDs and indulging in other fripperies
From a Newsmax account at the time:
“[Summers’s] attack on me was the wrong person, wrong professor and the wrong Negro, as it were. There is a certain level of respect that I require,” West said on Monday’s “The Tavis Smiley Show” on National Public Radio. West called Summers’s criticism an “attack on me” and referred to Summers as “the Ariel Sharon of American higher education,” a reference to the hard-line Israel Prime Minister.
“[Summers] acts like a bull in a china shop; he acts like a bully in a very delicate and dangerous situation,” West explained to Smiley.
Got that? West claimed that being mildly criticized by Summers amounted to a “dangerous situation.” That’s an apt precursor to today’s snowflakes who insist that “silence is violence,” etc.
I strongly support the candidacy of Cornel West. I would strongly support the candidacy of any other Dimwit Party goons. Not that I would actually vote for or monetarily support any of them. But the more fractious that party is, the harder it will be for them to win the White House….unless, of course, they commit voter fraud. AGAIN!
“In 2002, he tangled with Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers. Summers urged West — who was a black-studies [phew] professor at Harvard — to engage in serious scholarship, instead of recording rap CDs”
It’s hard to believe that Harvard, just 20 years ago, wouldn’t consider a rap CD produced by a black professor to be the pinnacle of scholarly activity, as it would today.
they have strategically gamed out key rotten boroughs, fulton, maricopa, wayne (that they extorted the supervisors recall, dane, which seems to preside over the rest of the state, etc
@miguel:they have strategically gamed out key rotten boroughs
There are about 160 million registered voters in the US today. Only 70% of them voted in 2020, supposedly. That means there’s something like 48 million votes out there, which can be tapped to overwhelm any potential Republican performance.
But nothing like 48 million is needed; there’s no need to run up the total in districts that are already reliably blue*. They’re just needed in the blue cities in purple states.
There’s no one “margin of fraud”, there’s dozens and in order to win the Electoral College the Republican candidate has to beat the margin in every single one of them in the states that voted for Trump in 2020, as well as some large fraction of them in states that went for Biden in 2020. If a state cleaned up its elections since 2020 there’s a chance of that, but none of the states Republicans need to win in 2024 have done this, as their elections are controlled by Democrats.
*If they wanted to score a propaganda goal then they could run up the popular vote in blue states, certainly, but propaganda does not have to be based on any actual event. Easier to focus on the few districts needed to secure the Electoral College and then the media will proclaim any kind of propaganda desired.
Elections are so close now that third party candidates — Ralph Nader, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein — can swing elections one way or the other. That is, assuming the elections are fair and honest, which is assuming a lot nowadays.
As I understand it, the People’s Party started in 2017 in hopes of providing at third party for Bernie Sanders in 2020. Sanders rejected it, but it managed to get on the ballot in some states. Old-timers will remember Dr. Benjamin Spock running for president in the Seventies as the candidate of an earlier, unrelated People’s Party.
An arch-leftist, West gets along very well with arch-conservative and fellow Princeton professor Robert George. I don’t have much use for West, but I’m not going to pile on either. Politics do get bitter and ugly, but I’ll try to be behind the curve, rather than ahead of it.
What we’ve seen in the last three years suggests that Democrats will exploit a narrow victory almost as much as a landslide. Winning both Houses of Congress as well as the presidency makes that easier, but control of the media and the bureaucracy counts for almost as much.
I saw Cornel West speak at my brothers graduation from SUNY Plattsburgh many moons ago. Speaks nonsense with the conviction of a revival preacher. Entertaining, I suppose, if you pay no attention to the implications of what the guy was saying…
I’m agreeing with Frederick here. The court decisions since the last election have shown that they won’t intervene. So its going to be who counts the votes that matter. And if the courts won’t uphold fraud to overturn elections what then ?
Protests ? We know that Jan 6 was to a large extent an invention of the left as was mostly peaceful or instigated by the deep state.
Republican governors ? Well Georgia was a republican state – how did that end up ? With Trump being investigated for questioning the results.
I don’t hold alot of hope. I’ve seen elsewhere noted that the policy position of Democrats has become more extreme since the last election, and it would seem a factor is that they no longer fear being defeated at the ballot box.
If you can’t win at the ballot box due to fraud, can’t win in court due to the unwillingness of courts to get involved, and can’t win in the court of public opinion due to criminalisation of protest – exactly what does the left have to fear and what options remain/ ?
“*If they wanted to score a propaganda goal then they could run up the popular vote in blue states, certainly, but propaganda does not have to be based on any actual event. Easier to focus on the few districts needed to secure the Electoral College and then the media will proclaim any kind of propaganda desired.”
I suspect this is already the case in states such as California due to a combination of unsecure or deliberately inflated election roles and ballot harvesting/creation.