As we get closer to the start of the 2024 primary season, Democratic strategists and Never-Trump Republican operatives continue to worry about No Labels, the dark-money group that is securing ballot lines in states to prepare for possibly running a third-party candidate in next year’s presidential election. They fear that such a move would likely siphon more votes from Joe Biden than Donald Trump, the presumed major party nominees, and perhaps throw the race to Trump in a few swing states. That’s a real concern, but we probably won’t know how much of a danger No Labels poses to Biden until next spring when No Labels—which appears to be funded more by Republicans than Democrats—decides whether to proceed with this project and nominate a candidate. I’ve broken several stories on No Labels and revealed some of its funders, but I’m wondering whether the Democrats and their anti-Trump GOP allies should fret more about another potential threat: Cornel West.
West, the fiery left-wing academic (once a Harvard professor) and orator, is running for president as a Green Party candidate. There are a bunch of little-known Green Party contenders, but he seems a good bet to snag the nomination (which will be determined at a yet-unscheduled convention). That will give him ballot access in many states. As of now, the Green Party is on the ballot in 17 states, including Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, which are likely be highly competitive in 2024. It’s aiming to get on many more. In the 2020 race, the Green Party won a spot on the ballot in 30 states and write-in status in nine others. In 2016, the party qualified in 44 states and could gather write-in votes in three others.
It’s arguable though not undeniable—the math is complicated—that had Jill Stein, the Moscow-boosted Green Party candidate, not been in the race in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won. And it’s widely believed—and pretty obvious—that in 2000 Ralph Nader’s collection of 97,488 votes in the decisive state of Florida as the Green Party nominee helped George W. Bush defeat Al Gore in a contest determined by 537 votes. Consequently, it’s not far-fetched for Democrats to peer ahead with trepidation that Cornel West could be a spoiler for Biden (or any other Democrat). He might only need to draw 10,000 or so votes in a swing state from Biden to turn the election toward Trump. (Maybe 11,780 in Georgia.) Could he do that by appealing to Black and progressive voters in a crucial state with his platform of Medicare for All, expanded public housing, anti-racism activism, and severe military budget cuts?
One expert on Black voting patterns tells me that West, a self-described “non-Marxist socialist” and public intellectual who attained celebrity status (he was in The Matrix movies), no longer has much juice within the Black community and is widely regarded as an egomaniacal has-been. It’s hard to know if that’s an accurate appraisal. West is a charismatic figure with a high profile derived in part from his anti-racism campaigning, his hip-hop politics, and assorted controversies (including clashes with Harvard University, which he left in 2021).
Maybe he can strike a chord among more lefty or disaffected Black voters. Maybe not. But it’s not hard to imagine a pro-Trump super-PAC pouring millions of dollars into promoting West—say, ads in Black media—in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Philadelphia, or Detroit and perhaps persuading a thin slice of voters to back West instead of Biden. And a thin slice may be all that is needed. (If a third-party candidate bags votes from people who wouldn’t otherwise have voted for the major-party candidates, you can’t count such votes as those for a spoiler.)
Not surprisingly, the West team is trying to shoot down all talk of him being a helpmate for Trump. In the New York Times on Sunday, his campaign manager, Peter Daou, contended that Democratic claims that West is a spoiler were anti-democratic: “You don’t protect democracy by trying to kick Greens off the ballot, and you don’t protect democracy by telling people, ‘You’re a spoiler.’ You can’t kill democracy to save it.”
Daou is an interesting case. A Lebanese American jazz musician who became a liberal blogger in the mid-2000s, he did digital work for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry (2004) and Hillary Clinton (2008). In 2016, he ran an outfit that fervently championed Clinton and vigorously blasted both Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was then challenging Clinton in the Democratic primaries. In 2020, Daou remade his politics. He slammed the Democratic establishment and became a Sanders superfan. He has since left the Democratic Party and urged Biden to resign. He now says that his calls in the last election for lefties and liberals to band together to defeat Trump were misguided: “I was going after the progressives and the leftists and the Green Party members who I have now come to see as my family. And it was a mistake. I was wrong. You know, it’s OK to be wrong.”
So Daou contends that he was wrong about Clinton in 2016 and wrong about the need to forge a popular front against Trump in 2020. But now he is right to support and assist a far-left third-party candidate whose candidacy could aid the far-right cult of Trump. Even though he tells the Times, “if Trump gets elected again, it’s the end of the world, it’s the end of the country,” he is sticking with the notion that the West candidacy is good for democracy. Daou might be wrong again. If so, the rest of the nation could pay a high price.
Meanwhile, West, who has been the honorary chairman of Democratic Socialists of America, is not scaling back on his association with the left. He has signed up as a headliner for an October 3 event featuring speakers and groups that oppose US military assistance to Ukraine. (They tend to claim that the barbarous war that Vladimir Putin launched is a proxy war for NATO and that the United States is responsible for the lack of a peaceful resolution.) The list includes Claudia de la Cruz, co-executive director of The People's Forum, which identifies itself as Marxist; Eugene Puryear, a former host on Radio Sputnik, a Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet; and Medea Benjamin, the leader of Code Pink, the subject of a recent New York Times investigation that showed that this antiwar group has received significant financial support from a pro-China tech mogul and has become a defender of China’s atrocious human rights record. (ABC News reported in August that West owed more than half a million dollars in unpaid taxes and unpaid child support.)
Appearing on Fox News last month, West excoriated Democrats who say he would be a spoiler, and he insisted he could win votes from the right and the left. (West is on the board of the Classic Learning Test, a right-wing competitor to the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. A fellow board member is Chris Rufo, the Ron DeSantis ally who concocted the conservative panic over critical race theory and who has led the crusade against discussing LGBTQ issues in public schools.) In an interview with the Hill, West, who supported Sanders in 2016 and 2020, mocked Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “window dressing, at worst” for the Democratic Party.
Sanders has voiced his opposition to West’s campaign, saying, "Where I disagree with my good friend Cornel West is, I think in these really, very difficult times…there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America." He added, “I think we've got to bring the entire progressive community to defeat Trump or whoever the Republican nominee will be [and] support Biden."
West, with the help of Daou, appears hell-bent on waging a campaign that denounces Democrats and Republicans, while progressive Democrats make the pitch that the left and the center must join forces to prevent Trump from retaking the White House and imposing the dangerous authoritarian schemes he and his allies have already cooked up. West certainly can’t win, but he does raise the specter of Jill Stein and Ralph Nader, as a candidate with the potential to screw things up big time for the Democratic candidate—and for American democracy. Stein and Nader demonstrated that a fringe candidate can make a big difference in a close election. That’s a history lesson that Prof. West has chosen to ignore.
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