Democratic jitters grow over Cornel West’s third-party bid
Democratic jitters grow over Cornel West’s third-party bid
Cornel West’s third-party presidential campaign is stirring up unpleasant flashbacks to 2016 for members of the Democratic Party, some of whom are starting to grow anxious about the effect it could…
Cornel West recently announced he is running for president as a Green Party candidate, challenging President Biden in 2024. Some Democrats worry that West's candidacy could split the progressive vote and help reelect Donald Trump if he is the Republican nominee again, as Jill Stein's campaign did in 2016. However, West has supporters who see his run as a way to push Biden further left on issues. Still, even some progressives acknowledge West could hurt Biden's chances of reelection. Democrats argue that beating Trump and enacting progressive policies requires electing Democrats first.
This author wrote basically the same article last week but for RFK Jr (including even calling it “jitters”): https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4037218-rfk-jr-s-rising-profile-sparks-democratic-jitters/amp/
I’m personally pretty tired of “dems in disarray” as a narrative. I thought we left that behind in the midterms.
this context plus the Hill's existing reputation really makes this look like fishing for engagement, because even on the left Cornel's announcement was polarizing and not particularly well lauded. i cannot begin to imagine anybody but terminally online D voters caring about his presence in the race.
Ugh. this is such an important catch I almost think @veraticus's comment should be pinned for important context.
Yeah this just seems like fishing for eyeballs.
Ranked. Voting. Please.
Absurd that a progressive candidate entering the race can somehow be a bad thing.
Which is exactly why we'll probably never get it nationwide. It's a feature, not a bug.
The problem is, as long as the 12th Amendment remains the law, US Presidential elections will only ever be decided using FPTP.
“In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,”
They'll blame anything other than the facts of Hillary being unlikable and Wasserman-Schulz being incompetent. Johnson took 3x as many votes from the Republicans as Stein took from the Democrats. In the end, Hillary was an electoral dud and Wasserman-Schulz' mishandling of the primaries led to faithless electors.
Yes, ultimately it's the establishment's philosphy of trying to scrape by on what crumbs of constituents they can pick up from the right end of the spectrum. It's a completely unnecessary high-wire act that they do all just to make sure their corporate backed candidates are palletable by comparison.
Same high risk, short-sighted strategy they played during the last midterms where they helped prop up all these absolute loons in the GOP so that they would have opponents who, only by shocking contrast, made their own milquetoast candidates look appealing.
In those scenarios even when you win you lose because you give these wingnuts a platform and their ideas spread, undermining the fabric of the electorate even if you got a short-term win out of it.
It's very frustrating that Dems learned nothing from Trump's win, and will flirt with plunging us into literal fascism just to ensure the country doesn't move towards a centered, progressive direction.
Yeah I'm so sick of hearing about the Green Party. Yes they suck, but we have data on who green voters are, and only about 30% of them said they would vote for a Democrat if there was no green candidate.
It's a convenient excuse for establishment Democrats to avoid taking responsibility for their losses, but doesn't hold up to any level of scrutiny. Their biggest issue is consistently failing to motivate their own base. Obama understood that Democratic voters respond well to positive campaign strategies while Clinton and Biden cling to 90s triangulation strategies. Which didn't even work back then they just got lucky that Ross Perot existed.
Green Party voters vote against the system. You can't blame losses on them because the vast majority would simply sit the election out instead of voting for a Dem.
Did he switch to the Green Party? When he first announced it was under "The People's Party" which created some criticism because of the sexual assault allegations of the party's founder and West's seeming ambivalence in addressing that.
Honestly I think he's just looking to spoil the vote. I'm progressive and fully recognize the problems with the conservative/liberal Democrat establishment, I do not like Biden and think he's an arrogant fool to be running again, but I don't think what we need right now is an intellectual trying to lead the charge. This isn't a political climate where that's a winning look you can sell to the general public who is struggling to make ends meet.
I'm really suspicious of politicians who style themselves as academics and scholars, not because I'm against academics and scholars but because it often comes off as an attempt to create this facade of authority. I get Michio Kaku vibes from people like West. Even if genuine, it's an impractical mindset for politics and not actually representative of average people and their needs. Academics should serve as advisors to more practical, savvy politicians.
I hadn't heard about the sexual assault allegations, but I'm not really surprised. What I have heard is that "The People's Party" is technically not even a political party (and thus doesn't qualify for ballot access), and that "leftist" "comedian" Jimmy Dore is a prominent member. The fact that West even considered working with them makes me question both his judgement, and his seriousness as a candidate.
Yes, it's unclear what the angle is since the chance of him winning is close to zero.
There is some value in these kinds of challenges shaping the discussion and getting incumbents to maybe promise to add progressive policies to their agenda, but that's all it really is; a promise.
Biden promised all kind of things to get the progressive vote, but when the chips have been down he's not delivered on a lot of those really. Lots of progressive sounding legislative packages, but when you look inside it's more pork than anything else, or when he does act he does it in these inefficient, roundabout ways that are more likely to fail and get struck down (ex. Student debt)
So in the end, I don't know if challenging a conservative incumbent at this stage will yield anything real other than the chance for catastrophic failure. Biden chose to run again, so we're going to be stuck squeaking him under the wire again or ending up with Trump. The margin of error in a Biden v Trump election is shockingly thin, judging from current polls.
LOL - Jill Stein had ZERO impact in 2016. The loss was all on Hillary failing to show up in Wisconsin and Michigan and talking smack about coal in Pennsylvania.
You can't win if you take states for granted. Joe won all three of them and that put him over the top.
Jill Stein was an unknown then, and Trump was a novel threat. West has more name recognition, which is everything in politics. The Dems should be scared. But they should also not shit on the leftier end of their electorate constantly. Votes are earned, and no citizen owes their vote to any single party. When the Dems stop assuming the left will vote for their candidates because they don’t have electoral alternatives, maybe some will come out.
Also? Dems didn’t protect my bodily autonomy. I had to get parts of my body removed for full and equal citizenship. They had decades to codify Roe. I voted for Dems my whole adult life. All we got was endless fundraising letters. If the party can’t do their job, they should disband and let someone else do it, not bitch about leftist voters.
This election is too important to split the vote. Biden should drop out and endorse West now to ensure Trump is defeated!
Your first sentence almost gave me an anyeurism. 🤣🤣🤣
Perhaps the Democratic Party should understand that this is what happens when you campaign on social justice and then govern like a Republican from the early 2000s, and then adjust accordingly. For many on the left, the prospect of having a Republican president in 2024 may be less frightening than letting the center-right Democrats get bullied around by the GOP and Fox News for another 4 years while actively targeting/destroying actual progressive movements. I'm not necessarily saying I'm on that side of the fence myself, but the Dems have spent the last few years deeply undercutting a lot of the progressive base that got Biden across the finish line and into the White House.
i don't really know many on the left who would find the idea of a modern republican less frightening than center-right Democrats, and any awareness of what republican state legislators are currently doing in red states should disabuse people of that notion. whatever disappointments suffered under our current gov are not a match for what was happening under the other guy by any measure, and if you're queer it really should not even be a question as to who is more frightening.
the comment about getting bullied by the GOP and Fox doesn't really make sense to me either. Fox isn't doing great right now, state GOP is hemorrhaging money, and Trump's been indicted several times, with more coming down soon. i'm nowhere near happy with Biden, and would prefer somebody far more progressive, but your perspective just doesn't seem super well informed to me. i'm not sure where you're getting your info.
i'd also like to know what movements have been targeted/destroyed. the things i can think of are the railroad strike, which didn't turn out as bad as people think, and maybe what's going on with Stop Cop City? there are lots of state and city Democrats fucking with that shit, but its a pretty republican push overall, and i don't think the federal government is involved yet.
Instead of "just leaving this here", how about you actually clarify what you're implying? It sounds like you're accusing Jill Stein of being a Russian asset, and I think it's really irresponsible to make this kind of accusation in a vague way that gives you plausible deniability.
I don't know for sure who is and isn't a "Russian asset" for any given definition of "Russian asset."
I mean, there was this, but she assures us that it meant nothing.
But in any case, the third party candidacy of the Green Party was absolutely a tool for Russia in 2016 to peel off potential Democratic voters to elect Trump, and I would expect the same games to be played this year. Specifically the Russian troll army, the Internet Research Agency, created faux Black voices on social media platforms and, after accumulating sufficient followers to have a large platform, attempted to convince Black voters to either not vote at all or vote third party.
Look, I love pretty much everything Cornell West stands for, but this seems like an incredibly unwise move, to put the best possible face on it.
These days Green Party is code for Kremlin Asset. Just look to where Jill Stein contested 2016 results and Gemany's green party actions in trying to stamp out support for Ukraine.
Just look to where Jill Stein contested 2016 results and Gemany’s green party actions in trying to stamp out support for Ukraine.
i'm not sure what these two things have to do with each other, or why either is indicative of being a "Kremlin asset" when the more logical explanation for both is just that Green parties are and have historically been full of people with idealistic political analysis. sure, Stein could be bought off by Russia or something―but i feel like it's a lot more likely she's just a weird person with ill-informed takes (she's basically a soft-antivaxxer and think Wi-Fi has health effects on children's brains) and that's why she does weird political things.
Over on the other site somebody put up a screenshot of a Tweet from Cornell West espousing the position of the US shouldn't be in NATO and we're paying to defend Europe. Therefore we should just drop it and leave Ukraine to fend for themselves.
If Sergei Lavrov has West's Twitter password he would have posted something pretty similar, aka the full-on Tankie talking points.
So, like 2016 DNC wants to keep the status quo, and won’t bend at all. At least this time the actual issue isn’t on the same ticket, and they can’t force the ticket. I honestly don’t think stein was their problem. Bernie was. And Clinton (she is wildly disliked by MANY) herself. But it was the DNC treatment of Bernie that cost them, not the third party ticket votes. At least imo.
Personally I’m excited to see people running, who share my views, more than any “mainstream” candidate ever has.
Democrats argue that beating Trump and enacting progressive policies requires electing Democrats first.
They're still arguing that? We've been waiting for the Dems to enact progressive policies for the past two years. It turns out that if you want progressive policies, you actually have to elect progressives.
Which Dems have you been waiting on to enact progressive policies? The House is controlled by MAGA republicans and the Senate is in a dead lock for the most part. How do you get any progressive policies through there? The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives that will deny anything moderately progressive.
Real change starts with local and state elections and electing Dems there. If you want that change, then try to help Dems in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, etc. Otherwise, just electing a Dem president is not going to suddenly make for progressive policies. It will slow down the MAGA bunch, but it won’t completely stop them until there is real change at the local and state levels.
Progressives saw climate change legislation and student loan reform in the last two years. If that's not enough, then you'll need a Senate supermajority.
The latter was shot down by the SCOTUS, which serves as a reminder that progressive policies can easily be undone.
Do you have a solution to enacting progressive policy that doesn't require electing a bunch of Democrats to create, introduce and vote on said legislation?
No, they have no solution, all they want you to do is Vote Democrat and shut up because any criticism will make you a "Russian Asset"
I'm So Glad that Cornel West is Running because he's immediately exposing all the lies of the Liberals and how they don't care about democracy itself. If Democrats feel so threatened by West maybe they will adopt some of his promises, like for example, Ending the Blockade of Cuba, or pardoning political prisoners, things West Promises to do first days in office.
My first thought was; did Jill Stein's 2016 campaign have any real impact on the result?
Looking at this table of results implies that if all Stein voters had voted for Clinton, then maybe Clinton would have won Michigan (final EC result is still 290:248), but the contests elsewhere either weren't close enough, or didn't have enough Green voters to matter. Looking at that table, it's clear that the Libertarians had a much bigger impact.
If another 2016 happens because of the third candidate people I will be so pissed. We need to be focused on keeping fascism at bay, then we can try some new things