The Memo: Democrat suspicions grow about RFK Jr., Cornel West, No Labels

Democrats aren’t just growing concerned about some potential third-party presidential candidates. They’re also becoming increasingly suspicious about those people’s motivations.

Supporters of President Biden see several threats on the horizon, beyond the Republican Party itself.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gained more traction than many Democrats expected in his primary challenge to Biden. A potential presidential candidacy facilitated by the No Labels group is causing consternation. And the decision by left-wing academic and author Cornel West to seek the Green Party’s presidential nomination further jangles nerves.

The slenderness of Biden’s 2020 victory in the electoral college undergirds many of these concerns. 

Even though Biden garnered roughly 7 million more votes nationwide than then-President Trump, the electoral college would have been tied had three states — Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin — gone the other way. Biden’s margin of victory in each of those states was less than 1 percentage point.

That means Democrats are keenly aware of the potential for a third-party candidate to shift the result of the 2024 election — and equally aware of the willingness of Republicans and conservatives to nudge such candidacies along.

Kennedy’s presidential bid is eyed with more suspicion than any other by mainstream Democrats, in part because of some peculiar political bedfellows.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, has been broadly sympathetic to Kennedy, and the candidate has appeared on Bannon’s podcast. Longtime Trump ally and mischief-maker Roger Stone has even advanced the idea of a Trump-Kennedy “unity ticket.”

Last month, during a NewsNation town hall event, Kennedy declined to commit to supporting Biden if the president officially becomes the Democratic nominee. Next week, Kennedy will appear as a witness before the Republican-led House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

And Friday, Kennedy called Trump “probably the most successful debater in this country since Lincoln-Douglas” during a Fox News interview.

Put it all together, and it’s more than enough to raise eyebrows among other Democrats.

“I don’t know what’s going on there. At one time I saw Kennedy as a true environmental champion,” said Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh. “But now his candidacy is being propped up by a bunch of right-wing types who seem to use Kennedy as a vehicle to undermine Biden. I am incredibly disappointed by his candidacy and the mess he is creating.”

Kennedy’s campaign hit back at those kinds of criticisms in an email to The Hill. 

“Challengers to a weak or unpopular candidate are not the cause of the weakness,” a Kennedy campaign spokesperson said. “If President Biden is concerned about his chances of reelection, he should uphold the traditional Democratic values on which he is vulnerable: peace, civil liberties, and clean government. Then there would be no serious challengers to his nomination.”

Skepticism of a different kind surrounds No Labels.

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More from The Hill

• Manchin stokes speculation with No Labels event

• Mark Kelly ‘concerned’ about third-party movement No Labels

• Trump calls RFK Jr. ‘a very smart person’

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The purportedly centrist organization has been trying to ensure ballot access in as many states as possible, even as it says it will not make a decision until next year as to whether to actually run a candidate. 

So far, No Labels appears to have secured a place on the ballot in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Utah.

On Monday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) will speak at a No Labels town hall in New Hampshire.

Speculation about a No Labels presidential candidate has centered more on Manchin than anyone else. If he does not run for president, the senator faces a challenging Senate reelection campaign in 2024 in his heavily Republican state. He has a long record of being willing to buck party orthodoxy, even at the cost of aggravating his party colleagues.

Manchin, however, has said nothing definitive about either seeking the presidency or reelection to the Senate.

More broadly, the No Labels effort has drawn strong criticism even from centrist Democratic members of Congress. 

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), for example, told Politico back in May that No Labels was “wasting time, energy, and money on a bizarre effort that confuses and divides voters, and has one obvious outcome — reelecting Donald Trump as president.”

Others further to the left are just as scathing.

Joel Payne, the chief communications officer for progressive group MoveOn, which has opposed No Labels’s ballot push, told this column that No Labels “claims to want to stamp out extremism in politics. But jumping in as a spoiler candidate would only enable probably the most extreme president we’ve ever had, Donald Trump, to win in 2024.”

Not so, countered No Labels’s chief strategist Ryan Clancy, who said that the group itself had not put any name, including Manchin’s, forward as a potential candidate. 

Clancy argued that the idea of a No Labels candidate as a spoiler was inaccurate, because there is no way of knowing whether an unnamed candidate would take votes disproportionately from one party rather than the other.

More broadly, Clancy said, “What we are doing is something so fundamental, which is working to give the American people choices, and we may never offer our ballot lines anyway. We have said that from the very beginning.”

“Just the fact of No Labels giving people a choice has elicited such an overreaction,” Clancy added.

The attempt by West to secure the nomination of the Green Party is seen very differently.

Broadly speaking, Democrats don’t see West’s candidacy as being in bad faith. Rather, they worry that he and the Green Party are being too cavalier about the possibility that they could tip the election to a Republican, including Trump.

David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist best known for his key role in getting former President Obama elected, recently tweeted that in 2016 the Green Party had “played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump. Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business.”

West, reached by phone Friday, hit back against that kind of warning.

“Any critique of an existing president is construed as helping Republicans, so what does one do?” West asked rhetorically. “Does one remain silent about the suffering of the Palestinians, the proxy war in Russia, the needs of poor and working people?

“No. We have to raise our voices in some way — and as soon as we do we are accused of being Trump supporters. That’s absurd.”

With so much at stake over the next 16 months before Election Day, the war of words is only getting started.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.