Biden urged to go on offense against third-party challengers

Democrats are pressing President Biden to take on his third-party and independent opponents amid concerns they could seriously damage him in November.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein have all sparked party-wide fears that they could earn enough votes to help former President Trump win back the Oval Office.

So far, Biden has played it coy, generally avoiding attacking them directly. But now, as he cruises to the nomination, and more and more polls show him losing to Trump when a third-party candidate is a choice, some Democrats want the president to go on the offensive and are prepared to help aid him from the outside.

“Spoiler third-party candidates are an essential ingredient for any Trump win, and that is why they have been silent about No Labels and RFK,” warned Jim Kessler, a Democratic strategist with Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

“That is why the Biden team needs to make clear that anyone considering a third-party candidate is not merely risking throwing their vote away, but our democracy,” Kessler said.

Fears over a third-party spoiler have permeated both parties as Biden and Trump head toward a likely rematch. The insurgent candidates have argued that voters do not want either option on the top of the ticket, pointing to ample public polling that shows high disapproval numbers for both men.

While Kennedy and West face their own questions about how many state ballots they’ll manage to get on, Democrats are nonetheless taking them seriously and doing early legwork so that Biden can focus on Trump. 

“You have these folks nipping at our heels,” said Pat Dennis, the president of American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal super PAC. “That’s not to say they’re not dangerous. I do think they are extremely dangerous. And that’s why organizations like mine are focused so hard on them and are making sure people are aware of the real threat that they are.”

“We can do that because we’re not the president of the United States, and this is how I see our role,” Dennis said. “We’re to take care of these small-ball, dangerous, but ultimately ineffectual opponents.”

West, a staunch progressive who’s now an independent, and Stein, who’s running again with the Green Party, see Biden as incapable of meeting voters’ calls for a change of direction. They want him to move leftward, warning that he risks fracturing the liberal coalition that helped him win against Trump the first time. Polling shows he’s lost significant traction with part of that core base, including young voters.

Biden and his inner circle have been hesitant to address those concerns publicly, leaving the door open for third-party and independent voices to potentially have a lane. Dennis and other Democratic strategists see their work ahead as defining lesser-known candidates through their policy positions while also working to create a negative connotation beyond name ID for more prominent figures like Kennedy.

While that work is happening beyond the campaign infrastructure, some Democrats and election experts say that Biden could try to highlight contrasts with these candidates himself.

Bernard Tamas, author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties,” said that any of the so-called spoiler candidates would have to seize on an area that voters say Biden and Trump are failing to address.

“​​An effective third-party strategy in the U.S. is to be a spoiler with a purpose,” said Tamas, who is also a political science professor at Valdosta State University. “The key to successfully mounting a third-party challenge is to address some policy theme [or] stance that the major parties are missing or avoiding.”

One possible issue is the conflict in Gaza. Several of Biden’s winning constituencies from 2020 —younger voters, Arab Americans and Black voters — have criticized the Democratic administration’s response to the war, accusing Biden of discounting the Palestinian cause and high death toll as they work to address the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terror attacks against Israel. 

Both Stein and West are to the left of Biden on the issue. West has rallied heavily against the military industrial complex, and Stein is running on a traditionally leftist anti-war platform. Observers say both could be attractive to certain voters who see Biden as too entrenched in the conventional stance around America’s role in foreign conflicts.

“The Biden campaign needs to confront this head-on by addressing the issue and trying to coopt it, so as to take away the sting of the Stein and West campaigns,” Tamas said.

Seth Schuster, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, predicted that only “two candidates” will be able to compete in the fall.

“When voters head to the ballot box in November, they will face a choice between two starkly different visions for the country and only two candidates with paths to 270 electoral votes — President Biden who will fight for our freedoms and uphold our democracy, and Donald Trump who will strip away our rights, saying he’ll be a ‘dictator on day one,’” Schuster said. “Team Biden-Harris will spend the next nine months talking directly to voters to ensure they understand that choice.”

West, an independent candidate, suggested he’s willing to engage with the president if presented with the opportunity.

“I find it profoundly hypocritical for Biden to ‘defend’ democracy and ‘redeem’ the soul of the nation by trashing opponents at home and enabling genocide abroad,” he said. 

While the conventional party stance is that Biden must primarily use his power as president to govern and tout policy achievements at this stage of the campaign, others believe more can be done simultaneously. Polling shows support for the 81-year-old president eroding in key battlegrounds such as Michigan and Georgia, and many fear the presence of a third-party or independent candidate on the ticket would make his prospect for victory much more uncertain.

That fear has been amplified especially around Kennedy, who is trying to get on as many ballots as he can, though so far he has qualified only in Utah and New Hampshire. He has recently floated running as a Libertarian in an apparent effort to gain more ballot access.

Even Democrats who see these third-party efforts as far-fetched acknowledge the potential danger they pose for Biden, warning that something must be done about it.

“There is a reason why every third-party candidate of the last 50 years ultimately fell far short of their polling peak when votes were actually cast,” Kessler said. “People kick the tires on these minor candidates, but most return to one of the two main combatants. In this election, this effort to hasten that process needs to happen early because the stakes have never been greater.”