Let’s be honest. This is usually a little bit of an exciting year as we get to start seeing which candidates are going to be running for president in 2024. There are already several names that have been tossed into the hat and you can guarantee that there are going to be a lot more to come.
If you just think about the most recent primary elections, there have been more candidates in the field than in the years prior. If I’m not mistaken there were somewhere around 15-20 people in each side of the race.
Personally speaking, I hate that we’ve confined ourselves to what is basically a two-party system. It’s either going to be a Democrat or a Republican and that doesn’t leave any room for anyone else. Sure, there are third party candidates, but you know as well as I do that a vote for them is a wasted vote. Say what you want, but whoever you dislike the most gets one vote closer, because in order for him to prevail, he doesn’t need your vote, he just needs you to not vote for his opponent.
However, many Democrats are in a panic this time as a new political group is going after Joe Biden. The group known as No Labels is supposedly a centrist political group that wants a moderate bipartisan ticket in 2024. This would throw a wrench in the Democrats’ plans as they believe this option would hurt Joe Biden more than it would Donald Trump and would ultimately lead to another Trump victory.
NBC News reporter,
The stark numbers driving Democratic panic about a third-party 2024 bid
Among all the reasons Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 but Hillary Clinton didn’t four years earlier, one looms especially large for the coming presidential election: the share of the third-party vote.
In 2016, 6% of all voters cast ballots for third-party and write-in candidates, with Libertarian Gary Johnson getting more than 3% of the national vote and Green Party nominee Jill Stein capturing more than 1%.
But in 2020, that proportion fell to 2%.
The difference effectively changed the threshold the major candidates needed to reach to win key battleground states — from 47% and 48% in 2016 to 49% and 50% in 2020.
That, Democrats say, made it easier for Trump to win in ’16 but not in ’20. And the numbers illustrate why Democratic groups — eyeing a possible, if not likely, rematch between Biden and Trump — want to keep the third-party vote share as small as possible, including moving to keep the well-financed third-party group No Labels off the ballot in battleground states.