Third-party candidacies have caused major panic among left-leaning media pundits as they sound the alarm over threats to democracy and suggested people supporting such candidacies were throwing their votes away.
Figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for the White House as an independent, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who is mulling a run himself, have raised alarm that they could siphon valuable votes away from President Biden and deliver victory to former President Trump.
Tara Setmayer, a senior advisor to The Lincoln Project and a frequent guest on MSNBC, said Wednesday that this election would be no different from past third-party spoilers.
"I think that third-party candidates are spoilers. History could potentially repeat itself again, and now more than ever, the idea of a third party is a threat to our democracy. This is not the time for this. I understand the frustration that the American electorate has. People always express a certain amount of frustration with the two-party system, but that's the system we have. We’re not in a position now where we have two candidates who are equal threats to our democracy," she said.
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Setmayer added that Trump was a "threat to our democratic system."
She scolded voters who think Biden is too old and said they need to "take a step back" and look at the choices.
"Third parties do not work. They’re spoilers. If you want Donald Trump to win the election, then go ahead, throw your vote away and vote third party. If you don’t, and you want to maintain our democracy and work within our system to reform it, maybe down the line, there can be an opportunity to have ballot access or a third party or whatever, that’s fine. But right now, the threat to our democracy is too great to be messing around with third-party candidacies."
The co-hosts of "The View" also sounded the alarm recently, as Sunny Hostin blamed third-party candidate Jill Stein for Trump's victory in 2016.
"I just learned today that when Jill Stein ran and it was Trump versus Hillary, there were three states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin where Stein’s vote total exceeded Trump’s margin of victory. So had she perhaps not been part of it, Hillary Clinton would have been president," Hostin said.
Co-host Ana Navarro said she remembered when Ross Perot was considered a spoiler against President George H.W. Bush, although some experts argue Bill Clinton would have won regardless of Perot being in the race in 1992.
"In this case, you have got Joe Biden, a sane, decent, normal human, running against a man who is an existential threat to democracy and to the foreign world, to the international world, to the universe. So this is not a normal, ‘Oh, you know what? We can afford to have a spoiler. We can afford to have [Joe] Manchin running around,'" Navarro continued.
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NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard recently confronted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with his past remarks worrying that Ralph Nader's Green Party run in 2000 could hand the White House to Republican candidate George W. Bush. Democrats have long mourned that Nader's run that year prevented Al Gore from winning, as he lost the decisive state of Florida by less than 600 votes, while Nader took nearly 98,000 votes there.
Kennedy, who voted for Biden in 2020, was asked if he would pull out of the 2024 race if polling showed him taking votes from Biden and helping Trump, or vice-versa.
"I’m not going to bow out of the race," he told NBC. "I think Americans should have a choice — that they shouldn’t be forced to choose the least of two evils. That they should be able to vote in a democracy, or for candidates that they like, that inspire them and who they want to run."
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Democrats have also been sounding the alarm over third-party candidates in the context of Biden's re-election chances.
"A lot of Democrats have come to the realization over the last month that RFK [Jr.] and [Cornel] West are real electoral threats and not just curiosities, and the Middle East crisis is partially driving that, especially in West’s case," a Democrat involved in stopping third-party efforts told the media outlet. "The RFK problem is not that he gets 18 percent. It is that he gets 3 percent or 2 percent or 1 percent."
Biden's allies have reportedly considered creating an organization to respond to third-party concerns.
Democratic strategist James Carville said in late January that third-party candidates were going to get a lot of votes in 2024, citing voter disappointment in both Trump and Biden.
"The third party is going to get a lot of f---ing votes in 2024. I'm just telling you," Carville said. "Unless something really changes, and it's hard for me to see the change."
"It's just hard for me not to see an uninspiring election with the third party doing really well," Carville added.
Speaking in early January about the "No Labels" effort engaging with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Jennifer Palmeri, a former communications director for Hillary Clinton's campaign, used a quote from "Veep" to describe the "hubris" of their third-party efforts.
"There’s a line from ‘Veep’ which encapsulates what I think the goal and galling hubris of the ‘No Labels’ effort. Which is, we are on life support, like democracy is on life support, and I feel like people are pulling the plug to charge their phones," she said.
She said the effort was very "dangerous."
"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," Jim Kessler, a Democratic strategist with Third Way, told the Hill.
"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," he added.
Biden holds a six-point lead over Trump in a likely November election rematch, a recent national poll found, although other recent surveys have shown Trump with leads over Biden.
But the Quinnipiac University survey released last month indicated that the president's advantage over Trump shrinks in a multi-candidate general election field that also includes Kennedy.
The poll also shows Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley topping Biden by five points in a hypothetical November showdown, but Biden with a slight edge over the former South Carolina governor and former U.N. ambassador in a crowded field of contenders.
Fox News' Paul Steinhauser and Joe Schoffstall contributed to this report.
