I am thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I won’t vote for him, but I’m just as unconvinced by the standard argument against voting for him.
Liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes a noble 2024 stab at the age-old argument that it’s somehow an abdication of responsibility to vote for anyone not nominated by one of the two major parties.
This year, one party nominated a philandering narcissist with the emotional continence of a 7-year-old who instigated a deadly violent riot when he lost the election four years ago. The other party nominated a chronic liar with no core beliefs who tries to make up for his unprecedented geriatric decrepitude with increasingly absurd vote-buying antics.
Yet Collins argues that third-party candidates are simply spoilers.
“This is the Third Party Thwack,” she writes. “The candidates can’t win, but they can screw things up for one of the real contenders. Most famous, of course, was Ralph Nader’s bid in 2000, which helped give us George W. Bush for president instead of Al Gore. In 2016, Hillary Clinton might have won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and her race against Trump — if the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, hadn’t been on the ballot, draining away some of the people who wanted to vote for a woman.”
It’s telling that Collins doesn’t mention Minnesota or New Hampshire, where Hillary Clinton carried the state with less than 47%. In both states, Libertarian Gary Johnson massively outpolled Jill Stein. In Minnesota, his vote total was nearly thrice Clinton’s margin of victory. In New Hampshire, Johnson got 10 times her margin.
Also, Collins is positing that if Stein hadn’t been on the Pennsylvania ballot, 89% of her voters would have held their noses and voted for Clinton, while not a single one would have voted for Trump.
Her premises are, firstly, that Ralph Nader gave us George W. Bush, and secondly, that Bush was worse than Al Gore. I don’t agree with the second, and to point No. 1, I’d say Gore should have done more, perhaps, to cater to the Nader voter.
What if you really think, as I do, that both major party nominees in 2024 are unqualified for the White House? Doesn’t a third-party vote make sense?
Collins writes: “People, this is a bad, bad idea. Voting for an independent candidate in a presidential contest does not make you principled. It makes you a citizen who cares more about looking cool and above it all than about taking part in the real democratic process.”
This is all simply an assertion, and it’s not a terribly convincing assertion. Yes, some of us have a principle that we won’t vote for people who are unqualified for the job. For us, refusing to vote for either is voting on principle.
Filing a protest against the two major parties might actually make a difference and make them more likely to pick qualified candidates in the future.
Most importantly, Collins has a horrifically strained understanding of “the real democratic process.” She seems to think that it is limited to pulling a lever in November of even-numbered years.
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Imagine a voter who campaigned for Nikki Haley, knocked on doors, filled out paperwork to get her on the ballot, spoke for her in town halls, and voted for her in the primary. Then imagine that voter, disappointed in the Republican primary results, talked to her neighbors voting for Trump, Biden, and Kennedy to figure out if she could bring herself to vote for any of them.
If she shows up on Election Day and writes in Haley for president, do you agree with Collins that this person was less involved in democracy than the op-ed reader whose only involvement was holding his nose and pulling the lever for one of two unfit men?