Kerby Anderson

For many months, I have been saying that if the 2024 presidential election becomes a rematch of 2020, many voters will stay home. Recent polls confirm my prediction.

There is another possibility. The lack of enthusiasm for Biden and Trump might increase the possibility of more Americans voting for a third-party candidate. The announcement by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that he is running as an independent makes that possibility even more likely.

Of course, he is not the only third-party candidate. The Libertarian Party and the Green Party will no doubt nominate candidates that will appear on most ballots. The No Labels Party is a centrist party that may nominate one Democrat and one Republican for the ticket.

This scenario certainly explains why leaders in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have engaged in a scorched earth campaign against these parties and their candidates. The attacks last time on Jill Stein (Green Party) and Evan McMullin (Independent) will pale in comparison to the attacks we will see against third-party candidates.

We will be hearing that voting for a third-party candidate is throwing your vote away. It is not. The two major political parties don’t own your vote. They need to earn your vote. If you see a candidate worthy of your vote, you should vote for that person.

We will also be hearing that voting for a third-party candidate takes votes away from another political party. But that assumes the voter would have voted for a main-party candidate if a third-party candidate wasn’t on the ballot. That is a difficult argument to prove. Perhaps the best example of that is the 2000 Presidential election in which Democrats argued that Ralph Nader’s candidacy kept Al Gore from winning Florida.

This may be the year of the third-party, which will remind the major parties that they don’t own your vote.