WASHINGTON – Americans haven’t elected an independent president since George Washington, but a public turned off by two historically unpopular frontrunners appears more open than ever to the rich crop of wildcards who could tilt the election in 2024.
Voters have made clear in multiple polls that they don’t want a rematch between Mr Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and are willing to take a serious look at the growing number of politicians mulling independent or third-party campaigns.
None has much of a chance of winning the White House in November but several so-called “spoilers” could sway a close election in either direction, say analysts.
Democrats in particular fear a wildcard candidate harming their prospects, recalling how Green Party standard-bearer Jill Stein threw a spanner in the works for Mrs Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Ms Stein is running again alongside several hopefuls seeking to upend the two-party system, such as racial justice activist Cornel West and Mr Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a candidate with a famous name who poses the biggest threat to the status quo.
Political consultant Douglas MacKinnon, a White House aide in the Reagan years, believes John F Kennedy’s nephew is shaping 2024 into a genuine three-person race, and points doubters to the multitude of pundits who gave Republican Trump no hope in 2016.
“Kennedy’s words and warnings are now resonating with young voters here in the US,” Mr MacKinnon wrote in an op-ed for politics newspaper The Hill. “So much so that he now leads both Biden and Trump with that demographic.”
In the absence of a genuinely competitive nomination processes for either of the major parties, this year’s campaign is set to be one of the longest in history.
Mr Biden and Trump are already drawing battle lines, even as recent polls by the NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research and the University of Massachusetts Amherst showed more than half of voters were unhappy about a re-run of 2020.
Opinions still differ on which candidate is more threatened by the scion of America’s most storied Democratic dynasty, who shares conspiratorial views on vaccines and an enmity for Ukraine aid that delights Trumpists.
Mr Biden and Trump are virtually tied in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, but throw Mr Kennedy into the mix and he takes 17 per cent – while Trump opens a lead of five percentage points.
Mr Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, cautioned that polls often overstate support for independents, who tend to start with lofty ambitions before flaming out.
But he added: “Polls that include all of the potential third-party candidates usually show Biden hurt a bit more by them than Trump.”
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