Cornel West is sure he'll be on the ballot for the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate. But the Harvard prof isn't sure that President Biden will be one of his opponents. "I think he's going to have an LBJ moment [and] pull back," West tells Politico, referring to Lyndon B. Johnson's surprise withdrawal from the race in 1968. Instead, West won't be surprised if the Democratic nominee ends up being California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom he considers to be on the "B team," he says in the interview. "I'm just saying that I'm open to those possibilities, given the fluidity of the situation," he says of Biden. "He's running out of gas."
He sounds more sure that Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee, though he derided the former president as a "bona fide gangsta, neofascist Pied Piper leading the country for the second civil war." Other nuggets from the interview, per Politico:
- Spoiler: West rejects the "spoiler" label being applied by Democrats who fear he'll draw votes from the party nominee. "A vote for Biden, a vote for Trump is a vote for Biden and a vote for Trump," he says. "And there may be slices of people who say 'if I didn't vote for West, I would have voted for Biden.' But that's not, to me, a spoiler. If you're in the race, and you make a case and they vote for you, how do you become the spoiler?"
- Ballots: West says he's making progress on qualifying for state ballots but concedes he may max out at about 40, blaming the "entrenched" political system.
The
Hill notes that West—who's running an unaffiliated independent campaign after flirting with the People's Party and the Green Party—is polling only at about 5% nationally, with most of his support coming from young people and progressives. (More
Cornel West 2024 stories.)
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