Democrats Prepare Aggressive Counter to Third-Party Threats
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An army of lawyers aims to challenge the steadily advancing ballot-access efforts of independent candidates, who Democrats fear could peel votes away in swing states.
The Democratic Party, increasingly alarmed by the potential for third-party candidates to swing the election to former President Donald J. Trump, has put together a new team of lawyers aimed at tracking the threat, especially in key battleground states.
The effort comes as challengers — including the independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West plus groups like No Labels as well as the Green Party — have ramped up their push to qualify for states’ ballots ahead of critical deadlines in the spring and summer.
The legal offensive, led by Dana Remus, who until 2022 served as President Biden’s White House counsel, and Robert Lenhard, an outside lawyer for the party, will be aided by a communications team dedicated to countering candidates who Democrats fear could play spoiler to Mr. Biden. It amounts to a kind of legal Whac-a-Mole, a state-by-state counterinsurgency plan ahead of an election that could hinge on just a few thousand votes in swing states.
The aim “is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,” Mr. Lenhard said.
Third-party candidates have haunted Democrats in recent presidential elections — Ralph Nader is widely faulted for costing Al Gore the White House in 2000, and some in the party have argued that Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, drew votes from Hillary Clinton in 2016 in swing states she narrowly lost to Mr. Trump.
There was little third-party activity in 2020, and it’s unclear what effect the possible presence of such candidates on the ballot this year would have. But fears among Democrats are particularly acute this year, with polls suggesting that Mr. Trump’s base of support is much more fixed than Mr. Biden’s, meaning it’s possible that some of the president’s voters could be open to an alternative.
