Democratic political strategist David Axelrod is sounding the alarm over the potential of a third-party candidate “tipping the election” to Donald Trump in 2024.

“In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” Axelrod tweeted. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again. Risky business,”

Cornel West, a philosophy professor and progressive activist, initially declared his candidacy under the People’s Party, then switched over to the Green Party. Slate reported Democrats are worried that West’s “celebrity” will eat into the liberal vote.

A recent Economist-YouGov poll found that 44 percent of American adults would “vote for a third party or an independent candidate.” A separate NBC News poll showed that more Democrats than Republicans are open to third-party voting in 2024. It’s not outlandish, then, to think some of them will peel off to support famed intellectual Cornel West, who is seeking the Green Party’s nomination. The longtime professor continues to hold plenty of respect in progressive circles—as a bombastic and righteous public scholar, as a committed socialist, as a former Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate.

West brought on Jill Stein to manage his campaign, even though she has been the “commonly blamed spoiler” of the 2016 race that swept Donald Trump into the White House. Vox reported, “Jill Stein got more votes than Trump’s victory margin in 3 key states,” taking enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to put him over the top.

“So maybe the lesson isn’t so much that Stein acted as a spoiler but that Democrats simply didn’t connect with a bunch of left-wing voters that they should have been able to attract,” wrote Vox reporter German Lopez.

With so many concerns over President Joe Biden‘s mental and physical fitness due to his age — at 80, Biden is the oldest U.S. president in history — a potential failure of Biden to appeal to Democrats could send the liberal vote right into West’s pocket, leading to a redux of 2016 for Trump.

The post ‘Risky Business’: David Axelrod Warns Cornel West Could Lead To 2024 Win For Donald Trump first appeared on Mediaite.

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