A Cornel West Candidacy? The Stakes Are Too High to Ignore Political Reality

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July 26, 2023

Donald M. Suggs, Word in Black

The only possible impact of West’s “vain, selfish candidacy is to take some votes away” from Joe Biden.

Cornel West, 2024 presidential candidate (Getty Images)

Black Americans need to recognize that we face a disturbing political reality. Despite his avalanche of seemingly intractable legal problems, Donald J. Trump remains the favorite to be the nominee of the Republican Party in the general presidential election in 2024.

That would mean a rematch between President Biden and Trump.

The outcome of that election is likely to be determined by a few tens of thousands of votes. In the 2020 presidential election, the margin of victory for Joe Biden in Georgia and Arizona was less than 12,000 votes.

In stark terms, the winner of the presidential election next year will be sworn in in just 18 months. A second Trump administration will be better thought out and effective than his first — which saw a huge setback to our interests and concerns.

It is this alarming political reality that makes the self-absorbed, narcissistic third-party candidacy of Cornel West troubling.

Notwithstanding his right to run and the idealism he cited in his announcement (much of which I agree with), any measure of political acumen forces one to recall West’s ill-fated support of Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaign against then-Vice-President Al Gore in his race against George W. Bush. There were disastrous consequences of the outcome of that race for people all over this country, in Iraq, and around the globe as a result of Bush’s denial of climate change.

Read the rest of Suggs’ concerns in the original article.

Learn about another Black presidential candidate, Tim Scott, in this Breaking News article.

Find even more Breaking News here.

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