Think I have something good to report, people. No, it’s not about how to get your kids Taylor Swift tickets in Tokyo.
My news is that Dean Phillips is not going to run as a third-party candidate for president.
“No! No!” he assured me when I asked him the big question this week.
OK, you’re thinking that you’ve had more thrilling news from the grocer on banana prices. But follow along for a minute.
Phillips is a representative from Minnesota who campaigned very energetically in the New Hampshire presidential primary. People there were a tad piqued by the Democrats’ decision to move the first official party vote to South Carolina. Despite all that rancor, Phillips, who, unlike President Biden, was on the ballot, got about 24,000 votes to Biden’s nearly 80,000 write-ins.
But he’s marching on. “Look at the data,” he said. (I discovered during our phone interview that Phillips says “Look at the data” a lot.) “I’m from the business world. It’s time to come out with a new product.”
If you want to run for president and it doesn’t look as if your party is going to nominate you, you have two real choices. You can do what Phillips is doing: keep competing in the primaries and hope voters will embrace your message. Or you can get yourself on the ballot in November as a third-party candidate.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
