2024 is not the time for third parties. If you don’t like Biden or Trump, don’t vote | Opinion

If Donald Trump wins the presidency in 2024, America will effectively become an authoritarian-type state. This threat will become a reality if third parties make a big play in the 2024 presidential election.

Remember that the great Ralph Nader decided to run as a third party candidate in Florida in 1980. He garnered over 97,000 votes. Al Gore lost Florida and the U.S. presidency to George W. Bush by less than 700 votes. Had Ralph Nader and the Green Party not been on the ballot, Al Gore would have received a majority of those votes and won.

Among the many results of this outcome is the fact that George W. Bush got to appoint Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito was the lead author of the court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, which gave women the right to an abortion and had been established law for decades.

Similarly, in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton was polling well ahead of Donald Trump, only to have her lead significantly plummet when then-FBI Director James Comey made public (and in violation of Department of Justice policy) a letter just days before the election.

Comey stated that the FBI was reopening its previously closed investigation of Hillary’s emails due to the “possibility” that there might be some relevant emails on the server belonging to someone else. This enabled Trump to blast the airways about “crooked Hillary.”

The result: she went down in polling and lost the popular vote in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by a combined total of less than 80,000 votes, as over 600,000 voters in those three states who decided to vote for a third-party candidate (Pennsylvania 249,000+, Michigan 227,000+ and Wisconsin 150,000+).

With Trump’s election, he got to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court. With a firm 6-3 conservative majority, the court has reversed many longstanding precedents while relying on many older and long-discredited precedents.

Elections have consequences. Now is not the time to support or vote for any third party candidates for president. This includes new “neutral sounding” third parties.

If one cannot stomach voting in the November presidential election for either of the candidates of the two main parties, simply leave that part of your ballot blank.

Howard Watkins is a former Fresno resident and retired attorney now living in Long Beach.