By supporting 3rd-party bid, Jay Nixon will put Donald Trump back in the White House | Opinion

Former Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was never the most progressive or partisan of Democrats. Even when he briefly contemplated running for his party’s presidential nomination in 2016, Nixon aimed to appeal mostly to America’s moderate swing voters. “There’s still a wide avenue to run as a moderate, centrist, somebody-who-thinks-about-working-people-every-day Democrat in the heartland,” he said at the time.

Nixon never made that run for president. He isn’t done with centrist presidential politics, however.

The former governor — he left office in 2017 — announced late last week that he is joining No Labels’ campaign to run a third-party “unity” candidate for president in the 2024 election. Nixon will serve as the party’s director of ballot integrity, working to ensure No Labels has a spot on each state’s presidential ballot.

“I feel calm. I feel correct. I think we have a high moral ground here,” he said.

Nixon may genuinely believe in centrist politics, but his work for No Labels is unlikely to put a sensible moderate in the White House, a figure who can bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the Democratic and Republican parties.

Instead, Nixon and his new allies are likely to give us another four years of Donald Trump.

No Labels says it has no plans to play spoiler in the 2024 election. The organization points to its own polling that says nearly two-thirds of voters want candidates from outside the two-party system, and that 59% of voters would “consider” a moderate independent candidate in 2024.

Perhaps. But third parties tend to create more media excitement than actual votes — and the votes they do earn can potentially change the course of history.

The last independent candidate to win Electoral College votes was George Wallace, the arch-segregationist former Alabama governor, who carried five Southern states during the 1968 election. Richard Nixon won the popular vote over Hubert Humphrey that year by less than a single percentage point.

More notoriously, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won 97,000 votes in Florida in 2000, and possibly deprived Democrat Al Gore of the votes he needed to beat George W. Bush for the presidency: Bush won the state — and thus the presidential race — by 537 votes. Eight years before that, independent candidate Ross Perot may have tilted the White House to Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush by winning 19% of the popular vote.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, beat Trump in 2020 by a margin of just 44,000 votes in the six swing states that decided the election.

No Labels says that observers have learned the wrong lessons from those earlier campaigns — and that anyway, polling shows most Americans don’t want a rematch between Biden and Trump. “No Labels is not a spoiler,” the organization asserts on its website. “It’s a winner.”

That’s doubtful.

Indeed, a No Labels poll released in December showed Trump and Biden separated by one point in a head-to-head matchup. When a third candidate was added to the mix, Trump opened up a five-point lead. And the hypothetical third candidate still finished in third place. That’s the very definition of “spoiler.”

That’s why Democratic activists are working to keep No Labels off the ballot. Nixon, in turn, says those Democratic efforts are the reason he has joined No Labels.

“What do I say to those Democrats? I say, ‘You’re entitled to your opinion. But we are also entitled to use our constitutional and statutory rights to allow Americans to have another choice,’” Nixon said.

Fair enough. Many Americans don’t neatly fit the two-party binary system. That’s why alternatives like instant runoff voting — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference — are so intriguing for folks who want to support a third party without inadvertently throwing an election to a candidate they detest.

That’s what Nixon seems most likely to accomplish. Trump is radical and lawless, the man who incited an insurrection at the nation’s Capitol. Getting him elected in the name of centrism and unity would be the least moderate outcome possible.