https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartm ... dium=email
This adds up. More at the article
"Dark money is preparing to disrupt the 2024 election, and it could get really, really ugly. All because a large handful of corrupt politicians and washed-out political hacks are enthusiastic about doing the bidding of their largest donors.
— In the presidential election of 1968, George Wallace carried almost 14 percent of the national vote.
The South was still deeply Democratic (the big shift toward the GOP happened over the following decade) and had Wallace not carried Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi those states would have gone for Hubert Humphrey, making him president instead of Richard Nixon.
— In the presidential election of 2000, Ralph Nader received 97,421 in Florida.
That was the state on which the election turned, and George W. Bush carried by only 537 votes in the first count (the Florida Supreme Court-mandated recount was blocked by 5 Republicans on the US Supreme Court, handing the election to Bush). Political scientist Gerald Pomper wrote in a 2001 Political Science Quarterly article:
“[A]pproximately half (47 percent) of the Nader voters said they would choose Gore in a two-man race, a fifth (21 percent) would choose Bush, and a third (32 percent) would not vote. Applying these figures to the actual vote, Gore would have achieved a net gain of 26,000 votes in Florida, far more than needed to carry the state easily.”
— In the presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to Donald Trump by fewer votes than Jill Stein claimed in each state."
"While less definitive than 2000 in Florida, one can still argue that if Stein hadn’t been on the ballot Donald Trump would never have become president and America would have been spared the trauma and 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths that accompanied his ascension to that office.
The simple reality is that in our political system — winner-take-all elections, rather than a parliamentary system or ranked-choice-voting — a third-party candidate always hurts the party it’s most closely aligned with.
Wallace was a Democrat, and Nader and Stein were Greens, so they hurt the Democratic nominee. Biden is currently the “moderate” candidate in a Biden-Trump or Biden-DeSantis match-up, so a “moderate” third-party candidate would throw the election to Trump or DeSantis.
Now it looks like a massive dark money group is planning to bring America a repeat of those three elections where a third-party candidate put a Republican in the White House.
Dark money-funded No Labels has invested a reported $70 million to get ballot access in all 50 states, in anticipation of a 2024 race where they’d sponsor a “centrist” (aka “bought off”) candidate to run for president. And Democrats around the country are worried.
No Labels already wields considerable financial and political power through the corporate Problem Solvers Caucus they claim to have “inspired” into existence."
"Back in 2010, when Republicans on the Court fully legalized the bribery of public officials by corporations and the morbidly rich in their Citizens United decision, it became clear that if the decision wasn’t overturned by Congress elections would become auctions. Whichever candidate had the support of the deepest pockets would win the race.
Speaking with me after Republicans on the Court handed down their corrupt 2010 Citizens United decision, expanding their 1976 initial legalization of political bribery, former President Jimmy Carter said:
“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”'
Probably the best man to be president since FDR.
""In 1776 we declared independence from the world’s richest man and the planet’s largest corporation, which his family started (Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company in December, 1601) and in which he owned the largest percentage of shares.
Today, we’re confronting a similar challenge. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1936 of the last time wealth and political power was as seriously concentrated as it is today:
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”
Very "jr." Brings to mind a thought (stolen and paraphrased): I knew Robert Kennedy; I admired Robert Kennedy, and you, "Jr.", are no Robert Kennedy.
:puke-left: 
Snowflakes.
