Cornel West’s plan to grow his ’embryonic’ campaign: ‘Be like jazz and improvise’

Running for president is difficult. Running for president without the backing of a major party is even more difficult, a reality Cornel West is only beginning to confront.

The famous philosopher’s independent presidential campaign has generated a lot of excitement, but He begins far behind in the herculean task of appearing on the ballot to truly compete against the likely Democratic and Republican candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

That’s one of the big unanswered questions hanging over the 2024 presidential race, for West and every other candidate who could run. Third-party candidates are generating interest in early polls, but not only is it unclear whether that will last, it’s also unclear whether voters in different states will even have those candidates as options on their ballots in November 2024.

“We’re still in the embryonic stage,” West acknowledged in an interview with NBC News this week. “The last thing I want to do is have big rallies now and peak too soon.”

West has only about 10 employees (his wife helps handle media requests). He has not conducted any internal surveys. He has only held one public campaign rally. His bank balance is double digits less than his rivals: he has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars while others have raised tens of millions. And he has given up outside help from a super PAC that could have helped make up the difference.

Still, with some degree of national recognition and an electorate interested in alternatives, West says he’s in it to win and pledges to stay in the race until Election Day.

How he gets there (or grows his small base of support into something approaching a broad winning coalition) won’t depend on any carefully crafted plan.

“I’m a jazz man. I believe in improvisation”, West saying. “I’m trying to just learn, listen, be jazzy enough to improvise while holding on to my integrity and honesty.”

Strict mathematics

After cycling through two different minor parties and at least as many campaign managers in the early stages of his campaign, West is beginning a more public phase, which will include a trip to Michigan next week to tap into discontent among Muslim voters. and Arabs with Biden. for his steadfast support of Israel during its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

You’ve just started holding fundraisers and you know you’ll need to start raising more money, a lot of money. West reported raising only $320,000 as of the end of September.

By contrast, another independent presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom West calls a “tough brother,” raised more than $15 million for his campaign, while a Allied super PAC has millions more.

Meanwhile, the Green Party, whose nomination West briefly sought before deciding to run as an independent, is already on the ballot in 19 states.

As an independent, it is now entirely up to West and his team to get his name on the ballot in each state, each of which has its own rules, requiring some combination of fees and signatures, with state restrictions on who can collect those signatures and where.

“When you start adding up what’s going to be needed nationally, at a minimum, you’re looking at millions of dollars,” said one veteran political activist who has overseen independent campaigns and requested anonymity to speak candidly. “The truth is, some people won’t make it.”

West said he would focus first on states with early deadlines and the “low-hanging fruit” (states with lower fees and signature requirements) before turning his attention to larger ones with higher hurdles, such as Texas and New York.

Some swing states have relatively low thresholds, meaning minor candidates like West could still prove pivotal in a tight presidential race even if they don’t appear on ballots everywhere. Wisconsin, for example, requires Only 4,000 signatures are needed to make the ballot, while Pennsylvania asks for 5,000, plus a $200 fee. Biden won Wisconsin by 0.6 percentage points and Pennsylvania by 1.2 points in 2020.

West’s goal, he said, is to be on the ballot in 15 states by March and 30 to 35 states by June, with hopes of being in all 50 states by November, although he said he would be happy to finish in the 40s to 45s. .state ballots.

Some Democrats worry that West could take away Biden’s support from the left. But critics doubt his campaign and West himself, who has never run for public office, are up to the task.

“The reason we’ve been so concerned about No Labels is that they’ve had the money, the time and the organizational power to get on the ballot in many states as a third party,” said Matt Bennett of the Democratic think tank Third Way center. referring to the deep-pocketed centrist group preparing for a possible third-party presidential campaign.

“But an independent candidate coming in now faces a much bigger hurdle,” he continued. “If an independent candidate hopes to appear on the ballot in one or two states to act as a spoiler, that may be feasible. But there is very little chance that they can appear on the ballots everywhere (or even in most places) to make a remotely plausible case that they are in it to win.”

Richard Winger, co-editor of Ballot Access Newsthat supports third parties and independent campaigns by providing useful information about arcane ballot access rules, said West would have been better off staying with the Greens.

“It would have been much easier for him because the Green Party is about to deliver its petition in Arizona. They are already underway in California, Texas and Florida. So there you would have had four of the six most difficult states. Free. And he abandoned everything,” Winger said.

Winger estimated that an independent candidate would need to collect at least 900,000 signatures nationwide to appear on ballots nationwide. Estimating a cost of about $5 per signature, he said a minimum budget would be $4.5 million. But costs can be as much as $12 per signature in some places., and campaigns must collect more signatures than required, as some will inevitably be deemed invalid by election officials.

“I would tell you with all my heart: you made a big mistake when you quit the Green Party race,” Winger continued. “If you can bear the shame, you should change your mind, and there is still plenty of time for him to look for her. Jill Stein is running for the Greens but she is friends with Cornel West. “She would be happy to step down if he came back.”

Stein did not respond to a request for comment.

Arguments in favor of “viability”

Although only six months old, West’s campaign has already faced organizational changes and accusations of mismanagement.

West began working with little-known people.‘s before the transition to the Greens. Stein, a former The Green Party candidate, who is now running for president again with the party, briefly served as its campaign manager. She was replaced by Peter Daou, a former Hillary Clinton-turned-Bernie Sanders strategist, and Marianne Williamson, who left West’s campaign last month citing personal exhaustion and mental health.

“I saved Cornel West’s campaign,” Daou saying on social media platform X after his departure, “from financial insolvency and complete internal disarray.”

West’s improvisational nature can cause confusion, even conflicting messages about his campaign launch date, or the candidate who arrived in Mississippi for a series of campaign events in August only to realize that no one had reserved a rental car, leading to a reporter drive the candidate for the day.

The campaign is now led by a “quartet” of four co-directors.

Anthony Rogers-Wright, co-chairman and policy director of the campaign, said his team fully understands the importance of demonstrating “viability” to convince supporters and calm skeptics.

“We have no illusions. “This is a gigantic task that we are taking very, very seriously,” he stated. saying. “But we kind of rejected Brother RFK Jr. by saying that he will cost 30 or 40 million dollars. “We don’t agree with that.”

The campaign plans to achieve its ballot access goals primarily through volunteers, leveraging local organizations and independent candidates who align with West’s vision, as well as building its own volunteer network, which Rogers-Wright says includes more than 20,000 people so far. He also said the campaign is already in talks with polling companies in some key states.

The campaign employed that model recently in Utah, where West held a rally with an independent candidate for mayor of Salt Lake City, who said he would turn his organization over to West’s campaign, according to Rogers-Wright.

The candidate, Michael Valentine, came in third in last week’s election. reception about 3,100 votes out of approximately 45,000 cast, about 7%.

“We’re basically creating an independent slate of candidates and their supporters and their grassroots efforts across the country,” Rogers-Wright said.

In Nebraska, which West will visit next, it will mean trying to leverage a signature-gathering effort to get an abortion measure on the ballot. And in Michigan, it will mean tapping into local networks of Muslim and Arab activists, some of whom have pledged to defeat Biden.

Sanders, I-Vt., employed a similar strategy to help boost his 2016 campaign, of which West was a prominent supporter and surrogate.

But Sanders remained adamant about running within the Democratic Party and ruled out an independent candidacy, despite the encouragement. of West and others, in part because of immense obstacles to ballot access

West says he believes Sanders would have won the 2016 election if he had been the Democratic nominee. But could Sanders have won as an independent candidate against Trump and Clinton?

“Probably not,” West admitted. “No, probably not.”