If Cornel West is worried about being a spoiler whose candidacy might let Donald Trump back into the White House by stealing votes from President Joe Biden, he isn’t showing it.
The 70-year-old former Harvard and Princeton professor is running in next year’s presidential election as an independent with a message more likely, on the face of it, to appeal to disillusioned Democrats than anti-Trump Republicans. (West launched his campaign in June as a Green party candidate, but dropped the party on Thursday.)
At a fundraising event in Busboys and Poets, a leftwing bookshop and restaurant in Washington, West – a veteran activist of myriad causes – insisted he seeks the sympathies of neither cohort, but is instead trying to woo alienated, hardened non-voters.
“I think that we are not clear if either Biden or Trump will be in the actual election because things are so flexible and fluid right now,” he said on being asked by the Guardian to respond to warnings that his candidacy was a boon to Trump.
“But I happen to be focusing on the 40% that don’t vote at all, and I happen to be pulling from the 62% of folk who do vote but who would never vote for the two parties. So if there is some taking from both parties, it’s going to be very, very small.
“I’ve got to be able to speak the truth no matter what. I’m planning to do that until the very end. So in that sense, who knows who’s stealing from who.”
With Trump buoyant in many polls, some have likened West’s presence to that of the longtime activist Ralph Nader in 2000, who was widely believed to have persuaded wavering voters to switch to him from Al Gore in the key battleground of Florida, tipping the state and thus the election to George W Bush.
An Emerson College poll conducted in August showed Biden and Trump tied on 44% apiece in a two-way matchup. West’s addition to the ballot saw him polling at 5% and Trump leading Biden by 42% to 41%. A survey carried out in June by Echelon Insight reached a similar conclusion, with West polling at 4%.
Further complicating the picture is the possibility that Robert F Kennedy Jr may run as an independent candidate, rather than challenging Biden in the Democratic primaries.
Addressing an audience of committed supporters, West – who campaigned against Trump’s presidency when he was in office and advocated voting for Biden in 2020, railed against the rigid two-party US political system and adopted a “plague on both your houses” posture to the Democrats and Republicans.
“One of the problems of the two party system is what Margaret Thatcher used to call ‘Tina’ – there is no alternative,” he said, referring to a phrase the former British prime minister used to defend her government’s stringent economic policies in the early 1980s.
“Tell the American people there is no alternative. There’s nothing else you can do. You are locked in the prison that the neo-fascist Trump himself has hijacked, this damaged banana Republican party in the name of the rule of big business and big military, scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful, most xenophobic across the board.
“The Democratic party has this crypto-fascist element when it comes to mass incarceration, when it comes to dropping bombs … when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to violation of individual liberties vis-a-vis the national security state.”
Wearing his trademark black suit and black scarf, West frequently deployed humor in a 30-minute speech laced with references to his musical heroes, including John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and the Isley Brothers, and including invocations of TS Eliot and Dostoevsky.
He drew widespread laughter when he said that, as a Christian, he would not demonise Trump – who he called a “brother” – but would “keep track of his demonic activity”.
West said he aimed to “become the head of the empire in order to dismantle the empire”. He vowed a “massive, massive investment in the basic social needs of people and much of that will come from a massive cut in military spending”.
Before departing for an engagement calling for peace in Ukraine, West told the Guardian that the war had to be stopped urgently.
“The suffering of the Ukrainians is overwhelming and there is a possibility of world war three in terms of the escalation of nuclear possibilities,” he said. “As you know, an attack on any one of those 31 Nato countries is an attack on the United States. And it’s getting very, very close.”
This article and headline were amended on 5 October 2023 after Cornel West announced he was no longer seeking the Green party’s nomination and instead running as an independent.
