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Comment by big_whack | Hacker News Reader

Dean Phillips seems relevant to this community. He has proposed cabinet positions for Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, and announced yesterday that he might be interested in running in the general under the No Labels ticket.

My understanding is that to make that work, he would need to switch parties pretty soon in order not to be affected by sore loser laws in many states that would prevent him from switching parties after the primary.

To me he appears to be an obvious Republican spoiler effort pushed by some of the wealthiest people in tech including Musk and Altman. If it were my boss pushing this I would be incensed.

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I dunno, I thought he came off pretty level-headed when I listened to him talk on All In. I don't think he's polling well enough for me to feel good throwing away my vote, but I'm certainly more interested in him than any other new candidate.

I'm not very politically savvy, though, so take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hh8lcoJ1NA fwiw

Just listen to him speak for a single minute and you know that he is not relevant for this community...he might be more successful on LinkedIn.

Andrew Yang endorsed him also

Bloody hell.

And I would vote for him over the nonsense the Republicans and Democrats are offering any day.

That's not really the point, the point is it's not an honest campaign. Elon Musk isn't donating money because he thinks Phillips will win, he's doing it because he thinks it'll help Trump win. Because Phillips needs to act soon, he can't wait as he says until Joe Biden appears unable to win. He needs to make that assessment in a week or two, before the general campaign even really starts -- so it isn't honest.

IMO it is fine to run for president, and to vote for whoever you want. But running a campaign that is really intended to just give the edge to another guy, is dirty politics intended to fool voters with an illusion of choice.

When the richest people in the country engage in those tactics, isn't democratic, it's plainly oligarchic.

>the point is it's not an honest campaign

So it's a dishonest campaign because some rich people are giving him money? By this logic RFK Jr's campaign should be seen as a dishonest campaign as well since he's raised more money from more people than Phillips has.

RFK's campaign is also a spoiler, propped up in part by the same people. My sense is what happened is they realized he's a little too crazy to be effective, so they are hedging their bets with Phillips.

Exactly the same story though.

If RFK ran as a third party he'd take votes from the Republican candidate, not the Democrat one. What kind of Democrat is going to vote for someone who believes vaccines cause autism and HIV doesn't cause AIDS?

There are people on all side that believe crazy stuff, and crazy=maverick to a lot of people. I know some left-leaning anti-vaxers. But you do appear to be correct.

>RFK Jr. pulls more votes from Trump than Biden in three-way race: Poll

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4289365-rfk-jr-trump-v...

> What kind of Democrat is going to vote for someone who believes vaccines cause autism...

Before COVID, I would have guessed the biggest reservoir of anti-vax sentiment was among very liberal Democrats (think the people who are super into yoga, organic food, and naturopathic doctors).

COVID became a culture war issue, which lead to partisan Democrats lining up on the pro-mask, pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine side, but I have no idea if that disrupted the views of existing anti-vax Democrats (of the "vaccines cause autism" variety).

I think your observation is why you read a lot more about Phillips these days than RFK.

RFK's promoters switched to promoting Phillips when they realized RFK was drawing more conservatives for the antivax stuff, than democrats for the Kennedy name.

Wait till you hear where Trump and Biden are getting their money from

Do you have any evidence of these claims? I have seen such tactics employed before (by Democrats and Republicans) but only rarely is there evidence of the altier motives.

I just learned about him and find his campaign platform to be agreeable.

Unfortunately, in a two-party system one is compelled to vote for the official party candidate if they want their party to win. So voting for a challenger during primaries is great in that it helps send a message to the party, but in the general one must hold their nose and vote for the party's nominee.

If he runs in the general election it will be as a spoiler candidate

Interesting conspiracy theory.

Musk, Ackman, Altman historically vote Democrat.

Dean didn't propose them as cabinet positions. He made an off the cuff joke.

Most Democrats want a different choice.

Why is competition within the party a bad thing? That anyone trying to compete must be a conspiracy by the others?

There's nothing wrong with competition within the party -- that's just a primary. What should clue you off is that Phillips announced yesterday he's considering a third-party run.

> What should clue you off is that Phillips announced yesterday he's considering a third-party run.

I don't think that follows. Biden is not a popular guy, and it appears his strategy is to crush all internal opposition while engineering a rematch with Trump (probably because he'd lose against anyone else).

What possible engineering could Biden do, even if he wanted to, to run against Trump? He’s ludicrously popular among the GOP.

>Biden is not a popular guy, and it appears his strategy is to crush all internal opposition

For example, the New Hampshire Democratic primary is officially unsanctioned by the Democratic Party.

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