On June 3, former Texas Republican congressman Tom DeLay endorsed the Constitution Party’s presidential ticket. See this article. DeLay was the U.S. House Majority Leader between 2003 and 2005.
DeLay argues that boosting Randall Terry would actually help former President Donald Trump defeat President Joe Biden. More attention for the Terry candidacy, he reasons, would influence some voters to shift their vote from Biden to Trump. This is a more sophisticated argument than may be first apparent. In 1936 the Communist Party ran a ticket in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt and Alf Landon, but the party believed that its campaign propaganda would actually help Roosevelt.
This type of thinking is bolstered by the book Predictably Irrational, which presents experimental evidence that when there are three choices, and two of the choices are somewhat similar but one of the two is superior to the other, that helps the superior choice defeat the dissimilar choice. In the case of voting, one could say the 1936 Communist and Democratic tickets were similar, in that they both supported the New Deal. The Republican campaign was the dissimilar one. But the Democratic choice was “superior” to the Communist choice because the Democratic Party was far more likely to be competitive than the Communist ticket.
Modern day spokespeople for the Democratic Party, who vociferously oppose candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West and try to keep them off the ballot, don’t seem to comprehend the findings of Predictably Irrational.
