In order to maintain ballot status and to run as third party candidates at lower levels, they actually have to run at the presidential level in many states. They’re forced to run a presidential candidate and split the vote, or else they’re locked out of many states.
Sounds like it would be better to fight against this form of disenfranchisement rather than rolling over and saying “we have to split the vote if we want to run in other elections”.
Or, at least, if they’re going to split the vote to maintain ballot access, they could try actually using that ballot access to run candidates in smaller elections.
In order to maintain ballot status and to run as third party candidates at lower levels, they actually have to run at the presidential level in many states. They’re forced to run a presidential candidate and split the vote, or else they’re locked out of many states.
Sounds like it would be better to fight against this form of disenfranchisement rather than rolling over and saying “we have to split the vote if we want to run in other elections”.
Or, at least, if they’re going to split the vote to maintain ballot access, they could try actually using that ballot access to run candidates in smaller elections.
But they don’t…