Hopeless candidates make elections better

Suarez joined the already crowded GOP field last week, filing the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday and releasing a campaign video titled ā€¯I'm Runningā€¯ the next morning. In a speech Thursday evening at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Suarez explained that he was running for president because ā€¯it is time for a leader who can connect with parts of our country that the Republican Party has struggled with, like young voters and urban voters.ā€¯ He portrayed himself as a traditional conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan, both in his style and his support for limited government.

There is much to admire in Suarez's record. But he faces, as The Washington Post observed in a dry understatement, ā€¯a long and complicated path to the Republican Party's nomination.ā€¯

The Miami mayor wasn't the only candidate with no realistic chance of winning who jumped this month into the race for the White House. Cornel West, a left-wing scholar and activist, a former Harvard professor, and a colorful public intellectual, announced that he is running for president as a candidate for the Green Party, with the goal of pursuing ā€¯truth and justiceā€¯ and to ā€¯reintroduce America to the best of itself.ā€¯

There are other candidates for president with no discernible path to victory. The Republican field includes, among others, wealthy entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, California talk-show host Larry Elder, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. On the Democratic side, President Biden is being challenged by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist; and self-help author Marianne Williamson.

Every presidential campaign brings a fresh crop of ultra-long shots — hopeless candidates who are as likely to be nominated for the nation's highest office as I am. Why do they run?

I'm not saying they shouldn't. I don't think candidates should run for president (or any office) only if they have a decent chance of winning. Sometimes, as Senator Jefferson Smith says during the filibuster scene in ā€¯Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,ā€¯ lost causes are the ones most worth fighting for. ā€¯You fight for the lost causes harder than for any others.ā€¯ As a voter, I have often backed a candidate certain to lose. In my view, there is no surer way to squander one's vote than to support a candidate merely because he or she is ā€¯electable.ā€¯

Still: Given everything involved in running for president — the expense, the time, the loss of privacy, the potential embarrassment, the scrutiny into past misbehavior, the toll on family members — why do so many candidates who are certain to lose choose to run anyway?

Some possible reasons:

Longshots can become running mates.

Just ask Joe Biden. When the then-senator from Delaware ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008, he bombed. He never gained traction in the polls and dropped out after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucuses with 1 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, he ended up on his party's national ticket with Barack Obama and spent eight years as vice president. No presidential candidate ever admits to running for veep. But all of them know it sometimes happens.

Longshots can land a high post in the winner's administration. In 2016, Dr. Ben Carson and former Texas governor Rick Perry were among the 17 (!) candidates in the Republican race for president. Like most of the other candidates, they made no headway against Donald Trump, who easily won. Yet both were later confirmed to Cabinet posts — Carson as secretary of housing and urban development, Perry as secretary of energy. Four years later, the little-known ex-mayor of South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg, made a splash with strong debate performances and a second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary. He subsequently dropped out of the race with only 21 convention delegates. But he had raised his profile in the Democratic Party — and became Biden's secretary of transportation.

Longshots can upgrade their reputation and build a national brand.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee pursued the GOP presidential nomination twice, in 2008 and 2016. Neither campaign got off the ground. But Huckabee leveraged them into a significant career as a TV commentator and radio talk-show host. Ditto former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a longshot GOP candidate in 2012 and 2016. Though he flopped as a presidential contender, he emerged with a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer and a gig as a political analyst on CNN. And then there is the odious Al Sharpton, who had a long career as a race-baiter and a bigot before entering the 2004 Democratic presidential race. His candidacy went nowhere, but his reputation soared. ā€¯It opened doors. I was taken more seriously and what I represented was taken more seriously,ā€¯ Sharpton later told The New York Times. In 2005, Sharpton signed with Radio One to host a daily national talk show and for the past 12 years he has had his own daily TV program on MSNBC.

Longshots can represent a cause or influence their party.

Eugene McCarthy, a little-known senator from Minnesota, challenged President Lyndon Johnson in the 1968 on an anti-Vietnam War platform. He had no chance of winning and lost the New Hampshire primary as expected. But though he lost, McCarthy's showing was strong enough that it prompted LBJ to announce he wouldn't run again, with dramatic consequences for the Democratic Party. Forty years later, Representative Ron Paul of Texas ran for president as a libertarian Republican opposed to the war in Iraq. He amounted to less than a speed bump in the path of John McCain's juggernaut to the nomination. But his campaign helped pave the way for the Tea Party movement that became, at least for a while, one of the most impressive grassroots political upwellings in modern American life.

Longshots can sometimes win.

Like winning the Powerball jackpot, the odds are very, very steep. But seemingly hopeless candidates for president have sometimes caught fire and gone all the way. When Jimmy Carter, a former one-term Georgia governor, took it into his head to run for president in 1976, the leading paper in his home state famously headlined the story ā€¯Jimmy Who Is Running for What!?ā€¯ When Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton decided to compete for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, he barely registered in polls that included far better known Democrats like Mario Cuomo, Al Gore, Lloyd Bentsen, and Bill Bradley. After six months of polling in 1991, Clinton's support averaged just 1.7 percent. But Clinton and Carter proved they had what it took not only to beat far more influential Democrats for their party's nomination, but to then defeat a sitting Republican president and win the White House.

Most hopeless presidential candidates leave no mark and are soon forgotten. When was the last time you thought of Eric Swalwell, Bobby Jindal, Lincoln Chafee, Michele Bachmann, or Alan Keyes? All the same, a candidate doesn't have to be viable to be valuable. Even doomed candidacies can enrich the democratic process. At their best, they enliven the marketplace of political ideas, they strengthen the ultimate nominees through the competition of debate, or they bring something to their party's contest that no other candidate is talking about.

Some even find that the experience makes them better public officials. Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado ran as a centrist in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, dropping out after failing to engage voters' interest. Despite flopping as a presidential candidate, he told Insider recently, the experience enabled him to develop valuable relationships with fellow senators he'd never previously gotten to know. And ā€¯it really expanded my knowledge of just how many different possible solutions there are to a given problem.ā€¯

In a video announcing and explaining his candidacy, Cornel West declares: ā€¯Democracy creates disruption. It creates an eruption. It creates an interruption.ā€¯ That's catchy and quotable, and sometimes it's even true. Most people who run for president haven't got a prayer of winning. But I'd rather see long shots keep trying to shake things up than to let presidential nominations go by default to whomever's next in line.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."