Citizens to Save Our Republic Calls on Presidential candidates to sign “No-Spoiler” Pledge
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Feb. 06, 2024 — All candidates seeking the Presidency are asked to agree to a “no-spoiler” pledge by Citizens to Save Our Republic (CSOR), a bi-partisan organization dedicated to keeping the biggest threat to our democracy – Donald Trump – from profiting from third-party candidates who cannot win the Presidency on their own.
“2024 is no ordinary election year. Democracy is on the ballot in the presidential election,” said former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, a co-founder of CSOR. “Voters deserve a clear and simple choice: are they for American democracy or against it?
“Third party candidates muddle the issue. They cannot win but can be spoilers by splitting the vote of the pro- democracy majority and throwing the election to an anti-democracy candidate.”
“That’s why we are calling on all potential third party candidates to sign this simple pledge,” Gephardt continued. “It does not ask anyone to withdraw from the race or to stop pressing their candidacy, ideas, and issues across the country. It merely asks that, by midsummer, if it is still obvious that they have zero chance of being elected and vanishingly little chance of winning even a single Electoral College vote that they remove their names from the ballots in the six critical swing states so that they cannot SPOIL the election and return Donald Trump to the presidency.”
Gephardt added that candidates considering running on the No Labels ticket would be asked to sign the pledge as well. “In normal times we would have no problem with the No Labels effort, and some of us would consider supporting it. But these are not normal times. As conservative Judge Michael Luttig told the January 6 committee, our democracy hangs on a “knife’s edge.”
Citizens to Save Our Republic also notes that objective, historical and political analysis makes clear that third party and independent candidates have virtually no chance of being elected. In fact, no third party or independent candidate has been elected since the dawn of our modern two-party system over 160 years ago; no third party or independent candidate has won a single Electoral College vote in over 50 years since George Wallace and in 2024 few, if any, third party candidates will even appear on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance of being elected.
The “No Spoiler” Pledge will be circulated by CSOR to all current and potential third-party candidates with the hope that it will be endorsed shortly.
Media Contact:
Bruce Fryer
bruce@futurepact.us
Media Contact:
Don Foley
Dfoley77@gmail.com
About Citizens to Save Our Republic (CSOR):
CSOR unites bipartisan leaders committed to the U.S. Constitution and preserving the nation's democratic system. The group, featuring current and former elected and appointed officials across the political spectrum, stresses the importance of prioritizing country over party and uniting to save our democracy in 2024.
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