Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri. Before we jump in, a reminder to check out my latest episode of Somebody’s Gotta Win for an autopsy on Mike Pence’s campaign with his chief strategist, Marc Short. We discuss what they got right, what they got wrong—and where Pence goes from here.

In tonight’s edition, I dissect how everyone in town is scrambling to figure out who’s spoiling who in a presidential election cycle that’s quickly attracting new gadflies and opportunists.

But first…

• McCarthy Career Opportunities: Yes, Kevin McCarthy is still a member of the House, and claimed he would run for reelection before Mike Johnson’s elevation to the speakership, but now that he’s no longer attending conference meetings out of respect for the new leader—a nice gesture that, nevertheless, erodes his relevance and clout—everyone’s talking about his next act. And I’m hearing he’s looking toward Wall Street rather than K Street. Alas, the jump might not be that easy. Sure, Eric Cantor took that path after he lost his majority leadership, eventually landing at Moelis, the boutique investment bank. But he was a member of the House Financial Services Committee, and he has told former members that it required passing financial exams and qualifying for a waiver due to his past appointments. We’ll see if McCarthy makes it up to New York. If that doesn’t work out, he always has his Rolodex of billionaire donor connections. “Former Speaker McCarthy deeply cares about the country, the institution of the House, and the members of the Republican conference, and he will continue to do so,” said McCarthy’s spokesperson Mark Bednar.

• Uncivil war: To celebrate his expulsion reprieve, George Santos tangled with one of his leading Congressional critics, Steve Womack, on Twitter/X. The Arkansas congressman compared Santos’s purgatory to Groundhog Day, while Santos went after Womack’s son’s legal troubles. Santos, of course, is not out of the woods yet—the two-thirds vote needed to throw him out of Congress may be delivered shortly after the House Ethics Committee releases a report on his alleged misconduct in the coming weeks.

  Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is back in business. After the House blocked her censure resolution against Rashida Tlaib, she attacked Chip Roy, one of the Republican dissenters, comparing his goatee to that of Colonel Sanders. She then went below the belt by questioning his very Texas authenticity. (He was born in Bethesda.) She also directed friendly fire toward “vaping groping” Lauren Boebert, which might be an upgrade after calling the sophomore Colorado congresswoman a “little bitch” earlier this year.

• Blue on blue: Nearly two dozen Republicans joined Roy in opposing the Tlaib censure. Democrats were uniformly in lockstep behind Tlaib as well, demonstrating a public unity that has surprised longtime party strategists who’ve heard the “Dems in disarray” line more than once over the course of their careers. But don’t let that vote mask Democratic division on this issue: In private, there is a deeply personal fight raging between members over the war, which transcends the antagonisms felt during their most recent squabbles over the Iran nuclear deal vote, in 2015, or the health care fight, in 2010.

  Outside of the Pelosi vs. the Squad beef during the summer of 2019, there’s been a foxhole camaraderie within the party during the Trump era. So this recent infighting, however private, has blindsided many in the caucus. One former chief told me that the last time he witnessed this level of Dem-on-Dem discord was during the Iraq War.

• Senate snobbery: During the House G.O.P. chaos, there was plenty of smugness in the Senate over the childish antics across the Rotunda. But now that Senate Republicans seem ready to take it to Tommy Tuberville for his blockade of Pentagon appointments, all hell has broken loose, with a Tuberville official-side staffer reaching out to anti-abortion groups to encourage primary threats against his G.O.P. colleagues. More of this is coming. Welcome to the chaos.
• Life comes at your fast: Meanwhile, I’m hearing that House Republicans are worried about an attendance problem: It’s getting harder to wrangle members back to votes after a hellacious October. One plugged-in G.O.P. lobbyist even characterized it to me as old-fashioned, Jeff Spicoli-style truancy. If this persists, House Republicans may have to delay votes as a government shutdown barrels toward the chamber.

  Of course, it would have been hard to pass any conservative priorities into law, given the Democratic-held Senate and White House. But the Republican compulsion to act on personal grudges has a price: three lost weeks without a speaker, time and energy spent on Twitter fights, missed votes and censure resolutions are eating up valuable floor time with no assurances that Republicans will hold the chamber next year.

The known unknown, of course—and the question occupying the billable hours of consultants around the country—is which candidate is most susceptible to be spoiled by a third-party contender. During an election that will likely feature split-ticket voting and more focus on candidate over party, these gadflies could impact a few thousand votes in key districts in a few battleground states—more than enough to swing the electoral map. “We have a lived experience. Our memory is not good,” James Carville told me, recalling how Ralph Nader spoiled the race for Al Gore in 2000, and Jill Stein negatively impacted Hilary Clinton by taking a few thousand votes from her in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016. “The one that worries me the most is Cornel West,” Carville continued. “We’ve seen the left two times cost us the presidency in races where we won the popular vote.”

Interestingly, however, a few recent polls and theories posit that Democrats may actually have some advantages if these gadfly candidates get some traction. Indeed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. increasingly looks like a liability for Trump rather than Biden as he builds support with an even more conspiratorial crowd. Operatives are also closely monitoring polls that show how independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, after months of being bashed by Ruben Gallego, the Democratic challenger for her Arizona Senate seat, could actually cannibalize Republicans in a three-way race. And then there’s the shift in thinking about No Labels: Could they possibly help Biden by putting a center-right Republican at the top of their ticket, rather than a moderate Democrat like Joe Manchin, whom they’ve floated as their nominee?

Regardless, the insanity of the moment seems to have de-risked the traditional headwinds facing a third party challenger. “We’re in a very disruptive time—Vivek [Ramaswamy] debating Ro [Khanna] and then Gavin [Newsom] debating Ron Desantis—it sounds like a time for people on the outside to be making noise,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican consultant. “Those on the outside have more upside. You’re fomenting 2028. Of all of the calculus about how this is all going to go down, the recent polling has shown how it could all be wrong.”

The other regular on the potential spoiler circuit is Manchin, who is often tossed around as the top of the ticket for third party group No Labels—the 501(c)4 run by centrist bogeyman Nancy Jacobson—which has been on a $60 million campaign to get on the ballot in all 50 states as an alternative to a Trump-Biden rematch. No Labels has always promised that they would not interfere in the campaign in a manner that would favor the reelection of Trump, and I’ve been hearing from sources that they are leaning away from Manchin, who could pose a significant threat to the Biden candidacy if the election does come down to a few thousand votes in a handful of states.

Indeed, I’m now hearing that No Labels is now focused on the possibility of a center-right Republican atop their unity ticket, hoping that the candidate would pull traditional Republicans away from Trump (rather than moderate Democrats from Biden). No Labels co-founder Mark McKinnon, who reiterated to me that he has had no affiliation with the group for the past decade, floated the idea of plucking a G.O.P. nominee from one of the seven battleground states—such as North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, Arizona’s Doug Ducey, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Nevada’s Mitt Romney, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, Pennsylvania’s Tom Ridge, or Michigan’s John Engler (or even Liz Cheney)—so as to pull in Republican voters who would never otherwise vote for Biden.

Of course, none of these people have a real shot to win the general election, but they could ostensibly spoil things for Trump. (Though, honestly, it’s not entirely clear that they would.) In the meantime, Axios reported that the White House is afraid to poke the No Labels dragon, and is instead staying quiet, hoping they abandon their plan to pick a candidate and hold a convention. Instead, Nancy Pelosi seems to be taking up the mantle and going after the group, calling them “perilous to our democracy.”

It’s just a four point swing for Biden, obviously within the margin of error, but it also reflects a dynamic that the Trump team has just recently identified—that Kennedy’s messaging about a rigged system is more appealing to Trump voters than Biden voters. This jives with a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll that shows Biden and Trump tied at 37 percent in the polls, with Kennedy winning 13 percent, taking away from what would have been a narrow lead for Trump. Moreover, Politico reported today that Kennedy is pulling donations from Trump voters at a much higher clip than Biden’s voters, further validating polls that show he pulls more from the Republican electorate.

To course-correct, the R.N.C. has been trying to paint R.F.K. as a “typical Democrat,” but it’s too late. “The alt right base that helped form him as a candidate—they spent months promoting him, there’s a bond created that might be hard to split,” said Bartlett. “They thought he was going to soften Joe Biden and beat him up. Instead he catered to the right.”

The greater worry for Democrats, as Carville noted, may be Cornel West, a far left candidate running as an independent, who appeals to a part of the coalition that Democrats are having a hard time keeping together—Black men and young people who are increasingly supportive of the Palestinian cause. “We’re massively underperforming in terms of Black turnout,” warned Carville. “It’s a very dangerous indicator, we’ve massively not paid attention to it.”

Perhaps it’s too soon to tell how each third party candidate will impact a few thousand votes in the battleground states that will decide who wins or loses. What’s clear is that conventional wisdom has been flipped on its head during this disruptive moment as more and more candidates try to inject themselves between two deeply unpopular old men.