How weak of a candidate is Joe Biden? Trump has been indicted four times, many of the crimes he is obviously guilty of, so he'll likely spend part of the campaign season behind bars. Yet, according to RCP, Biden is barely winning in the polls, and if history is any guide, that means Biden will lose in the electoral college.
A recent Emerson Poll put an exclamation point on this.

In a potential 2024 Presidential Election matchup between Biden and Trump, candidates are tied with 44% support each. Twelve percent are undecided. Trump has gained about a point in the head to head matchup from the June Emerson poll.

When Green Party candidate Cornel West is added to the ballot, support for Trump and Biden declines slightly to 42% and 41% respectively, while 5% support West and 13% are undecided.

When a hypothetical matchup included Taylor Swift as the third-party on the ballot, 42% support Trump, 39% Biden, and 8% Swift. Ten percent are undecided. Swift is viewed favorably by 43% of voters, while 38% are neutral, and 19% have an unfavorable view of her.

“The Swift test suggests that Biden’s support is softer than Trump’s, whose support is more locked-in,” Kimball said.

Marshmallow soft.
I personally love Cornel West, and I will be voting for him.
But the Dems are already spinning the voter shaming instead of looking at the enormous elephant in the room - why is their candidate so universally hated that he would lose to a conman, crook, and soon-to-be convicted felon in an election where the GOP are on the wrong side (by polling) of the abortion question?
When will the Dems finally stop finger-pointing and take some responsibility? Recall that the Dems controlled both the White House and Congress almost uninterrupted from 1932 to 1968, when the party was known for siding with labor. They've been mostly out of power since 1995, when they started siding with Wall Street.

Republicans like to talk about freedom. Democrats like to talk about democracy. Neither of them walk the walk.
Both parties have worked hard at keeping third parties off the ballot, and it's not just true for Blue States.
The Texas Republican Party sued to get 40 Libertarians kicked off the ballot in 2020 and sued again to get another 23 Libertarian candidates off the ballot in 2022.

However, it's the Democrats that have been the most hostile to democracy.
In 2018 the Democrats managed to get the Greens kicked off the ballot in Montana. So the Democrats doubled-down in 2020 starting in Wisconsin.

A Democratic Party spokesperson filed a challenge against the Green Party petitions, claiming the change of address by Walker invalidated some of the petitions. The hearing on the challenge before the state Elections Commission had all the trappings of a kangaroo court. The attorney for the Democratic challenger huddled with the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission to restrict the testimony of Green Party attorneys.
The Democratic challenge was upheld by the Commission and the signatures on those petitions were invalidated — conveniently enough to keep the Greens off the ballot.
...
In Pennsylvania, the Democrats went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to remove Hawkins/Walker from the ballot. They were victorious on the flimsy technicality that the Greens did not submit signed filing papers in person but mailed them in.

You might be aware of the dirty tricks the Democratic Party in North Carolina has been using to get the Green Party off the ballot this year, but the Dems have been waging war on democracy for longer than that.
People are upset that the North Carolina Dems got copies of the Green Party petitions and went to signers and encouraged people to remove their signatures. But in fact that is exactly what the Dems did in 2020 to get the Green Party kicked off the ballot in Montana again!

So far the Libertarian Party has been most successful third party at surviving this onslaught, but they have their own self-inflicted problem. While Libertarians have long been in perfect agreement with the GOP on economic issues, they have at least separated themselves from the GOP on the culture war issues.
At least that was until recently. Now the Libertarian Party has become the MAGA wing of the GOP.

In July 28, 2017, Jeff Deist, the president of the Mises Institute, named for libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, published a blog post arguing that “blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.” The phrase “blood and soil” already had an unmistakable fascist overtone—but it took on an even more gruesome connotation two weeks after the post during the infamous Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally of 2017, where an anti-racist protester was killed. The white supremacists who tried to dominate the streets of Charlottesville chanted “blood and soil.” Several of the organizers of the Charlottesville rally identified as libertarians. In the wake of that event, Nicholas Sarwark, chair of the Libertarian Party, signed an open letter warning of the dangers of fascism. Arvin Vohra, vice chair of the Libertarian Party, wrote a post arguing that the “Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right.” The ensuing arguments over “blood and soil” lead to the creation of a Mises Caucus, which aimed to overthrow the pragmatic Gary Johnson wing of the party and adopt the incendiary culture war politics of the hard right.
...
On May 29, at the Libertarian Party Convention in Reno, McArdle won the title of chair of the party’s national committee. This was a decisive victory for the Mises Caucus, which received the vote of 69 percent of delegates. The Mises Caucus is now the undisputed ruling faction of the party.

"Taking the Libertarian Party out as a competitive force will help consolidate the right-wing vote around the Republican Party."
- Jeet Heer

The Dem party establishment has sensed it's weakness and now is looking to give the coup de grâce to the upstarts.
It seems fitting that this killing blow will be delivered by the leadership of the progressive wing of the party.

A pack of progressive candidates have crashed this year’s Democratic primaries, hoping to unseat incumbents and push the party to the left. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the fifth-ranking Democrat in the House, has other plans. Jeffries and two of his House Democrat allies on Wednesday rolled out the first slate of endorsements from Team Blue PAC, a political action committee intended to protect incumbents from intraparty attacks.

A PAC to protect incumbents during primaries is always controversial, but this one has compromised ethics far beyond that.

The lawmakers united in an effort to provide resources to the increasing number of House Democrats who face primary challenges — in particular, from the left. That circumstance faces the five incumbents who received endorsements on Wednesday: Reps. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), Donald Payne Jr. (D-N.J.), and Dina Titus (D-Nev.). Davis and Maloney face opponents backed by Justice Democrats; Brown faces a rematch from Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner, who had the support of the left-wing group during a special election to fill the seat last year...
he insists the PAC’s efforts are not strictly a matter of ideology: Maloney is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, just like he is. Its purpose, Jeffries says, is to protect incumbents’ records from “being distorted” by “the hard-left.” He uses the term to separate himself from his detractors, who see actions like these endorsements as evidence he’s not on their side. “Why are members of the hard-left targeting progressive members of Congress, and then trying to act as though they’re engaging in some ideological contest against the rest of us?” Jeffries says. (It’s worth noting, of course, that Team Blue PAC isn’t defending any incumbents from challenges from the right.)

Once again the Dems have proven that they would rather lose to the right, than win with the left. The only difference this time is that the Progressive Caucus is proving it.
This is clearly entrenched corruption protecting itself from left-wing reform efforts, but just in case this was clear enough to see just follow the money.

There’s also the matter of corporate campaign funding, which all of the Team Blue PAC-endorsed candidates accept. The PAC itself is primarily financed through corporate PAC money, and I asked Jeffries whether that fact proves his detractors’ point.