To hear Democrats tell it, they are leading the charge to save Democracy by propping up Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump in November.

Trump, they are fond of saying, is a threat to all we hold dear, our very rights as Americans.

That would include the right to choose who should sit in the White House. Not so fast.

Dems are fine with a Trump-Biden matchup, they’d like the choice limited to two, But when a third party candidate enters the fray and gets some attention, all bets are off.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the presidency gained steam as the independent named patent lawyer and investor Nicole Shanahan as his vice president. As The Hill reported, this brings a fresh flow of cash to Kennedy, shoring up his bid for ballot access. The two spell disaster for Democrats eager to keep Biden in the Oval Office.

As Axios reported, Kennedy threatens the Biden campaign’s premise that the election is a choice between Biden’s stability and Trump’s chaos and divisiveness.

How big is the threat? Democrats are going all in to thwart Kennedy’s campaign, insisting they need to spotlight his controversial positions and do whatever they can to make him an electoral afterthought, The Hill reported.

Note the lack of concern for voters and their right to make a decision based on an array of platforms. This, sadly, is the bottom line of this and recent elections: It’s not so much about what’s best for the American people, it’s about political parties and getting and/or staying in power.

“Democrats should use every tool available to them to expose the truth about Kennedy and Shanahan,” said Doug Gordon, a Democratic operative.

“Expose that they have no path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win,” Gordon said.

Sometimes voters will choose a candidate even if they know they won’t necessarily win. They do so to make a statement, to have their voices heard: we’re not buying what either party is selling.

Some in the anti-Kennedy camp noted the 2016 election, when Green Party candidate Jill Stein took votes away from Hillary Clinton, a factor in the Democratic nominee’s loss.

“They need to see what happened in 2016 and take it very seriously,” said one Democratic strategist who was involved in that race. “They need to not only call out Donald Trump, they have to do the same with RFK Jr. He should never ever be seen as a viable option.”

The earth must not be just scorched, it must be salted as well.

The Democratic National Committee and aligned advocacy groups are building out war room-type operations for Kennedy, intended to collect as much info that could damage him as possible.

If only those Democratic pols would made such robust efforts to fight crime in their cities as they do targeting Kennedy.

Kennedy is not taking this lying down. He told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday that “Biden has done something that no other president in history has done, which is to order media — particularly social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google — to censor his political opponents.”

Biden has had four years to convince voters he’s the better candidate. If he’s looking wobbly in the polls, that’s on him, not RFK Jr.

Editorial cartoon by Steve Kelley (Creators Syndicate)