A “No Labels” Candidate?
A hypothetical spoiler for 2024? (Stress on "hypothetical").
Via The Bulwark: How the ‘No Labels’ Gambit Could Wreck the 2024 Election.
Those politics watchers—including most journalists—who are envisioning the 2024 presidential election as a contest between a Democrat (presumably President Joe Biden) and a Republican (perhaps former President Donald Trump) are missing a big part of the story. Last week brought the warning flash of a significant storm brewing for the upcoming election. The political organization No Labels qualified to place its third-party presidential candidate on the ballot in battleground Arizona twenty months from now.
No Labels is aiming to shake up American politics by running an independent candidate for president. In the process, it may be shaking apart our democracy.
First, and foremost, this is crazy dramatic.
Second, may I stress (as I am sure I have before) that “No Labels” is, well, a label?
Third, the idea that some “unity” candidate is going to emerge and create chaos in 2024 is far-fetched.
Fox News reports that No Labels is courting politicians like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Susan Collins as it seeks to build a so-called “unity ticket.” Soothing as the sound of “unity” may be to ears tired of the divisive screeching of our politics, third-party presidential bids have been, without exception, fools’ errands. This one may be worse.
How can anyone with any political acumen whatsoever take any of those candidates seriously? And “courting” is a long way from getting them to agree to run. I cannot see Manchin nor Collins engaging is a quixotic stunt at the end of their careers. To what end? Sinema might do it for the LOLs and the attention, but the notion that she would attract much in the way of votes, even in Arizona, is laughingly bizarre.
While a third-party candidate could, in theory, throw a given state out of its likely outcome, the odds are not high. And yes, Arizona’s razor-thin partisan balance could be affected by even a few percentage points going third party. Still, it is worth considering that Sinema would only consider this move because she knows she can’t win reelection to the Senate in Arizona, so it isn’t like she has some huge base in the state. People seem to forget that the main reason she won the Senate seat in the first place was that she was the Democratic nominee, not because she was Krysten Sinema. Take the D away from her name and her support plunged. Put her in a contest that people will know she can’t win under any circumstances and watch those number plunge even further.
Voters, on balance, are aware of what realistic choices they have and they know that in an R v D v No Labels contest that No Labels got no chance. And it has been clear since the results of the 2016 elections that Democratic voters in particular are heavily focused on the electability issue (see, e.g., their behavior in the 2020 primaries).
Some third-party efforts are not worth paying attention to—perennial gadflies, say, or minor parties that don’t make it onto ballots. No Labels is not in that category. They are making a serious effort: They’ve hired hundreds of signature collectors and plan an April 2024 nominating convention in Dallas. In addition to Arizona, they have gained ballot access in bluer Colorado and Oregon. They’re targeting twenty other states. As of last summer, No Labels reportedly had pledges of $46 million on the way to a $70 million goal.
Any moderate No Labels candidate will almost certainly drain more votes from the Democratic side than the Republican. According to Pew Research, “third-party 2016 voters who turned out in 2020 voted 53%-36% for Biden over Trump.”
Neither of those claims is correct in my view. I am fairly certain that Sinema, Machin, or Collins would very much fall into the “gadfly” category.
Having gained ballot access in three states is a long way from fifty (and “targeting” twenty is still a ways from being on the ballot and even if they make the ballot, so what? And yes, as noted above, in theory, the system can be affected by several states having unusual outcomes.
And let’s return to this:
Any moderate No Labels candidate will almost certainly drain more votes from the Democratic side than the Republican. According to Pew Research, “third-party 2016 voters who turned out in 2020 voted 53%-36% for Biden over Trump.”
Actually, that number could very easily be suggesting the opposite of what is being asserted. It is likely demonstrating that third-party voters are more interested in defeating Trump than they are in voting third-party (and, indeed, I think that is likely what it does show). I would also note that this two data point comparison may simply be demonstrating that a lot of Never Trumpers voted third-party in 2016. Indeed, there was a higher-than-normal third-party vote in 2016. Libertarian Gary Johnson won 3.3% and Green Party candidate Jill Stein won 1.1%. It is likely that Johnson’s numbers were inflated by Never Trump Republicans, many of whom probably voted Democratic in 2020. And one suspects as well that some left-leaning Democrats went from Stein to Biden because, well, Trump.
The likelihood is that in a hypothetical 2024 rematch of Biden v. Trump that those third-party voters in 2020 will stay with Biden, not snap back to 2016 (which, again, is not a great year to set as some kind of baseline). The notion that a huge chunk of voters who don’t want Trump back in the White House will be mesmerized into voting for Krysten Sinema makes little sense.
All of this is just the rewarmed, recycled story we get every presidential election cycle that makes wildly inaccurate assumptions about the power of “centrists.”
I will note that the Bulwark piece was co-authored by Norm Ornstein (I just noticed this as I was finishing the post). Ornstein is a smart fellow and I know he has legitimate concerns about the health of American democracy. I think his concerns (or pure anxiety) are overshadowing his analysis here. While I understand the hypotheticals to be associated with a third-party candidate winning even a small percentage of the vote in key states (as they note, Florida 2000 is such an example), I also think that the current political climate is not one that is conducive to third-party success even of that level.
In 2016 the two-party share of the vote was 94.4%.
In 2020 the two-party share of the vote was 98.17%.
I think that 2024 will look very much like 2020. We are highly polarized and a key reason for that polarization is Donald Trump, who continues to be the most likely GOP nominee.
I would also note that in both 2016 and 2020, the majority of voters did not want Trump as president. To assume that a significant chunk of those majorities would rank a symbolic vote for a third party more important than a vote to defeat Trump (i.e., a vote for the D) seems unlikely at this moment in time.
I will say this, in defense of the piece by Ornstein and Aftergut: this is not the time for No Labels to be spending money on a third-party 2024 loser candidate. If it is concerned about building a way forward for third parties to thrive it should be spending its time and money on institutional reform efforts or simply supporting pro-democracy candidates.
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I suspect that you meant pro-democracy.
I read on Rick Wilson’s twitter feed that the NL whatever-it-is has indicated it is running only in the states that Biden won last time. So if that is true, it’s pretty clear that it’s a Trump-friendly scam. That’s one way to find out.
Also: who’s funding this thing? It pretty much sprang up out of the ground with a full campaign for its message. How are they raising money? Who are the consultants working for it?
Americans have always been suckers for the whole Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington nonsense. We don’t like political parties, never have. But surely we’re not so dumb as to fall for something like this without checking under the hood and kicking the tires?
As far as I’m concerned: it’s Trump or Biden and if you have a problem with lack of civility, go hide under the bed until December 2024.
I’ll take a 3rd Party seriously when they start at the local level. As for theses clowns, they literally refuse to take a position on anything. They’re a parody of themselves.
@Not the IT Dept.:
That. There seems to be a limitless supply of wealthy glibertarians and this as a spoiler scheme would strike them as clever. Maybe we can’t do much about the flood of money in our politics. Could the supposedly liberal MSM at least report on it?
@Mister Bluster: Indeed. Thanks.
Democrats only fall for third parties when they allow themselves to be convinced of two things: That both parties are the same, and that it doesn’t matter who is in the White House. That’s why the Greens could suck votes away from Al Gore — things in ’99 really seemed to be going well, and government didn’t seem to have anything to do with it, and Clinton had decided that his path to success was to embrace Republican priorities like “ending welfare as we know it.”
No voter who has been alive for the last eight years will believe either of these shibboleths. No Labels may end up grifting some decent cash from glibertarian creeps, but in terms of their influence on the election they’re going to be the Tulsi Gabbard for the new generation.
@wr:
People believe what they want to believe, and there are a lot of people who are the classic willfully-stupid moderate. Tell them both sides are corrupt, and that we need common sense solutions, and never say what those solutions are, and they will be drooling with excitement.
Getting them to shift their learned behaviors of voting for one of the major parties is going to be hard, especially since it feels like throwing their vote away, so the impact will be minimal, but it’s there and the election will likely be won on a razor thin margin again.
These people are the second most detestable group of voters*, the worst being those who “want to vote for a winner.”
I think a third party also has an appeal to the lost reasonable Republicans, but there are shockingly few of them, and it would depend on the candidate. Dr. Joyner may gaze whistfully at the candidate while knowing he will hold his nose and vote for a Democrat, and he represents about 4% of that demographic all by himself.
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*: you would think I would place Republicans as worse than either of those groups, or at least the white supremacists, but apparently I favor evil over aggressively stupid.
For me, and this applies to statewide or federal elections, generally, if I see someone who self-designates as an ‘Independent’ or there is ‘No Label’ I assume that they’re very conservative Republicans, especially here in California. Not always true mind you, but for it’s a flashing warning light.
Politics1 website lists 28 third parties that have fielded candidates in the past. Following that list are nine more 3rd parties that have yet to enter a candidate in any election. The No Label faction is one of nine.
One of the items I found when I clicked on the NLP link was video of a recent Meet the Press featuring former North Carolina Republican Governor Pat McCrory. Apparently Former Governor McCrory is an advocate for NLP. He said things like “a Trump vs. Biden contest might open up a door for a 3rd party candidate” and “40% of registered voters in America are independent” and “they’re getting on the ballots”. When pressed about ballot access in all 50 states McCrory said: “it’s an insurance policy. If the majority of people do not agree with the two parties’ selection, and right now the majority of Democrats don’t agree with Biden, and the majority of Republicans don’t agree with Trump. So, it’s going to be interesting –”
Insurance Policy? I don’t know what that means.
“40% of registered voters are independant.” Where does that number come from? In Illinois when citizens register to vote there is no party affiliation recorded. Somehow I suspect Illinois is not the only state that registers voters in this manner.
And so what if there are a percentage of voters who claim to be “Independent” does McCrory really believe that electors who don’t cast a D or R ballot will all vote No Label when there are 28 other 3rd parties to choose from?
There is also Andrew Yang’s Forward Party. It does have a few endorsements from Republicans that couldn’t stand Trump (like Chris Vance, former Chair of the WA State Republicans – but not the Lincoln Project goons). I really don’t see it going anywhere.
@Mister Bluster: Most states do not require registration (Alabama and Texas don’t, for example).
He is referring to polling in which people often identify as “independent” and then the mistake is made that they are somehow nonpartisan, which is not the case.
@Steven L. Taylor:..He is referring to polling in which people often identify as “independent” and then the mistake is made that they are somehow nonpartisan, which is not the case.
A vital distinction to be sure. I don’t know why I still expect elected officeholders to exhibit an advanced level of perception.
Maybe I’m not cynical enough even after four years (and counting) of Trump.
From your mouth to (the deity of your choice’s) ears. We can only hope/pray.