No Labels Will Decide Whether to Jump Into the 2024 Election Next Week https://t.co/z38WbZooiV — Emily Mills (@sf_mills) February 29, 2024 Ed Kilgore, at NYMag, is extremely skeptical: … “No Labels has said for months that our movement plans to regroup shortly after Super Tuesday to evaluate whether we should offer our ballot line to …
Late Night Open Thread: No <del>Scruples</del> Labels Reaches A Decision PointPost + Comments (42)
In fact, No Labels emissaries have been trying to persuade Haley through back channels, but she’s emphatically resisted. Joe Lieberman, who sits on the board, has told donors that the organization has three strong options, including a Republican governor, but he won’t share names. So far, No Labels has also flirted with total non-starters like Chris Christie and Hogan and Manchin, until they got turned down. (Hogan is now running for Senate in Maryland.) It’s hard to see anyone leaving their party to run as a spoiler, and No Labels had made it clear they need a Republican on the top of the ticket so as not to hand the election to Trump.
Supporters of No Labels are starting to wonder if this whole romantic endeavor could truly and spectacularly backfire on a group almost everyone in Washington has been suspicious about. And often for good reason. To wit: Lieberman and Jacobson are barely in communication—their friction is merely one example of the organization’s dysfunction. (A No Labels spokesperson denies this, saying the two were on a call together this afternoon.)…
No Labels' spoiler bid has suddenly entered full meltdown mode. No serious candidates are interested. The group's public justifications are increasingly ludicrous. Time to pull the plug.
We have lots of new reporting and info in this piece. 1/
— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) February 23, 2024
… Manchin’s evolution illustrates why No Labels’ effort to mount a third-party bid is suddenly in serious trouble. The group, which hopes to run a “unity ticket” consisting of one Republican and one Democrat, had been eyeing Larry Hogan, the former GOP governor of Maryland, along with Manchin, perhaps with Hogan at the top of the ticket. Manchin’s decision, along with Hogan’s recent announcement that he’ll run for Senate, dashes that dream for good.
Yet No Labels faces a problem that runs deeper than the lack of high-profile candidates willing to take the third-party plunge: The group’s core argument has proven impossible to sustain, and everyone paying even cursory attention to its activities knows it.
For months, as No Labels has sought to secure a line on ballots in as many states as possible—the group claims 16 as of now—its officials have sworn vehemently that they have no intention of mounting a candidacy that only functions as a spoiler or helps Trump. Joe Lieberman, the group’s founding chairman, often says as much. The true intention, it says, is to answer the public’s alleged call for an alternative to the two parties with a “unity ticket” that will birth a new coalition of public-spirited voters who value bipartisan compromise over petty partisanship and dysfunction.
But no matter how hard No Labels strains to project such pious intentions, the all-but-certain impact of such a plan has proven impossible to disguise. It is borderline impossible for such a bid to win outright in enough states to assemble a majority of 270 Electoral College votes—Ross Perot and Ralph Nader won none; the last third-party candidate to win any electoral votes was George Wallace, 56 years ago.
So the only real impact of a No Labels bid will likely be to pull in center-right voters who might be disillusioned by Trump and otherwise would have grudgingly gone to Biden, helping the former president…
Close watchers of No Labels still worry it may yet find a candidate—someone like former Utah GOP Governor Jon Huntsman, or Pat McCrory, the former North Carolina Republican governor who co-chairs the group, or some business guy looking for an ego trip. But it’s hard to see how the group’s well-heeled donors would be content with anything short of a big, gratifying name at the top of the ticket.
“If they nominate anyone less than a top-tier candidate, it will ensure that the group’s effort is even more of a fool’s errand,” said Doug Jones, the former Democratic senator of Alabama, who’s also active against No Labels.
Here’s the bottom line: No candidate can continue humoring the group’s central claim—that the ticket can accomplish anything beyond making a second Trump term more likely—while also retaining anything remotely resembling an aura of seriousness.
No Labels officials and donors like to think of themselves as patriots and devoted servants of the public good who wouldn’t dream of foisting a disastrous second Trump term on the country they love. If so, they should accept that the whole foundation of their third-party-bid project is irredeemably flawed, and come to terms with the obvious: It’s time to pull the plug.
"We're in it to win it!" No Labels' chief strategist proclaims.
Prompting the group's founder to interject, “But I just want to clarify, this organization is not in it to win it.”
One of many amazing moments in this @JohnGHendy look at the group: https://t.co/jTP1aUw9it
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) February 27, 2024
A rambling & confused story by a conservative who refuses to believe what’s obvious — No Labels has been a profitable grift, but it’s reaching the inevitable endpoint:
… Even if the forthcoming White House bid ends up as nothing but a sideshow, it is still garnering attention: Polls indicate that a No Labels ballot line may well draw more votes away from Biden than Trump. It could be the deciding variable that secures Trump’s return to power.
Why is No labels doing this? Some of the group’s opponents allege that No Labels is nothing more than a money-raising grift. Others have suggested that No Labels is a shadowy Republican dark-money group, and that the “unity ticket” is a stalking-horse bid to help Trump. Yet another theory is that No Labels is full of idealists who, whether they realize it or not, are playing Russian roulette with American democracy, as one critic recently put it to me. Jacobson and the organization vehemently deny all of the above accusations.
I’ve spent the past several weeks talking with No Labels’ leaders, staffers, consultants, and opponents, trying to understand the organization’s endgame. I came away confused, and convinced that the people behind No Labels are confused, too. They’ve correctly diagnosed serious problems in the American political system, but their proposed solution could help lead to its undoing.
Nancy Jacobson, a longtime Democratic fundraiser who is married to the longtime Democratic pollster Mark Penn, founded No Labels 15 years ago. Back then, her goal was to build the voice of the “commonsense majority” and bring compromise to Capitol Hill during what was then seen as an era of division and dysfunction. (It looks bucolic compared with the present day.) The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, an earnest, relatively uncontroversial coalition of Democrats and Republicans, eventually emerged in the House of Representatives as the result of No Labels’ work.
So many political observers view Jacobson as a Beltway operator that her colleague and friend of 30 years, Holly Page, who sits on No Labels’ board of advisers, came to our interview prepared to dispute that characterization before I even mentioned it. Page informed me that Jacobson is not, in fact “a conventional creature of Washington,” and instead likened her to a Silicon Valley disrupter who’s willing to “try things” and “challenge conventional norms.”…
Back in November, the organization’s leaders scuttled plans for an April 2024 in-person convention in Dallas. My request for details about a rumored replacement “virtual convention” went unanswered, perhaps under the logic that they can’t plan a convention if they don’t have candidates. So the conversations are happening quietly.
More generally, the group is cagey about its internal operations, and won’t even share the names of its donors. (Harlan Crow, the Texas real-estate tycoon who has financially supported conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is one.)…
Rick Wilson, one of the founders of the “never Trump” Lincoln Project, is a vocal No Labels critic. He believes the formerly centrist group has evolved into yet another cadre of Trump enablers, and that its ballot-access plan is far from benevolent.
“While No Labels has every right in the world to try to put somebody on the ballot, we have an equally sacred right under the First Amendment to object to it,” Wilson told me. “I feel like No Labels is doing something dangerous and definitely stupid,” he added. “Probably extremely dangerous. Likely to cause the return of Donald Trump. And in those things, I’m going to speak out.”…
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, if Rick Wilson shook my hand, I would count my fingers afterwards. But the man certainly knows enough about less-than-honest politics to recognize a ratf*cking squad, which is what No Labels has ‘devolved’ into.