On the menu today: No Labels hosted a New Hampshire town hall yesterday. It featured two of the group’s co-chairs, both of whom are currently options for a future No Labels presidential ticket: West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Jon Huntsman, the Republican former governor of Utah. Liberal columnists are increasingly apoplectic that the small group could play spoiler and derail President Biden’s reelection bid, and unintentionally return Donald Trump to the Oval Office next year. You know Democrats are serious about stopping No Labels, because they’ve enlisted 82-year-old former House majority leader Dick Gephardt to lead a group dedicated to stopping No Labels. Meanwhile, an American has wandered off while visiting a place in which you should never wander off.
Democrats Are Terrified of No Labels
The Democratic strategy for 2024 isn’t difficult to determine: run the same playbook that worked in 2020. Turn the election into a referendum on Donald Trump and tie every other GOP candidate on the ballot to “mega-MAGA Republicans.” Right now, about 56 percent of Americans feel unfavorably toward Donald Trump, and just 40 percent feel favorably toward him. Donald Trump is the ultimate established brand in politics; there’s little reason to think that many Americans will change their mind about him between now and the next election. It’s extremely hard to win 270 electoral votes with such a low ceiling of support.
Biden is going to tout a record that he insists is full of sterling successes, while Trump will relentlessly insist that the 2020 election was stolen. You can hear the theme of Biden’s convention speech already: “This election is about the future, but Donald Trump is obsessed with the past.”
For Democrats, the key is to ensure that the 2024 presidential election is widely seen as a binary choice, either for or against Trump, instead of a referendum on the performance of the incumbent. Yes, the electorate thinks Joe Biden is too old and doesn’t like Kamala Harris at all. But no one drives the Democratic Party’s turnout as effectively as Donald Trump does, and few Republicans repel independent voters the way Trump does. The 2020 exit polls indicated Biden won self-identified independents, 54 percent to 41 percent.
But Democrats are terrified that this group No Labels could come along and screw it all up.
You can see the logic of why No Labels is interested in running another candidate. An astounding 65 percent of voters don’t want Biden to run for another term, and 60 percent of voters don’t want Trump to run again. Among independents, 73 percent don’t want Biden to run again, and 70 percent don’t want Trump to run again. There are many Americans who dread a rematch between two habitually dishonest, narcissistic, shouting old men and who desperately hunger for some other serious option.
The past months have brought columns, articles, and interviews from Bill Kristol, The New Republic, Jonathan Chait, The New Yorker, Slate, Data for Progress, Bill Press, FiveThirtyEight, Nicholas Goldberg, Paul Waldman, and former Democratic senator Doug Jones denouncing the No Labels effort. The group has been condemned as “a political doomsday device” (Chait), a “threat to democracy” (Data for Progress), and “completely nutty” (Press). The Newark Star-Ledger editorial board raged against “another harebrained attempt to put a third-party candidate on the presidential ballot” and “a dangerous stunt.”
In these columns, you can find a few references to past Green Party nominees Ralph Nader and Jill Stein, who rank among Democrats’ favorite scapegoats for the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump. (Because Lord knows the Democrats can’t bring themselves to blame Al Gore or either of the Clintons!) These voices operate from a worldview where each major-party nominee is entitled to all the votes of all the citizens on his side of the ideological spectrum. If you, humble voter, find the nominee of your usual party unpalatable and choose to explore other options, you, too, can be labeled a threat to democracy. (You notice how the terms “threat to democracy” and “threat to the Democrats” are easily and quickly interchangeable, right?)
Democrats are so worried about No Labels that they’ve formally established an organization to stop No Labels; instead of the natural name of “All Labels,” its founders chose the name “Citizens to Save Our Republic.” (Drama queens.) This effort is led by the whirling dervish of raw political charisma, former Democratic House majority leader Dick Gephardt, one of the few men who can call President Biden, “youngster.” To hear Gephardt tell it, if there’s a No Labels presidential candidate in the race, not only does Trump win, but he wins big:
We commissioned a national survey and a survey in the six or seven swing states that really determine national elections.
And it shows conclusively that, if it’s a two-person race, then Donald — that Joe Biden wins by four points, which is precisely what he won by in 2020. But if you put a third-party, independent, bipartisan candidate — and that’s the way we phrased it, to give it the best benefit of the doubt — then Joe Biden loses by five or six points.
If you look at 2020, it was independent moderate voters in six swing states that stayed enough with Biden for him to win the race over Donald Trump. We cannot have Donald Trump back in the White House. He engineered a overthrow of the electoral process. He would do it again.
Similarly, in a Washington Post column, Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, and Craig Fuller, former chief of staff to Vice President George H. W. Bush, wrote, “A third-party candidate dramatically changes the equation. If he or she takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House.” That wording seems a little tough to swallow, as the odds are good that the Libertarian and Green parties will be on the ballot in most states. Presumably, From and Fuller mean a well-known, well-funded, at least decently charismatic and compelling third-party candidate dramatically changes the equation.
No Labels hosted a New Hampshire town hall yesterday, featuring two of the group’s co-chairs: West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin, and Republican former governor of Utah and ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman. You can watch the full video of the event here; Manchin did not say whether he would run for reelection as a senator next year or choose to pursue the No Labels nomination. “I’ve never been in any race I’ve ever spoiled. I’ve been in races to win, and if I get in a race I’m going to win.” The group also unveiled a “booklet” of its foundational beliefs, which you can find here.
Would No Labels hurt the Democrats enough to put Trump into the White House again? It’s a bit hard to tell without knowing who the presidential and vice-presidential nominees for No Labels are going to be. No Labels has indicated that it wants its unity ticket to feature one Democrat and one Republican.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post put together a roster of the most likely options; interestingly, Manchin is the only Democrat on Blake’s list. (Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who was elected as a Democrat before leaving the party to become an independent last December, also makes the cut.)
The five Republicans considered well-known and realistic options are former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, Huntsman, and Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine. Blake also mentioned two other Republicans, former Michigan congressman Fred Upton and former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory, but for now, I’m going to focus on the bigger names.
You can mix and match among those seven names, but one factor that isn’t getting much attention is that most of those seven don’t come from particularly competitive states.
For starters, with Manchin atop a No Labels ticket, does that put West Virginia in play? Probably not. West Virginia is a really pro-Trump state. Last cycle, Trump won it 68 percent to 29 percent, taking just over 545,000 votes to Biden’s just under 236,000. Trump could lose a lot of votes to Manchin and still win the state comfortably. Those four electoral votes probably stay in the Trump pile.
If No Labels somehow convinced Sinema to be its nominee, it would change Arizona from a competitive state with a two-way race to . . . a competitive state with a three-way race. Biden won Arizona by the skin of his teeth last time — 10,457 votes out of more than 3.3 million cast. Arizona began this cycle as one of the blue states most likely to shift back to red, and it will remain that way, regardless of whether Sinema runs for Senate or president.
New Hampshire is a purple-to-blue state, so the presence of Sununu on a No Labels ticket could theoretically make a splash, but Biden won this state 52 percent to 45 percent, a margin of more than 59,000 votes. (Sununu got 46 write-in votes last cycle.)
Hogan’s home state of Maryland is not a competitive state in presidential elections. In 2020, Biden won Maryland, 65 percent to 32 percent, a margin of more than a million votes. Biden can concede a lot of votes to Hogan on the No Labels ticket and still win the Old Line State.
It’s a similar story in Louisiana, where Trump beat Biden by almost 19 percentage points, or almost 400,000 votes. Would having Senator Cassidy on the No Labels ticket eat into Trump’s usual margin? Yes. Would it do so enough to cost Trump the state? That’s an extremely tall order.
Maine is more complicated, as it allocates two of its four electoral votes to the winners of its two congressional districts, and last time, Trump won one of the state’s electoral votes. The short summary is that Maine has one congressional district that is heavily Democratic (the southern coast first, which Biden won 60 percent to 37 percent) and another that leans toward Republicans (the massive rural second, which Trump won, 52 percent to 44 percent). If Collins were on the No Labels ticket, would her presence alter the likely outcomes in Maine? I note that Collins was supposed to be toast in her reelection bid in 2020 and she ended up winning comfortably, which I interpret as a sign that we should never underestimate her. Either way, Maine is probably going to remain a split decision in 2024.
So, the short answer is that a Sinema–Sununu or Sinema–Collins ticket would be the No Labels pair most likely to alter the outcome of a state’s presidential vote, while Manchin–Hogan or Manchin–Cassidy would probably not alter the winner in any of those candidates’ home states.
Could a No Labels ticket win enough votes in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, or Wisconsin to alter the outcome? Conceivably, but those four were always destined to be swing states, with or without a third-party candidate. The outcome in those states and elsewhere depends on a lot of factors: Who’s on the ticket? Does the No Labels organization really raise the $70 million it’s been talking about raising? Does its ticket get a lot of media attention? Does the Commission on Presidential Debates (which Republicans have formally departed) invite the No Labels candidates to participate in the debates? How does the campaign allocate its time and resources? If the No Labels candidates choose to spend vast chunks of autumn 2024 campaigning in New Hampshire, they could have a bigger impact there.
ADDENDUM: My first thriller novel, Between Two Scorpions, featured a scene where the fictional CIA director has a meltdown on live television and makes an observation about Americans who end up detained by hostile regimes:
“It’s like everybody’s walking around in this trance, completely oblivious to reality and how the world really works!” Peck spoke louder, eyes starting to bulge. “How are we supposed to protect people when they choose to go hiking over the Iranian border? Why do Americans walk around, thinking these countries are as safe as going to the local mall?
United Nations Command at the Korean border, this morning: “A U.S. National on a JSA orientation tour crossed, without authorization, the Military Demarcation Line into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). We believe he is currently in DPRK custody and are working with our KPA counterparts to resolve this incident.”
JSA refers to the Joint Security Area, part of the demilitarized zone between the two countries; private tour groups visit the site.
What kind of genius chooses to go wandering off from the tour group when visiting the North Korean border?