No Labels: Do Dems Protest Too Much?
It's not hard to understand the Democratic Party's ire over the non-partisan, No Labels organization's determination to field a so-called unity ticket in the 2024 presidential election if the alternative served up by the GOP and the Democrats is simply another contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Few Americans (relatively speaking) desire such a contest.
While current polls show a substantial majority (60 to 70 percent) of Americans want to see someone other than either Biden or Trump inaugurated in January of 2025, a third-party alternative is disparaged and, indeed, is fraught with risk. Unfortunately, so is the alternative of depending on either Biden or Trump to lead the nation until the last year of this decade.
Biden, who would be 82 at the start of a new term, is showing his age, and everyone knows it. Donald Trump is also showing signs of age. His adolescent petulance, childish chronic lying, immature name-calling, and attempted shoplifting of everything from elections to classified documents don't commend him to the Presidency of the United States either.
So, No Labels is preparing to challenge the DNC-RNC election monopoly by providing a third choice, albeit one that will probably consist of a unity ticket with a Democrat and a Republican (or vice-versa). In the interest of full disclosure, my wife and I have hosted No Labels speakers, and we have been enthusiastic supporters of the organization's years of non-partisan work. The Problem Solvers Caucus, created by No Labels in 2017 and now functions independently, is the most successful example in Washington of Democrats and Republicans working to find common ground wherever they can.
Sadly, the No Labels' determination to provide an alternative to a Biden-Trump rematch has seriously frayed the once close relationship between the Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus and No Labels. It isn't hard to understand why.
Third-party races have never faired well in American elections. They typically become spoilers, skewing our unusual electoral-college balloting enough to affect outcomes but never enough to elect third-party candidates. Because of the third-party adventures of Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost, and we wound up with Donald Trump. The third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader arguably dealt a similar death blow to Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000.
"What is Past is Prologue" is chiseled in the limestone edifice of our National Archives in Washington. Would the country be playing with fire to forget the recent past and entertain a major third-party alternative again in the 2024 presidential election? Would a No Labels so-called unity ticket simply return Donald Trump to the oval office as so many fear? Would the country be repeating the drama of 2000 and 2016 when third parties wound up electing Bush (43) and Trump? Quite possibly. But, quite possibly, something as simple (and as human) as an ill-timed gaffe, a stumble, or an age-related "health incident" could also return Trump to the oval office. And how confident is the country that Biden leading the country until he is closer to age 90 than 80 is the course we should set?
Trump, criminal indictments and civil-court libel verdicts against him notwithstanding, is polling as a surprisingly strong contender, and, no one should kid themselves, Biden is far from an unsurmountable obstacle standing in his way.
There is somewhat of a two-shot game of Russian- Roulette arrogance to the notion that whomever the Republicans nominate and whomever the Democrats nominate will determine the totality of who we might consider as our next President. The demonstrable fact is that most voters don't want to play that particular game of roulette. A recent YouGov poll found that a mere one-third of voters want Donald Trump to run, and only 26% want Joe Biden to run. An NBC poll two months ago found that between 60% and 70% of Americans do not want either Trump or Biden to run, yet they are the take-it-or-leave-it choices our entrenched political system insists we have.
One of my favorite columnists, Peggy Noonan, summed up our election dilemma in a recent column, "Watch a third-party bid. The centrist group No Labels says it's provisionally attempting to get on the ballot in all 50 states. We'll see how that works. But a third party, if it comes, could have real and surprising power in this cycle. I am the only person I know who thinks this, but again, look at people's faces when you say it will be Trump or Biden."
Another consideration is how heavily the vice-presidential candidates will weigh on voters' minds in this particular election. With two old guys with low approval ratings running for President, massive media focus will be on both Vice-Presidential candidates who are almost sure to be women. Enormous attention will be focused on (presumably) Vice President Kamala Harris and (my guess) Kari Lake, or another Republican female candidate, perhaps Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, or even Nikki Haley, who has served successfully as Governor of South Carolina, and as Ambassador to the United Nations. The most recent NBC News poll last month shows Kamala Harris with a 32% positive rating, the lowest VP score in the history of the network's poll. Harris may be to President Biden in the 2024 election as the boulder was to King Sisyphus in Greek mythology.
History will also credit several substantial positive achievements to both President Biden and President Trump. That isn't the point. The real point is that the country is eager to move on to new, younger, and accomplished leaders. The DNC and the RNC don't seem to recognize that. No Labels, it seems, does.
The centrist No Labels organization is being demonized for its determination to provide America with an alternative to a Biden or Trump presidency. Third-party challenges are, indeed, risky. Then again, so is forcing America to select one of two candidates that, for legitimate reasons, most Americans do not want to see returned to the Oval Office.
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The spoiler argument holds water for the Nader-influenced 2000 election, where it's likely that Florida and New Hampshire would have gone to Gore, flipping the total from 271-267 Bush to 296-242 Gore. But that's the only one. Perot, despite amassing 19 million votes in 1992, only influenced Ohio (which went for Clinton, but might have gone to Bush I); nevertheless, Clinton still would have won easily - take away Ohio from him and it would have been 349-190, instead of the actual result of 370-168. Hillary-dead-enders notwithstanding, Jill Stein was not a factor in the 2016 outcome. People forget that Gary Johnson had more than three times the votes of Jill Stein in 2016, but no one seems interested in claiming that any of Johnson's 4.4 million votes came out of Trump's hide. The 2020 election would have ended in a 269-269 deadlock without Libertarian Jo Jorgensen arguably costing Trump the combined 37 electoral votes of Arizona (11), Georgia (16), and Wisconsin (10). You can look up the razor-thin vote margins for those states and see that Jorgensen's votes greatly exceeded Biden's margin in all three.
The electoral elephant in the room is the percentage of non-voters. Since 1980, the turnout in presidential elections expressed as a percentage of voting-eligible population has ranged from a low of 51.7% in 1996 to a high of 66% in 2020. When 70 or 80 million people would prefer to stay home than to vote for "the lesser of two evils," it's an indicator of how broken our democracy is.
As for third parties in general, the deck is terribly stacked against them in terms of ballot access laws (decided by - guess who? - the democratic and republican state legislators), fund-raising hurdles, media blackouts, no chance to get into the debates, and, perhaps most important, "the wasted vote syndrome." Ranked voting might help. Multiple-member legislative districts at all levels could create some momentum for a very-well organized third party (i.e., when there's no prize for second place - which is the case in single-member legislative districts - there's no room for three contestants). Barring either of those potential approaches, expect 3rd party politics to be little more than a political parlor game.
Of course, whosever ox is most likely to be gored will determine the level of mainstream support or opposition to any third party, including the No Labels party.
No presidential election is “simply” a contest between two candidates. Biden has achieved nearly as much as Roosevelt while avoiding the recession Wall St has been fearing (in part because it would make Biden’s taxation policies look good). Reductionist stupidity that claims Biden and Mr. Bluster will both be remembered for achievements is purely nonsense. Policy after policy from the former administration has been exposed as grift disguised as policy. Federal agencies were fiddled with to punish enemies and score political points (e.g. farm subsidies) and by the end of Biden’s term, Mr Bluster could be in jail. Media insistence on Biden being age-compromised and attempts to consider them somehow equal in are media masturbation aimed at creating the same old dualisms that make writing stories easy and conceal truths that require serious debate. No Labels cleverly disguises it’s vividly partisan posture with the pretense of objectivity in it’s name.