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.
