Outside the Beltway

No Labels Continues to Have No Clue

An unserious plan by an unserious group.

Steven L. Taylor · Friday, March 15, 2024 · 7 comments

Via WaPo: No Labels announces committee to select presidential candidate.

The centrist group No Labels announced a committee of 12 people Thursday who will decide in the coming weeks who should appear on the group’s potential third-party presidential ticket.

Led by co-chairs of the group — including former senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair and civil rights activist Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. — the committee will then take its recommendation to a separate group of No Labels supporters that is prepared to formally nominate the ticket on 48 hours’ notice.

This does not strike me as a way to compete in a race that has clearly been Trump v. Biden for quite some time now. The notion that there is anybody who could step in at this juncture and attract the needed attention to overcome the cultural and structural hurdles that are in place is, well, delusional.

And then there’s this:

Lieberman said in an interview on Wednesday that the group would have the ability to stop a candidacy from moving forward after a few months if it failed to gain traction and appeared to be a possible spoiler that could help elect former president Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee.

“We want to give the American people the third choice — bipartisan, moderate — that they say they want,” Lieberman said. “But if for some reason after two or three months, they say they don’t want it, we have got to be realistic and say, ‘This is not the year.’”

Ok, so by definition a candidate running under a specific label (i.e., a party) against candidates from other parties cannot be “bipartisan.” They would definitionally be a partisan. They could very well be moderate, and perhaps No Labels is a moderate party (or aspires to be because it isn’t much more than, ironically enough, a label at this point). But such a candidate would not be bipartisan.

I also think this is a great illustration of the way in which the current partisan duopoly thoroughly captures our national psyche because instead of defining No Labels on its own terms, Lieberman defines it in relationship to the Republicans and Democrats. In this formulation, the totality of political possibilities is somehow encompassed by The Two Parties, one conservative, the other liberal and, therefore, a moderate third wat can only mean a “bipartisan” hybrid. Moreover, the way to make this new party function is for politicians who have left The Two Parties to come together and form a third choice. Our political imagination is largely stuck in this binary simplism.

I would note that Lieberman himself never tried to form a party after he left the Democrats (or, more accurately, he failed to win re-nomination in 2006 and so switched to being “independent”–and often was described as an “independent Democrat” which again makes my point about the way the Two Parties capture our political minds).

The rest of the quote is weird as well, insofar as it implies some kind of recall option once a candidate is chosen. I would note a few things. First, for a No Labels candidate to be viable, it would have to be polling at extraordinarily high numbers in several states. That would mean commanding a plurality of the vote in enough states to deny any candidate an Electoral College majority. This isn’t going to happen. Second, to be a spoiler would mean a handful of votes in a couple of key swing states. While I honestly think this is not especially likely, the probability is not zero.

As such, if the option of being a viable candidate is zero and the chances of being a spoiler are greater than zero, what is the point of this process?

Side note, because I figure someone will bring it up: is it possible that some of No Labels’ secret donors are actually pro-Trump and want NL to be a spoiler? Maybe, but that all seems a bit too clever by half. I actually do think that politicians like Lieberman believe in their own version of the pundit’s fallacy that because voters tell pollsters they want moderate and/or new options this is the way to provide it to them. I also think that they are misunderstanding what the demand actually is while simultaneously misunderstanding the structural constraints of our system and how they shape competitive options.

And yes, I do want more parties in the United States, but just adding one more presidential candidate to the mix is not what I am talking about.