Via Dan Balz at WaPo (No Labels wanted a centrist ticket. Polarization, Trump stood in the way.):
For decades now, various politicians have sought to tap into and energize what they see as a moderate middle of the electorate into a viable political movement. For decades, those efforts have come to naught. The latest evidence came a few days ago after No Labels — formed as a bipartisan, centrist organization — gave up its search to field a presidential ticket for 2024.
The quest by No Labels was premised in part on the idea that many Americans are dissatisfied with having to choose between President Biden and former president Donald Trump, the two oldest candidates ever to run for president and, combined, the least popular. In that environment, some thought there was an opening for an independent alternative, and some polls lent credence to the idea.
The effort, however, was doomed almost from the start by perceptions that a No Labels ticket would become a spoiler, with no chance of winning the election and every chance of helping to reelect Trump.
Let me start with the Trump part and then move on to the broader picture (I don’t really address his polarization angle, but largely agree with them–go to his piece to see those). Yes, there were concerns that a No Labels candidate could help Trump. I am not sure I fully even bought that argument, but that is speculation anyway because it is hard to know the answer to that question without even knowing who the candidate was. However, I will confess that I have some sympathy for the position of preferring fewer third-party candidates in this cycle so as to make the choice as stark as possible.
Having said that, the main problem for NL was not Trump (or even polarization), it was the mushy, unclear nature of their goals and the bottom-line fact that there was no one they were going to find to run who was going to have any chance of success.
There simply isn’t this magic route to Centerville wherein a Moderate Centrist is able to draw from the left and right and then win. This is the pundit class’s fantasy about the fiscally conservative and socially liberal candidate who can square the circle and bring balance to the Force.
This is not how it works.
Balz provides the following description of this fantasy:
The concept of a moderate middle of the electorate has long existed. Some politicians have called it a “sensible center” or a “radical middle,” as if it were some kind of sleeping giant within the electorate just waiting to be awakened by the right idea or a charismatic leader.
Two thoughts. First, when I think of he “sensible center” I do not think of charisma. Second, if you movement thinks that the thing it needs to launch itself is a “charismatic leader” then the product must not be all that great.
Inherent in this thinking is the notion that there is a robust middle and that dissatisfaction with the Rs and the Ds as reflected in polling (such as this poll from Gallup from last year: Support for Third U.S. Political Party Up to 63%).*
But Balz rightly notes:
But many who call themselves independent actually lean toward one party or the other and vote loyally as a result — 81 percent, according to a 2019 Pew Research study. As the study said, “Independents often are portrayed as political free agents with the potential to alleviate the nation’s rigid partisan divisions. Yet the reality is that most independents are not all that ‘independent’ politically.”
That same study also underscored the lack of coherence among true independents. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans were labeled as fully independent, according to Pew, and this group “has no partisan leaning.” Beyond that, they were seen as less engaged politically — less likely to be registered to vote and less likely to vote if registered.
That is hardly a broad or stable foundation upon which to build a centrist movement.
Indeed.
I would note that while voters frequently state that they wish they had better choices, their ultimate behavior does not demonstrate that those preferences are especially intense. If Democrats, in the main, truly wanted a different candidate, the primaries would have been a different story. Voter behavior versus stated preferences, is ultimately what matters.
I may sincerely prefer something other than one of the two meals in the refrigerator. But the proof of exactly how much I really don’t want to eat either is my willingness to go to the trouble of cooking something else/being willing to leave the house to obtain a different option.
I may sincerely prefer a third movie to watch, rather than the two you rented from the video store, but if I want to watch a movie and I am unwilling to get in the car to go get another one, I am stuck with what you’ve brought to watch. **
I heard an analyst on NPR this morning state that No Labels wanted a “bipartisan” candidate. This type of analytical framing is a great example of how even someone smart about American politics can be captured by the narratives of American politics. This tracks with No Label’s own language of wanting a “unity candidate”–with the “unity” clearly being between Ds and Rs. The notion that No Labels (or any third party) should be seeking a candidate with “bipartisan appeal” is so captured by the notion that our system is binary that it misses the point that a third party ought to be forming its own partisan identity. It should be a truly new party. Yes, such a party might draw from the voting pools that currently go R or D, but the bottom line remains that as long as third party attempts (and fantasies) are largely conceived of somehow just borrowing parts from the two mainline parties, it just shows how deeply we cannot get beyond the duopoly.
At the most basic level: if we are going to continually talk about a new party in terms of “bipartisanship” then we are demonstrating that we don’t really understand what a true new party should and could mean.
I would note, too, that we only really have this conversation around the presidency in any serious national way. To be honest, this is really not about forming parties, as much as it is providing labels to what amount to various independent candidacies. I will caveat that by noting that the Libertarians, Greens, and a few others do attempt to run at the local level. But that is the extent of serious attempts at third-party formation, and they are pretty anemic in comparison to party systems elsewhere.
Consider the fact the No Labels wasn’t really offering, even at the fantasy level, anything especially new. It was, let’s get a moderate Democrat (Joe Manchin) to run. Or, let’s get a moderate Republican (Larry Hogan) to run. That isn’t creating a new alternative vision for America. It is just hoping that people will vote for leftovers instead of for the main dishes that they claim not to like (but will end up consuming with some level of gusto when the table is set).
While I understand, from a simplistic understanding of the median voter theorem, that many moderate Democrats should, in theory, prefer Manchin to Biden (and certainly to Trump) because of ideological proximity and that if Biden is more liberal that Manchin (he is, but not radically so, I would argue) then if the distribution of voter is more towards the moderate middle than the mildly center-left then a lot of voter should prefer Manchin. Likewise Hogan should appeal to more moderate Reps and even some centrist Dems.
But this overestimates the degree to which voters simply pick the person most closely linked to their precise point on a simplistic ideological spectrum. First and foremost, reality really isn’t a simple spectrum from left to right (and people also have multiple issues that they care about–and therefore we are talking spectra, not a single spectrum). Second, the calculation of who can win comes into play, and being the incumbent president (or a previously sitting president) kind of matters. Third, there is a panoply of other variables, like the fact that Manchin pissed off (that’s the technical term) a lot of Democrats for his behavior in the Senate, Hogan doesn’t exactly have a magnetic personality, and is not widely known, and so forth.
There is also the pesky way we elect the president. For a third-party candidate to win, that candidate would have to be able to not just appeal to the theoretical center of the country as a whole, but to the specific centers of multiple states, each of which has a different left-right distribution than the country as a whole (sometime wildly so).
I would be moderately more sympathetic to these appeals to theories of the median voter if we had a national popular vote with plurality winners or even a run-off system. The mechanics of the Electoral College really cut against viable third-party candidates, despite the fact that the Framers thought that there would be a bunch of candidates and the House would have to choose. But, as I have noted many times, it never worked the way they thought it would (see, for example, How Hamilton saw the Electoral College).
*I, for one, support the notion of a third party. I would like to see more options. But that also does not mean I am going to vote for a third-party candidate in 2024 just for the pleasure of doing so. Ultimately, most voters will behave just as I will, whether they think very deeply about it or not.
**This example brought to you via a wormhole in spacetime from the year 1993. I rejected a similar time warp example of which of the shows that were on TV in 1976 you had to choose from.
