A group aligned with corporate America and placing itself in opposition to the socialist left of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian populist wing of the Republican Party wants an alternative for 2024. No Labels proposes a bipartisan ticket with a Republican and a Democrat that would take on both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
It has no plans to announce its alternative candidate until next year. It hopes to raise $70 million to run its campaign.
Could It Happen?
Ross Perot’s insurgent 1992 candidacy was the last third-party ballot choice to earn a significant chunk of the vote, winning 19%. Bill Clinton won anyways. No third-party candidate has won an electoral vote since George Wallace won 46 in 1968.
Polling found that a centrist third-party candidate could take votes away from both Trump and Biden.
What We Know
This group was founded in 2010 by Nancy Jacobson, finance director of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. Clinton’s campaign that year sold America on the “New Democrat,” one who was pro-business and fiscally conservative yet socially liberal. No Labels has received considerable funding from Republican donors. Its donations have gone to more Democratic candidates than Republican ones, according to Open Secrets. Its co-chairs include 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who declined to challenge Donald Trump for president next year.
No Labels is a 501(c)4 that does not have to declare who its donors are. Reports suggest No Labels has received considerable funding from billionaires like former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as well as Andrew Tisch, and the group has allegedly solicited Trump backer Peter Thiel.
“After the Super Tuesday primaries in March, it should be pretty clear who the nominees of the two major parties will be,” Jacobson told The Jewish Insider. “That’s the key factor for us, then, to decide whether we want to use the ‘insurance policy’ and give the American people a third alternative.”
No Labels held a bipartisan strategy session in Miami in February that included former Trump White House acting Chief of Staff Mark Mulvaney, presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, Sen. Joe Manchin, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and former Hillary Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn among others. Penn and Jacobson are married.
Lieberman told The Jewish Insider that Trump and Biden are unacceptable to large swaths of the American electorate because they represent the most radical and uncompromising portions of their respective parties.
Manchin, Sinema, and Hogan have been mentioned as potential candidates.
Manchin told The Washington Post he would consider running on the No Labels ticket if asked.
Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton criticized No Labels for claiming that Biden is too far to the Left. Parton argued that Biden has pushed through bipartisan legislation on infrastructure, climate change, domestic manufacturing, election reform, and gun safety, more “than any president in recent memory.”
Lieberman acknowledges this.
“I admire him,” Lieberman said regarding Biden. “In some ways, he’s been pulled, or his administration has, to the left, by the left part of the Democratic Party. But on the other hand, he has embraced some of the bipartisan compromises that have come out of the No Labels members of Congress.”
Parton worries that No Labels, a group equally distrusted by conservative Republicans, could give the White House to Trump, the presumptive Republican frontrunner and likely nominee. She called it a “another high-dollar, dark money vanity project” that Democrats do not need.
“If Trump is the nominee, the No Labels coalition certainly hurts the Democratic candidate on the ballot,” Republican strategist Bryan Lanza told The New Republic. “Whether it’s Biden or even Kamala Harris. A vote for Trump is so cemented in that the opposition can easily be fragmented. It’s not like people are on fire for Joe Biden. They’re just there because he’s the best of the lesser choices. But [if] there’s additional options, people will easily siphon off into that.”
