Delusion of No Labels

The group trying to put an independent on the ballot is led by North Carolinians

No Labels is the opposite of a grassroots organization. The group that wants to place a third party candidate on the presidential ballot is made up of political has-beens and disgruntled billionaires who are pissed because nobody in either party is listening to them. They believe that if they put up enough money, some centrist candidate is going to rally a groundswell of Americans to reject the two parties and elect somebody chosen by a small group of wealthy politicians with chips on their shoulders. The premise is neither new nor original and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate and politics.

No Labels’ founding Chair is Joe Lieberman, best known as Al Gore’s vice-presidential running mate. Lieberman was always a malcontent in the Democratic Party. After the party rejected him in his 2004 bid for the Democratic nomination, he endorsed John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008. Now, he’s trying to undermine Joe Biden.

The two national co-chairs both have strong North Carolina ties. Civil Rights Leader Ben Chavis grew up here and first gained notoriety as a leader of the Wilmington 10, a group of activists unjustly imprisoned during the struggle for integration in the early 1970s. Pat McCrory was elected as the state’s first Republican governor in more than 25 years.

Chavis has courted controversy throughout his career. He was pushed out of this position as Executive Director of the NAACP under cloud of a financial and sexual harassment scandal. He teamed up with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in the mid-1990s but left after sexual harassment allegations in 2000. He was briefly appointed Executive Director of he North Carolina Democratic Party but was pushed out before he could begin the job. More recently, he’s been in a legal battle with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a Black publishers organization that he heads. He has no experience in electoral politics.

McCrory is a failed governor who was run over by the right-flank of his party. He was elected as a moderate, business-friendly Republican but quickly rubber-stamped extreme legislation coming from the legislature. When he ran for re-election, he lost. When he sought his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate in 2022, the GOP rejected him. He’s since made a career as a talking head on cable news shows that don’t vet their guests.

This week, No Labels filed a complaint claiming groups are colluding to keep their candidates off the ballot. They released a montage of ads and columns from the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark, and Third Way discouraging people from supporting the group’s effort to get on the ballot in states across the country. McCrory accused them of “attacking ‘the rights of the American people and our democracy.’” I guess he forgot about First Amendment rights. That’s not very centrist. That’s whining.

No Labels calls itself a centrist organization, but it’s really a dark money group. They haven’t disclosed their donors but clearly have the backing of billionaires. They make the same attacks as Democrats on Donald Trump and the Republican Party, accusing them of authoritarian and anti-democratic rhetoric and tactics. However, they struggle to define Joe Biden’s extremism, instead using vague accusations of “wokism” and complaining that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer relaxed the dress code to accommodate Senator John Fetterman’s gym shorts. Talk about false equivalency.

Their approach to mounting a third party is fatally flawed unless their real goal is to steal votes from the incumbent. There’s no evidence of a groundswell of support for an independent candidate and the list of their potential nominees is largely unknown outside of Senate Cloakrooms or cable greenrooms. We have a fairly extensive history of how independent candidates fare and nobody is likely to create the excitement to capture the political imagination of the 50 million or so Americans they would need to succeed.

In 1980, John Anderson, a liberal Republican Congressman (a breed now extinct) from Illinois, ran as an alternative to incumbent Jimmy Carter and conservative Ronald Reagan. Anderson was seen primarily as a thinking person’s alternative to Carter who was battling both inflation and a recession during his re-election. He got early traction, polling as high as 24%, but as his New York Times obituary said, “But in a pattern familiar to independent candidates, Mr. Anderson’s support drifted as voters turned to candidates who they believed could actually win the White House.” He ended up with 7% of the vote, probably taking votes from Carter, not that it would have mattered.

Twelve years later, Ross Perot ran as an independent centrist against incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. He made a splash with an argument that Americans were ready for something different. Perot was a showman with an ego, a bunch of charts, and folksy humor. He railed against Washington and deficits and evoked images of a more peaceful, patriotic America. His campaign seemed to catch fire. In the end, though, he only garnered 19% of the vote and may have served as a spoiler for Bush.

No Labels is no different. They are most popular as a concept among political curmudgeons rather than a reality among middle class Americans. They may get some early traction because people like the idea of an independent, but when it comes time to vote, most will return to their traditional habits and vote for the party that best reflects their values.

Instead of a movement, No Labels is a bad combination of ego and money. They are run by politicians who are used to having people tell them what they want to hear and entitled billionaires who believe they are smarter than the rest of us. A fundraising friend of mine used to describe these folks as “masters of the universe,” enamored with their own wealth and knowledge. Because of their bottomless pocketbooks, they attract grifters who try to keep the game alive instead of trying to find a meaningful role for organization.

If the Masters of the Universe could set their egos aside and look at the country’s politics through a more realistic lens, they might see their real opportunity. Like a lot of fantasies, there’s a kernel of truth in what they’re preaching. People are fed up with politics as usual. The parties have become increasingly dysfunctional and defined by their extremes. While voters might not be ready to turnover the highest office in the land to an unknown entity like No Labels, they might be willing to take a chance on a lower office.

Because of gerrymandering and sorting, the vast majority of Congressional seats are not competitive, but that’s only based on two-party races. For instance, in supposedly safe Republican seats, around 40%-45% of the electorate, the Democrats, feels disenfranchised because their vote doesn’t matter. Conservative and moderate independents begrudgingly vote for incumbent Republicans because they can’t vote for a Democrat or there’s no opposition. A well-funded centrist independent could start with a solid 40+ percent of the vote. Electing a member of Congress or two would help No Labels build the national credibility they need to grow beyond their base of has-beens and billionaires.

No Labels believes a small group of very wealthy people can choose either a moderate Democrat or moderate Republican as a presidential nominee and a groundswell of millions of people is just waiting to jump on the bandwagon. It’s a fundamental misreading of the country and electorate. With enough money, they might be able to reach Perot’s 20% of the electorate, but they’ll never get close to a plurality. They’ll just steal moderate swing votes from Joe Biden. If they want to make a difference that does not help elect Donald Trump, they should set their sights a bit lower.