One underrated scenario that would enable a right-wing authoritarian like Ron DeSantis or even Donald Trump to win the presidency in 2024 is that the Republican path will be cleared by an organization called No Labels. The semi-inscrutable organization, which is lavishly funded by anonymous donors, is planning a third-party candidacy that would almost certainly peel off enough moderate voters from the Democratic ticket to ensure a Republican victory.
Like a far-off meteor heading directly for Earth, a No Labels campaign is simultaneously distant yet disconcertingly likely to result in catastrophe.
The media periodically checks in on No Labels, which is putting its vast budget to use acquiring access to the ballot in every state with the goal of potentially fielding a moderate presidential campaign, and every report is slightly more unnerving than the last. The latest, via the Washington Post, notes that Über-centrist William Galston has grown concerned enough to quit the organization.
Given the minuscule margins by which Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, any third-party campaign would likely enable Republicans to win another presidential election simply by consolidating the right-wing base.
No Labels insists it will only go through with a campaign if it is going to win. No Labels swears up and down it will not run a spoiler campaign. “I just wanted to emphasize on the spoiler question: I would not be involved if I thought in any account that we would do something to spoil the election in favor of Donald Trump. That’s just not going to happen,” said Benjamin Chavis Jr., an adviser to the group. “We have very tight guardrails around this effort,” promises Ryan Clancy, a senior adviser.
But can anybody trust that the group’s “guardrails,” which seem to be a proprietary secret, would actually work? The Post provides several reasons to doubt it.
First, while it puts itself forward as an advocate of moderation and bipartisanship, No Labels refuses to concede that Joe Biden is an example of either. No Labels describes its protocampaign as a contingency operation against an extreme candidate by either party, and Joe Lieberman, one of the politicians associated with the group, refused to tell the Post whether a Biden campaign qualifies as the sort of contingency that would operationalize a No Labels campaign.
Indeed, the No Labels website specifically describes itself as an “insurance policy against a Trump-Biden rematch.” Larry Hogan, another No Labels figure, says, “The vast majority of people in America are not happy with the direction of the country and they don’t want to see either Joe Biden or Donald Trump as president.”
Biden may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but he has worked productively with Republicans to sign a surprisingly broad array of bipartisan legislation. His main partisan domestic initiative was essentially written by Joe Manchin, who is also involved with No Labels. It seems bizarre to create a group dedicated to promoting moderate, bipartisan legislation as a protest against a president who has actually accomplished those very goals.
Second, there is the murky but highly concerning involvement of the odious Mark Penn. While No Labels insists Penn is not involved with the group, the Post notes “extensive surveys that No Labels has commissioned from HarrisX, a company whose corporate parent is overseen by [No Labels chief executive Nancy] Jacobson’s husband, Mark Penn, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who has distanced himself from the Democratic Party.”
Penn, a former pollster for Bill and Hillary Clinton, was forced to leave the Clinton campaign in 2008 after insisting that Clinton’s personal image would not prevent her from winning the nomination and that Barack Obama was unelectable. Penn has been pushing for years to create a third party in the mold of his own fiscally conservative, socially liberal ideology. (Here he is predicting a party to emerge in 2010, and here he is again in 2011 blaming all of Obama’s travails on his unfair attacks on the rich.)
What actually transpired was that Donald Trump proved Penn’s analysis was backward: The underserved market was composed of voters with socially conservative, fiscally liberal proclivities. Rather than analyze his own failings, Penn responded to Trump’s election by lavishing him with praise as a pragmatic problem solver.
Third, the group’s own polling suggests its candidacy would serve as a spoiler on behalf of Republicans. In December, it found an unnamed moderate third-party candidate would win just 20 percent of the vote, against 33 percent for Trump and 28 percent for Biden. This result, which is entirely intuitive given Biden’s much greater reliance on moderate voters vis-à-vis Trump’s, has somehow not discouraged the organization from plunging ahead.
All this leaves are the secret “guardrails” No Labels promises will stop the group from spoiling anything. But the very idea that a presidential campaign can be easily turned on and off in response to cool analysis of polling reality defies any practical understanding of how campaigns work.
In the real world, campaigns have to hire staff and recruit allies with promises that are not easily reversed. Once running, campaigns generate emotional connections. The staff and the campaign convince themselves of their virtue and the perfidy of their opponents. They insist they can save the country and then believe it. And they develop unrealistic beliefs about their own likelihood of overperforming the polls. None of those things can be easily turned off.
What’s more, the timing makes it difficult, if not impossible, to calibrate a campaign’s effect. Most third-party campaigns collapse very late in the process. By the time No Labels realizes it is running a spoiler campaign, if that realization sets in at all, it will be too late to stop it.
The outside world has to trust the guardrails will be used responsibly by the very people who are constructing a political doomsday device.
