At a campaign-style event in New Hampshire last week, No Labels unveiled its policy agenda for its doomed bid to field a third-party presidential candidate in 2024. While No Labels claims its ticket will draw evenly from both parties, it is utterly alone in that belief. Though our organizations represent different vantage points — Third Way, the Democratic center and MoveOn, the progressive left — we agree that No Labels’ effort would hurt President Joe Biden and hand Donald Trump a second term. That’s why we joined forces on Thursday to warn Democrats on Capitol Hill of the No Labels threat.
And it’s not just us: Nearly all nonpartisan observers, and even Republicans, say Democratic candidates from Biden downward will be the ones most hurt by a No Labels run. That’s why the opposition to No Labels’ plans is coming from Biden supporters, while the right is either funding and supporting the effort or remaining conspicuously silent.
While No Labels demurs on whom its bid would hurt most, the data is crystal clear: It would spoil the race for Biden and elect Trump.
First, let’s dispense with No Labels’ central claim: that its candidate can win the election. No third-party candidate has gotten even one electoral vote in more than 50 years, including Ross Perot, whom No Labels cites as its model. And yet, No Labels claims it can somehow garner 270 electoral votes. It released a map purporting to show, without evidence, that it can win not only closely divided swing states but also states from Arkansas (which voted for Trump by 28 points) to Massachusetts (which went for Biden by 33 points). The map even labels Hawaii, which went in Biden’s favor by 63% to 34%, as a “solid moderate independent state.” It’s a preposterous fantasy.
But with $70 million from largely anonymous donors — 20 times as much as Jill Stein spent in her 2016 bid for the Green Party — No Labels certainly could be a spoiler, as Stein was. While the group demurs on whom its bid would hurt most, the data is crystal clear: It would spoil the race for Biden and elect Trump. Consider how third-party voting affected Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin compared with Biden’s 2020 victory in all three states (and the overall election). AP VoteCast found Biden won voters who backed Stein and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson by 30 points. A survey in April found Biden has maintained that advantage, with a staggering 39-point lead over Trump among voters who disapprove of both. And a recent poll from the Prime Group found that an unnamed “moderate, independent third-party candidate” would pull more votes from Biden and hand Trump the White House.
No Labels’ own polling from December (the latest data it has released) found its third-party candidate turns a Biden-Trump tie into a 5-point Trump advantage in a three-way race. “This makes sense,” No Labels co-founder Bill Galston wrote in a critique of his former group’s plans in The Wall Street Journal, “given that 36% of Democrats identify themselves as moderate, compared with 22% of Republicans. In addition, polls have consistently shown that a larger share of Mr. Trump’s support is ‘strong’ — less likely to shift — than Mr. Biden’s.”
Independent analysts from FiveThirtyEight to the Cook Political Report have found that a No Labels ticket would draw more support from those who would otherwise vote for Biden. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten writes: “It seems voters who don’t have a favorable view of either Biden or Trump are more likely to go with Biden. In an average of the past three Quinnipiac University polls, Biden leads Trump by 7 points among those who don’t have a favorable view of either man.”
Prominent Republicans, from Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway to Sen. Mitt Romney, have echoed these conclusions. Even Sen. Rand Paul, no friend to what he sneeringly refers to as the “Democrat Party,” agrees that the No Labels bid would hurt Biden more than Trump. And longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove wrote a recent piece titled “No Labels Should Worry Democrats.”
It’s hard to imagine how the No Labels plan could be more favorable to Republicans if it were run by the Republican National Committee itself.
It’s not difficult to see why Republicans would be happy to sit back and let No Labels clear the path for their party’s nominee. Nor is it surprising to see reports of Republican donors like Harlan Crow backing the effort, GOP-aligned vendors working on ballot access, Republican staffers on the group’s payroll and No Labels surrogates predicting a Republican will lead their ticket. And Republicans must be delighted with No Labels’ falsely claiming that Biden has done nothing for moderates and even attacking its own Democratic allies in the Problem Solvers Caucus, who are “in open revolt” over its 2024 strategy.
It’s hard to imagine how the No Labels plan could be more favorable to Republicans if it were run by the Republican National Committee itself. While we were among the first to sound the alarm among Democrats, centrists and anti-Trump Republicans, many others have joined the chorus insisting that No Labels’ third-party bid will divide the pro-democracy coalition that defeated Trump last time. The relative silence from Republicans about this effort is not complacency; it is strategy. For them, the more distractions, early damage and potential general election difficulties No Labels causes Biden, the better.
If No Labels truly does not want to be a spoiler, it should back down immediately. In this election, third-party candidates do not offer Americans another choice. Rather, they offer an illusion; they have no hope of winning but instead would bring about the catastrophe of a second Trump presidency.