This week has brought three curious developments in the effort by No Labels to lay the groundwork for an independent or third-party bid for the presidency next year.
(1) If Ron DeSantis or anyone else not named Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, No Labels may scrap the effort, because the numbers indicate there won’t be enough frustrated Republicans to make the third-party candidacy worthwhile.
“From the polling and modeling that we see today, if it’s any Republican other than Trump, those voters probably” back the GOP nominee, Clancy said. He mentioned DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as broadly acceptable alternatives for some 20 million GOP voters.
“That [would start] to close off the gap or that opening that we see today for the independent ticket,” Clancy said.
No Labels will be polling “to see whether we think there continues to be an opening” for an independent presidential ticket, Jacobson said, “and we’ll see how that registers with the voters.”
If the 2024 general election has no Trump, then it will probably have no No Labels–funded independent candidate, because the Republican Party will be too unified. If you’re a Republican who really wants to win the 2024 election, this seems like the kind of indicator you might want to consider!
(2) Certain high-profile Democrats are terrified that in a three-way race between Biden, Donald Trump, and an as-yet-unnamed No Labels candidate, Trump will win, and are holding meetings to figure out how best to subvert the No Labels effort.
These Democrats include figures very close to Biden, such as “former White House chief of staff Ron Klain, Democratic National Committee senior adviser Cedric L. Richmond and Stephanie Cutter, a former campaign adviser to Barack Obama who has worked with the Biden team,” according to the Washington Post.
(3) Your mileage may vary, but I would find a term of, say, independent President Joe Manchin preferable to a second term of Democrat Joe Biden or a term that features Kamala Harris becoming president. (Note that in a three-way race among Biden, Trump, and Manchin, the 75-year-old Manchin is the youngest.)
Nonetheless, a slew of former Republicans who have rebuilt their entire identity around opposing Trump are now doing everything possible to prevent No Labels from giving the country a third option:
They were joined by former senators Doug Jones (D-Ala.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), along with representatives of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, former Weekly Standard publisher Bill Kristol and Lucy Caldwell, a former Republican consultant who now advises the independent Forward Party, according to people present at the event, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the event was private.
It’s a free country, and Kristol and the other ex-Republicans can stand up for their beliefs and, er, conserve conservatism, or however they describe their mission, in whatever way they see fit. But when they want to reduce the chance of Joe Manchin and his longshot independent bid, in order to maximize the chances that Joe Biden gets another term . . . well, it sure gets hard to distinguish them from any other Democrats.