Democrats are scrambling to prepare for the growing possibility that a No Labels ticket could throw the election to the GOP nominee.
The chief strategist for No Labels is projecting optimism that the centrist political group’s “unity ticket” will have ballot access in 15 states by the end of the year and 34 by next spring.
Citing the public’s exasperation with the likely rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, No Labels is preparing to lend its ballot lines to as-yet-unnamed candidates in 2024, infuriating mainstream Democrats who are scrambling to prepare for what they see as the growing possibility that a third-party ticket could help lead the eventual Republican nominee to victory.
Polls show they have a reason to panic.
Biden’s approval rating hovers below 40 percent, and an October New York Times/Siena College poll showed Biden losing to Trump in five of the six most competitive presidential battlegrounds. That survey followed a September poll from CNN/SSRN showing that two-thirds of Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than Biden.
This polling is deeply worrying to pro-Biden activists, who say that No Labels’ centrist appeal could cost Biden crucial swing votes in the handful of battleground states that typically decide competitive presidential elections.
“A winning Democratic coalition necessarily relies more on moderate voters today than a winning Republican coalition does. Democrats need to get about a supermajority of moderate voters in order to win a presidential election,” says Kate deGruyter, senior director of communications at Third Way, a left-leaning group that opposes the No Labels ticket. “Diverting just a small chunk of the Biden coalition to a third-party candidate could easily make the difference in a national race.”
Like Third Way and MoveOn.org, former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt has also formed a pro-Biden super PAC, called Citizens to Save Our Republic, to oppose the group, citing polling that suggests a No Labels ticket is likely to tilt the group toward the Republican nominee.
Still, No Labels is barreling ahead with its ballot-access efforts. The nonprofit advocacy group announced last month that it has already secured access in twelve states, including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, and Utah, thanks in part to the $8.9 million that No Labels spent in 2022 on “citizens engagement, digital and grassroots building and ballot access,” according to tax forms first reported by National Review earlier this month. Those tax forms also show that the group raked in $21 million last year, up from $11 million the year before.
No Labels’ 501(c)(4) status shields the group from being legally required to release its donors. And political observers can only speculate about who might emerge on its potential ticket — retiring Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and former governors Jon Huntsman (R., Utah) and Larry Hogan (R., M.D., a No Labels national co-chair) are possible contenders — let alone what the group’s candidate selection process might look like.
“This is too important for us not to get it right. So we’re going to just keep running it through the process and when we have it ready, we’ll announce it,” No Label’s chief strategist Ryan Clancy told National Review on a call with reporters earlier this month. “But our overall plan, which is sometime between mid March and mid April, is when we’ll make the determination whether to put up a ticket and then who would be on it.”
The group’s “Common Sense” policy booklet encapsulates No Labels’s effort to thread the needle on a number of contentious issues. Its immigration section, for example, calls for more border-patrol agents, security technology, and even “physical fortifications” at the U.S.-Mexico border while also calling for a path to citizenship for “Dreamers.”
Also frustrating to many Democratic political activists is the group’s moderate position on abortion, outlined in the policy booklet as a balance between women’s “right to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life.”
Sounds vague? The “wiggle room” is “by design,” Clancy tells National Review. “That commonsense policy booklet is not supposed to be the prescription for every issue,” he says. “It’s supposed to be directional enough where you can get a sense for where the country wants to go, and it’ll be up to the candidate to fill in some of the lines.”
Now a year out from the general election he president’s allies are working hard to sound the alarm about No Labels’s centrist appeal and how it might, in their view, tilt the election toward Republicans. Even Biden said in a rare interview with ProPublica in October that a No Labels ticket is “going to help the other guy.”
Well aware of of the uneasiness that many independent and Democratic-leaning voters have about Biden’s unpopularity and age — he turned 81 last week — pro-Biden groups are trying to keep the focus on their perception of Trump, his likely general-election challenger, as a unique threat to democracy whose general election chances could benefit from a third-party ticket.
“Those polls in our opinion show people are looking at this as a referendum on Biden, but we think that that’s really going to feel like a choice between Biden and Trump as they get much closer to the election,” deGruyter says. “This is an anti-Trump coalition more than anything. There are a lot of moderate or even disaffected Republican voters who are really important in the Biden victory.”