Are Democrats Right To Panic About No Labels?
How a moderate third-party ticket could affect the presidential election.
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On to today’s article…
War has broken out between different factions of American political centrism. On one side is No Labels, the bipartisan political organization, which began laying the groundwork last year for a moderate, third-party presidential ticket in 2024. On the other is Third Way, a moderate think tank that has harshly condemned the No Labels effort as a spoiler that will draw support away from Joe Biden and throw the election to Donald Trump.
From a substantive point of view, both sides have strong arguments.
No Labels says that the two major parties have gotten too comfortable playing to their ideological bases, leaving most Americans choosing between two extreme options they don’t like. If Americans want a less destructive form of politics, No Labels argues, they should have the option to vote for candidates that represent a commonsense middle ground. At the top of their list to lead a potential ticket are centrists like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Larry Hogan.
Third Way says that No Labels needs to come back down to earth. The reality, they argue, is this: a third party cannot realistically win the presidential election; it’s ridiculous to draw an equivalence between the extremism of Trump and that of Biden; and while a moderate third-party campaign might sound good in theory, the practical consequences will be to help reelect Trump.
As I said, I find both of these arguments pretty convincing. I don’t begrudge people on either side because this seems to be a case of two good arguments competing against one another. That definitely makes me an outlier, because the blood on both sides of this feud has turned very, very bad.
Since I’m pretty equivocal on such a heated debate, I’d rather not wade into the merits of a third-party bid. Instead, I want to focus instead on a more narrow analytical question: how would a moderate third-party ticket affect a Biden-Trump rematch?
How No Labels Could Affect 2024
Most everyone has taken it as a matter of faith that a third-party candidate would hurt Biden and help Trump. I was skeptical at first, but the evidence really does seem to support this argument.
First, polling shows that a moderate third-party candidate pulls more support from Biden than Trump. A recent Data for Progress poll found that in a two-man race, Biden beats Trump by 2%. But when voters are given the additional choice of an unspecified “moderate independent candidate,” Biden’s support drops by 6% while Trump’s drops by 3%, enough to tip the numbers in Trump’s favor. A similar poll found that a third-party bid by Joe Manchin, which was supported by 9% of survey respondents, was enough to flip the popular vote to Trump. Even No Labels’ own poll shows that a “moderate independent candidate” would pull more support from Biden than Trump, stretching Trump’s lead from 1% to 5%.
Second, voters that dislike both Biden and Trump lean towards Biden when pressed to choose between the two. Given their distaste for both candidates, these so-called “double haters” would likely be the first to jump ship for a No Labels ticket. With presidential elections decided by just a percentage point or two, Biden losing enough of these reluctant supporters could tip the election in Trump’s favor. It wouldn’t be the first time that double haters proved decisive. They were pivotal to both Trump’s victory in 2016 (he won them by 17 points) and Biden’s in 2020 (he won them by 15 points).
Ultimately, then, it looks like the critics are right. A No Labels bid does seem like it could pose a serious threat to Biden, sucking just enough support away to give the election to Trump.
To be fair to No Labels, the group does not plan for their “unity ticket” to be a sideshow in the single digits. They say they are playing to win, and the fact that polling shows an independent candidate pulling slightly more support from Biden than Trump 15 months from election day does not prove that they’re doomed to be a Biden spoiler. If things go their way, the dynamic will change once they announce a ticket, start campaigning, and develop a message that appeals to moderates in both parties.
The burden, however, is on No Labels to prove that Americans will take a third-party bid seriously. The last third-party candidate to win a single state was George Wallace in 1968, and the last one to get over 5% of the vote was Ross Perot in 1996. That’s not to say that a third-party campaign is 100% doomed, but the evidence we do have so far seems to suggest exactly what No Labels critics are scared of: that a third-party moderate ticket can’t win, but that it could open the door to the Oval Office for Trump.
An Even Greater Threat To Biden
Given all the attention that the No Labels effort has gotten, one would think that it poses the greatest third-party threat to Biden. But despite the fact that most of the coverage has been dedicated to No Labels, there’s another campaign that I think should be even more concerning for Biden: Cornel West and the Green Party.
West, a left-wing political activist and democratic socialist, announced earlier this month that he’s running for president in the Green Pary to offer voters a choice between what he’s called “neofascist” Republicans and “milquetoast neoliberal” Democrats. The constituencies that West is gunning for are lefties, young people, and black voters — all constituencies that generally lean heavily toward Democrats. According to a recent survey, West is supported by 15% of black voters and 13% of voters under 35. And while that won’t be enough to put West within arms reach of the presidency, it could very well be enough to tip the election to Trump.
It’s strange, then, that West’s campaign explicitly targeting progressive voters has received far less criticism than the No Labels effort. It seems rather obvious to me that the greater threat to Biden is the explicitly left-wing campaign than the explicitly centrist one. The forces who are relentlessly attacking No Labels may want to divert a smidge of their fury and condemnation towards West, who has somehow managed to skate by with relatively little scrutiny.
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Democrats should instead panic about relentlessly pushing the hugely unpopular notions of racialism and transgenderism. See DeSantis 2020 and Youngkin 2021 for what happens when Republicans run hard against those agendas.