(C) Tennessee Lookout
This story was originally published by Tennessee Lookout and is unaltered.
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No Labels? More like no solutions. – Tennessee Lookout [1]
['More From Author', 'January', 'J. Holly Mccall']
Date: 2024-01-18
While in Washington, DC, recently for a seminar, I heard a presentation from Holly Page, one of the founders of No Labels. No Labels was created in 2009 and purports to “speak truth to partisanship” and provide an option for the “politically homeless” — those voters dissatisfied with both major American political parties.
According to the group’s website, No Labels leaders are open to creating a Unity ticket to run for president and vice-president in 2024, on the premise Democrats and Republicans select candidates deemed undesirable by a “vast majority” of American voters — presumably referring to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
But a study of U.S. history provides no examples in which a candidate from a third or minority party has succeeded in winning the presidency and while no one can predict the future, history often guides us if we look for patterns.
Let us examine the 1912 election, in which the immensely popular former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt broke with his friend, then-President William Howard Taft, and the Republican Party, to run as a third party candidate. As the nominee of the National Progressive Party, Roosevelt managed to come in second place to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson swept the Electoral College with 435 votes but the combined popular vote for Roosevelt and Taft — respectively, 4.1 million and 3.5 million — totalled more than Wilson’s 6.1 million. While Taft proved an unpopular president, antagonizing the progressive voters who elected him, the intra-party split assured Wilson’s win.
Through the last century, third party candidates have served as nothing but spoilers, affecting no meaningful policy changes nor coming close to winning elections.
A more recent example shows a similar outcome. In 1992, billionaire H. Ross Perot ran as the nominee of the Independent Party, achieving a respectable 18.9% of the vote and 19.7 million popular votes. In similar fashion to the 1912 election, incumbent George H.W. Bush had riled his conservative base by reversing his position on raising taxes, but still won 37.5% of the vote to Democrat Bill Clinton’s 43%.
Charlie Cook, founder of and contributor to the Cook Political Report, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019 that while Bush’s loss could not be exclusively attributed to Perot, Perot’s attacks on the economy “carried more credibility with Republican and conservative voters than had they come only from Mr. Clinton.”
The issue is not quite as clear in the 2000 election, in which political activist Ralph Nader earned only 2.7% of the popular vote. Nader achieved little during his campaign: he put forth no policy seriously considered by the winner, Republican George W. Bush, or the Democratic Party.
And this brings us back to No Labels, which errs in many of its assumptions. As shown by the 1912 election and the exceedingly charismatic Roosevelt, personality alone isn’t enough to create a win for a third party candidate, but the ‘likability’ factor can’t be stripped from the calculus voters make as they choose candidates. Names being bandied by No Labels as potential presidential candidates include U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, an anti-Trump Republican. Neither man lights up TV screens, liberal Democrats strongly dislike Manchin for what they see as his failure to support many important party platforms, and perhaps more importantly, neither represents a growing generation of young voters who are more likely to stray from the two major parties.
Second, both Biden and Trump remain popular within their parties. A January 14 story in The Hill quoted a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll showing 72% of GOP voters would be satisfied with Trump as president. (Nick Robertson, The Hill, “Poll shows 72 percent of Republicans would be satisfied with Trump as nominee,” Jan. 14, 2024.)
Biden doesn’t fare quite as well, but a Pew Research Center poll — as straightforward a poll as there is — from December showed 61% of Democrats approve of the job Biden is doing with only a modestly higher disapproval rating among Democratic voters ages 18-49.
No Labels’ best chance for success would be to tap into Generation Z voters, given the approximately 41 million in the generational cohort, nearly half of whom are persons of color.
Yet there is nothing on the No Labels site to indicate the group is trying to appeal to Gen Z: even the use of the phrase ‘spry and indefatigable’ on the site’s home page is an odd choice, as the word ‘spry’ is often applied to senior citizens. A tab labeled ‘A Look Back: See what problem-solving can accomplish,’ references the 1935 creation of the Social Security Administration and comprehensive tax reform in 1986, important, if snooze-inducing, issues. National political leaders for the group are a quartet of men, the youngest of whom is 67 and only one of whom is Black. No Labels’ Board of Advisors? Eight people, only one of whom is a person of color. The site’s platform page labels a tab ‘America’s Youth’ and a pretty good way to show you don’t understand Gen Z is to refer to members as ‘America’s Youth.’
The organization even equivocates on policy, stating of abortion in a tab marked ‘empathy and equality’: “America must strike a balance between protecting a women’s rights to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life.”
To put it colloquially, this ain’t it.
Anecdotally, I spoke with a 62-year-old retired Navy officer and lifelong Republican who is struggling with the direction of his party. I asked him what he thought about No Labels; a fine idea, he said, as there must be an outlet for those voters who aren’t thrilled with their options. Would he vote for a Democrat, I asked him? He shrugged sheepishly. “I don’t know if I can,” he responded.
Eventually, there may be a third party that can inspire a majority of Americans to leave the partisan groups into which they are locked. But No Labels offers no solutions, no home for the politically homeless, and no chance of winning an election.
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