CNN
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West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin will again drive Democrats to distraction Monday by appearing in New Hampshire with a group whose exploration of a third-party presidential ticket is fueling fears he could hand the White House to Donald Trump .
The moderate Democratic senator will participate in a town hall hosted by the group No Labels to help launch a new “common sense” platform on immigration, health care, gun control, the economy and other issues he believes are being ignored by his side. seen as two main ideological parties and increasingly extreme.
Manchin, who is up for re-election to the Senate next year but has not yet said whether he will run, will be in his familiar political seat, marking ground to the right of his party and attracting a political spotlight that he uses to maximize your influence. . Last year, for example, Manchin’s initial refusal to support a massive planned climate, fiscal and social safety net forced President Joe Biden to scale back and renegotiate a large part of his domestic agenda.
The West Virginia Democratic model has served him well with repeat statewide victories in one of the most conservative pro-Trump states in the nation. But he has Democrats doubly nervous: about how any presidential bid could trigger Biden’s re-election, and how a decision not to seek re-election himself would give Republicans a Senate seat in 2024.
Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju last week that his appearance in the Granite State has nothing to do with any third-party presidential bid, but is simply about advancing a “common sense dialogue.” But the senator, who has built a power base by keeping people guessing, added: “I’ve never ruled anything out or governed anything,” and dodged a question about whether an independent ticket could hurt Biden in November 2024 .
No Labels says it is considering a third-party unity ticket with one Republican and one Democrat in November 2024 and will make a final decision next year based on whether its “insurance plan” has a viable chance of victory.
For now, Manchin’s noncommittal answers are worrying some of his Democratic colleagues. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who represents a swing state that Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that he has raised the issue of possible third-party candidacies with Manchin.
“I don’t think No Labels is a political party,” Kelly said. “I mean, this is about a few people putting dark money behind an organization. And that’s not what our democracy should be about. It shouldn’t be about a few rich people,” he said Kelly. “Obviously, I’m concerned about what’s happening here in Arizona and around the country.”
CNN has reached out to No Labels, a registered nonprofit that does not disclose its donors. The group has criticized previous efforts to dispute their right to participate in the political process as undemocratic.
Democrats are also concerned about a planned third party led by former Harvard professor and public intellectual Cornel West, who supported independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during his 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential campaigns. even if West got only a few thousand votes from Biden in, say, the key state of Georgia, it could still compromise the president’s hopes of victory.
But West, who is running for the Green Party nomination, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday that it was “simply not true” that he could tip the election to Trump, should the former president become the GOP nominee. And he accused Democrats of failing to talk about the poor and working people and warned that Biden was “leading us toward World War III,” in an apparent reference to U.S. support for Ukraine’s bid to repel the invasion of Russia
Doubts about the current 80-year-old president are also fodder for the candidacy of Robert Kennedy Jr. to the Democratic nomination. He has a history of repeating baseless conspiracy theories about childhood vaccines or that man-made chemicals could be turning children gay or transgender. Kennedy this weekend was embroiled in a new controversy after falsely declaring that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” are “more immune” to Covid-19.
Growing speculation about a possible third-party challenge in 2024, despite the futile history of most previous efforts, is being fueled by public dissatisfaction with the options. Polls show both Biden and Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, unpopular. In fact, a rematch between the two is the one race many voters don’t want to see. Anger at the political establishment in both parties, a defining factor in politics in the first 20 years of the 21st century, is one reason some political pundits believe there may be substantial room for a ticket of third this cycle, even. if the obstacles to success are immense.
The new intrigue surrounding the 2024 election also comes as the pace of the campaign heats up. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has fallen short of expectations so far as the GOP’s primary challenger to Trump, ranking second in most national polls but still trailing the former president. DeSantis is showing the classic signs of a pivot. His campaign has shed staff (a spokesman told CNN the number was fewer than 10) and is venturing out of its safe zone of engaging only conservative media. On Tuesday, he will join CNN’s Jake Tapper for an exclusive interview following a campaign event in South Carolina.
But Trump is ramping up his efforts to knock his former protégé out of the race, even as he faces the excesses of two criminal indictments. The former president claimed Saturday that he was “totally dominating” DeSantis in the Florida polls and that it was time for his challenger to “come home.” Trump’s fundraising lead is cementing his front-runner status after new campaign finance data. Meanwhile, an impressive $72 million in fundraising by Biden and the Democratic National Committee is still not allaying all Democratic concerns about the president’s re-election prospects.
No Labels presents its platform in a new “Common Sense” pamphlet that Manchin and former Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman will promote at a town hall at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. The platform contains multiple ideas that split the difference between the Democratic and Republican positions on key issues with bipartisan positions anchored at the political center.
On immigration, for example, the group is calling for tighter border controls, reform of asylum procedures and a path to citizenship for Dreamers, or undocumented migrants brought to the United States as children. On guns, the group wants to defend the right to bear arms, but calls for keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of “dangerous people,” including through universal background checks and closing loopholes that make it easier to purchase weapons at gun shows. . No Labels also wants better community policing and crime-fighting.
Given the gridlock, anger and dysfunction in Washington, it’s hard to argue that the current political system is working. But many of these solutions are familiar, having been tried by presidents of either party or cross-party senatorial groups. Its failure to make it into law encapsulates the rationale for a third-party bid to break Washington’s political deadlock, but it also explains the institutional and political barriers to an independent president being elected or effective.
“We think there’s an opening today, and if it looks like this a year from now, there could be an opening,” Ryan Clancy, chief strategist at No Labels, said in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish in may “To nominate a ticket, we have to clear two pretty high bars, which is that the major party candidates have to remain really unpopular, but a unity ticket has to have a direct path to victory.”
No Labels says it would attract Republican and Democratic supporters alike and argues that previous third-party candidates, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, have not success because the voters did not believe. they could win (Some Democrats accused Nader in 2000 and Stein in 2016 of siphoning votes from Democratic candidates Al Gore and Hillary Clinton and paving the way for the GOP to claim the White House.)
Center-left think tank Third Way warns that a no-label candidate could be especially dangerous for Biden in key swing states. Is highlighting research showing that in 2020, Biden won six of the seven states where the margin of victory was three points or less. He argues, therefore, that 79 electoral votes are potentially at risk for Biden from the involvement of a third-party challenger.
Such a challenger would also have to win states where Biden won big, and at least some conservative strongholds. And given that Trump’s deeply loyal voters are unlikely to abandon him, it seems more likely that a third-party candidate will draw from the same pool of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate, independent voters that Biden is targeting with an entrenched campaign in their warnings against the threat. to democracy from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” populism.
An analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten shows that voters who do not have a favorable view of either Biden or Trump are more likely to side with the current president in the end. In an average of the last three Quinnipiac University polls, Biden leads Trump by 7 points among those who do not have a favorable view of either. A third name on the ballot could complicate that equation.
There’s also the question of whether No Labels — with its condemnation of “two major political parties dominated by angry, extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics” — is drawing a false equivalence between Republicans and Democrats. Trump, for example, tried to override a Democratic election in 2020 to stay in power, while Biden has enacted rare bipartisan legislation that includes gun safety and infrastructure.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is hoping to thwart Trump’s bid for a third straight Republican nomination, warned Sunday that a third-party bid could play right into the former president’s hands. “There are only two people who will be elected president of the United States on November 24: the Republican nominee for president and the Democratic nominee for president,” Christie said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“They think they know who (they’re going to) hurt. They want to hurt Donald Trump if he’s the nominee. But. … you never know who you’re going to hurt in this process.”
