People from the group No Labels hold signs during a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, July 18, 2011. Jacquelyn Martin/AP hide caption
toggle subtitle
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
People from the group No Labels hold signs during a demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on July 18, 2011.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
In this extraordinary political season, every story seems larger than life and every event potentially apocalyptic.
That may be one reason for the fevered attention this week at a town hall meeting Monday at a small New Hampshire college, about 16 months before the next presidential election.
There was no declared candidate for this event, which was not sponsored by either of the two major parties.
And that was largely the point.
The event was organized by the political group No Labels, which bills itself as a voice for moderation and an end to polarized partisanship in American politics. It has existed since 2010, holding lunches and seminars and helping to organize the “Problem Solvers Caucus” in Congress. Many have seen it as a “good governance” group and nothing more.
But No Labels is drawing attention now to get involved in the 2024 presidential season. The group wants to offer an “insurance plan” by creating a “Unity Ticket” if the two major parties put forward candidates “the vast majority of Americans don’t want to vote for.”
It’s not lost on anyone that both parties are currently moving toward nominating the same men they did in 2020 — President Biden and former President Trump — despite the fact that most Americans don’t want that to happen. An NBC News poll published in April found that 60% of American adults did not want Trump to run and 70% did not want Biden to run. Citing age most often, those opposed to a Biden bid included nearly half of Democrats in the poll and a majority of independents.
So the circumstances would seem ripe for someone like No Labels to step into the gap. The group is working on an agenda and “building a massive ‘voting record’ of citizens who will support leaders brave enough to speak truth to partisanship.”
It all sounds pretty high, and there’s no denying that voters would like to have more options.
But there is consternation in some quarters about the impact the group could have in an upcoming election. In 2016, more than 5% of American voters voted for candidates other than Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It was three times larger than the third-party vote share in 2012 or 2020, and that increase was more than enough to make a difference in several states where Trump narrowly won.
Even if Biden won in 2020 by 7 million votes nationally, a change of four-tenths of one percent would have flipped Wisconsin, the same size change would have flipped Arizona, and only three-tenths of a percent would have flipped Georgia. A relatively handful of votes could have reversed the Electoral College result.
Democrats have been upset enough by this to speak out against No Labels. Citing surveys at 538.com and elsewhere, analysts have predicted that a tagless ticket would shift more support from Biden than Trump.
A group including former House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt has formed called Citizens to Save Our Republic and explicitly challenging No Labels for its potential benefit to Trump.
We have been here in the not too distant past
If that sounds a little familiar too, it should. It is very reminiscent of a plan offered a dozen years ago by a group of high-powered individuals called Americans Elect. Founded in 2010, around the same time as the original No Labels, Americans Elect had an eye on the 2012 presidential cycle and the stated goal of getting all 50 states to vote.
Americans Elect featured some prominent people from both parties and the world of finance and think tanks, including the late Peter Ackerman, who was a founder and early funder and whose son was installed as the group’s chief operating officer. Ackerman had already had a remarkable career, finishing his doctorate at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1976, three years after he started working for the Wall Street investment house of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Working alongside fellow Michael Milken, Ackerman sold junk bonds and was reported to have pocketed $165 million in 1988 alone.
Ackerman had been associated with Republican politics during the presidencies of George HW and George W. Bush, but wanted to go further, especially given the rise of populist energy then known as the “Tea Party” movement. While the phrase Tea Party has since faded, much of its original energy can still be seen in the enthusiastic crowds that attend Trump rallies.
But the idea behind Americans Elect wasn’t just to offer an alternative to the Tea Party or Obama, or Mitt Romney or any other Republican who survived the caucuses and primaries of 2012. The idea was to create an alternative system to determine who the candidates would be, independent of the two major parties and based on the unlimited possibilities of the internet.
Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., co-headlined with former Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman at a town hall in Manchester, NH, on Monday sponsored by the bipartisan group No Labels. The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Im hide caption
toggle subtitle
The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Im
Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., co-headlined with former Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman at a town hall in Manchester, NH, on Monday sponsored by the bipartisan group No Labels.
The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Im
Instead of going through Iowa and New Hampshire, elected Americans offered to host a national online primary to pour a wide field of “draft” candidates onto a single two-person ticket. Then it was on to hold a convention to nominate the winning entry online in June 2012.
The sheer audacity of the idea was appealing at a time when increased Internet access had transformed much of the economy and culture. Impressed by the concept, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offered a respectful description of what Americans Elect was trying to do in July 2011: “What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to drugstores, Americans Elect plans to do to both sides of the American political race; get on and let people in.”
This was the dream. But even as Friedman was describing the positive potential for Americans Elect, other observers warned of a spoiler effect. They noted that America’s chosen candidate could produce unintended consequences, as when progressive hero Ralph Nader shared some of the vote that might have gone to Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000, possibly costing him Florida and the election.
As it turned out, neither the dream nor the worst fears came true. Problems arose with the online process, which allowed any registered American voter to join Americans Elect and participate. Members could draft and vote for anyone they chose who met the constitutional requirements for the office of president or vice president. Anyone who gets “clicks of support” from 5,000 members in each of the 10 states would move on to the first phase of actual voting.
Or that was the idea. As a result, participation was far below expectations and click votes were too scattered. The first primary was canceled because no candidate had enough clicks of support to qualify for the May event. The same fate befell the next two scheduled rounds of click voting. In July, the board of directors of Americans Elect ended its presidential process and removed the party’s name from most of the 29 states where it had qualified.
Shared stories of financial question marks
There was also controversy over the finances of elected Americans. The group emerged from another called Unity08, which had funded some selected candidates in previous cycles. Americans Elect was organized as a “social welfare” organization under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, which allowed it to avoid disclosure of its donor list. There was criticism for this, and also for the millions in contributions he is known to have received from the world of high finance.
A similar criticism has been attached to the funding of No Labels, which uses the same tax regime. Recent news about the group has sometimes suggested it had something to hide, including substantial contributions from Biden opponents who see No Labels as helpful, whether intentionally or not.
The other question that looms large is the logistical challenge of finding candidates and building support for them. At this week’s New Hampshire event, the two most visible politicians were U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican who briefly ran for president in 2012, dropping out after finishing third in the first primary.
Not really a household name either. Manchin will face a tough re-election case next year, against the popular Republican governor in a state Trump has won twice by nearly 40 percentage points. But he has little chance of denying Biden the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024, so he’s been mentioned often as a potential champion of No Labels.
Huntsman, who has served as ambassador to China and Russia under Obama and Trump, was sometimes called the Republican candidate Obama feared most in his 2012 re-election year, because he had appeal to independents and less partisan Democrats.
In a way, you could say that it sums up what a group like No Labels would want in a candidate. If he seems ideal in many ways, his lack of success as a candidate (outside of Utah) may also illustrate the difficulty of translating the ideal into actual electoral success. This goes for voting systems and also for candidates.
