Paul Morigi/AP Images for No Labels
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), right, speaks at a No Labels event on December 5, 2016, in Washington.
Over at No Labels, things are hoppin’. With $70 million in the bank, the organization is busy qualifying its own ballot line in a range of states so it can run an independent candidate for president in 2024. (Despite its claim that it seeks to restore trust in government, No Labels has declined to identify where that $70 million came from.) It has already won ballot status in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), seeking to reclaim his hold on the nation’s attention now that he’s no longer the swing vote in the Senate, and facing probable defeat should he seek re-election to the Senate next year, is the likeliest recipient of No Labels’ You-Too-Can-Be-the-Presidential-Spoiler Prize. Other possible claimants (though if Manchin runs, they’d almost surely have to settle for the vice-presidential line) include Maryland’s former governor, Republican Larry Hogan, and the general flotsam that has floated around No Labels for years. (At one No Labels New Hampshire presidential primary forum I covered in 2019, speakers included Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard.)
Leading Democrats of the centrist persuasion, including Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and No Labels co-founder Bill Galston, are now scurrying away from the group as fast as they can, pointing out that characterizing a race likely pitting Joe Biden against Donald Trump as one in which no sober-minded centrist could make a choice—which is precisely No Labels’ line—is pernicious hooey. Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats devoted to defeating the left in intraparty tussles, has expressed voluble alarm at No Labels’ plan, noting that the states in which No Labels is now gathering signatures are both swing and blue, but decidedly not red. That can only be interpreted as a ploy to weaken Biden and the Democrats.
No Labels justifies its actions by insisting that both Democrats and Republicans have become entirely creatures of extremists. Lest you think I overstate the organization’s message, consider this video that it is sending out to potential donors, whose existence was revealed last week by The New Republic’s Daniel Strauss.
“With the extremes on both sides dominating the primaries,” the video warns, “the two parties are on a path to nominating candidates most eligible voters will find unacceptable.” Above these words, the video shows photos of four political figures—in order of appearance, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.
The Democrat who will surely be his party’s nominee next year, one Joseph R. Biden, has been mysteriously omitted from No Labels’ list, even though it was Biden who “dominated the primaries” that the Democrats held in 2020, and will do the same in 2024 should he run, which is virtually guaranteed.
Depicting the Democratic Party as an amalgam of left extremes is, of course, the daily fare offered up by Fox News and like polemicists (political scientists call this the “Carlson-Hannity-Teixeira Syndrome”). But not even Fox has gone so far as to suggest that Biden will somehow vanish between now and 2024.
The video is also filled with shots of empty polling places, anticipating “an election in which the majority saw no viable choice.” This despite the fact that the 2020 election saw by far the highest turnout in American history, and that elections since then—like in Wisconsin last week—have also seen record-high turnout. Looking all the way back to the post–Civil War era, party polarization has usually boosted turnout, not depressed it. No Labels’ claims to the contrary are rebutted by the record levels of voting in the Republican North vs. Democratic South voting of the 1870s and ’80s, and the huge increase in turnout between 1932 and 1936, during which interval Franklin Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress despite major Republican opposition.
For an organization that once included at least one serious political intellectual (Galston), No Labels has been willfully indifferent to the leading role that the Republican Party’s plunge into ethno-nationalism has played in the current political polarization. Galston’s Brookings colleague Tom Mann and his co-author, the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein, documented the degree to which the Republicans’ move rightward has greatly eclipsed the Democrats’ move left, but that seems to have made no impression on the No Labels crowd. Neither has No Labels noticed that the elements of Bernie Sanders’s left-wing program that Biden has embraced—affordable child care, tax credits for families with children, free public-college tuition, higher taxes on the rich—are, by the evidence of every poll on the subject, among the most popular public policies with the American public.
But it’s precisely such ideas that a Manchin or a Hogan will run against should No Labels manage to get one of them on the ballot. Who is it, then, that No Labels envisions as their constituency? The group constantly cites polls that show growing numbers of Americans view themselves as independents, but ignores the same polls when they go on to ask if that group of Americans regularly votes for one party or the other. (That’s just what the vast majority do.) Many have also noted that a Biden-Trump rematch, featuring a sitting president who’ll be 81 years old in 2024 and a former president who’ll be 78, leaves voters, especially younger ones, longing for less geriatric choices. But among the sweet birds of youth vying for the No Labels line, Manchin will be 76, and Larry Hogan will be 67. Should they opt out, there’s always No Labels’ noodge-in-residence, Joe Lieberman, who’ll be 82.
What No Labels can’t seem to reckon with is that there are a host of burning issues in today’s America that come down to binary choices. The foremost of these in voters’ minds is a woman’s right to an abortion. As events would have it, Joe Manchin was the one Senate Democrat who voted no on a bill last year that would have restored that right in the wake of the Supreme Court’s revocation of Roe v. Wade. Manchin joined every Republican to ensure the measure failed, which it did by a 49-51 margin. I suppose from No Labels’ perspective, that was a stellar act of bipartisanship. My hunch is that, should he be the No Labels candidate for president next year, the majority of No Labels’ much beloved swing voters will reject Manchin in light of his anti-choice position, as well as the prospect that voting for him could toss the election to the Republicans, who share his opposition to a woman’s right to choose.
With each passing day, it becomes clearer that No Labels is fundamentally a vanity enterprise, offering such figures as Manchin, Hogan, and even Lieberman a way to stay in the limelight. Its ancillary effect may be to enable Trump or some other Trumpified Republican to take state power, at considerable cost to American democracy and decency. To No Labels and the Manchins of this world, that appears to be something between a secondary and a negligible concern.
