There's one fewer wild card in the 2024 presidential election deck, as the centrist group No Labels has bailed on its long-running ambition to field a unity ticket to challenge the two-party duopoly.
“No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House,” said No Labels CEO Nancy Jacobsen in a Thursday email to the group's backers. “No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down.”
No Labels had made unfruitful overtures to a long list of prospects, including former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, former CIA Director David Petraeus, former Special Operations Command commander William McRaven, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
The last major publicly-reported target was former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. He bailed too, saying that "if my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again, then it is not the way forward.”
Bill Clinton's network teamed up with the likes of MoveOn, Bill Kristol and former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain to dissuade various candidates from running with No Labels:
Bill Clinton personally intervened with Manchin and Hogan in separate exchanges, warning it would ensure Trump’s return to the White House, according to people familiar with the meetings. Clinton raised those concerns in June over coffee with Hogan before the former governor appeared at an event at the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark.
The former president later met with Manchin and members of the senator’s family...and was “pretty forceful” that Manchin would only help Trump if he ran as a third-party candidate, according to one of the people. -- WSJ
Founded in 2010, No Labels bills itself as a "national movement of commonsense Americans pushing our leaders together to solve our country's biggest problems." In 2021, the group launched an ambitious project to secure ballot access so it would be positioned to give a platform to a bipartisan ticket in the 2024 election. No Labels had secured ballot slots in 21 states, including Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina.
No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars to support the effort to pursue ballot access across the country, raising the question of what will happen to that pile of cash. We may never know: No Labels is not a political party, but is instead configured as a 401(c)(4) social welfare organization. That structure frees the group from having to disclose its donors or report on its actions.
No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars for its prospective presidential ticket. Some was spent on ballot access operations for a ticket that will now never exist. Most has not been accounted for publicly—and might never be, given the group’s structure.
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) April 4, 2024
The biggest sighs of relief over the No Labels exit are coming from Democrats. Plenty of them have been pulling their blue hair out for months, hysterical over the idea that a centrist independent ticket would pull another block out of increasingly wobbly Jenga tower that is the Biden 2024 campaign. The fake-Republican grifters at the Lincoln Project are also pleased...
No Labels is OUT. Today’s huge win is a testament to the strength of the pro-democracy coalition we've amassed since 2020. No Labels is a dark money operation created to throw the election for Trump… and failed. But there’s still more work to do.
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 5, 2024
Next up: RFK. pic.twitter.com/pr7UXptbDa
In breaking the news Thursday, the Wall Street Journal said the move ended No Labels' quest to "become the first substantial third-party effort since independent Ross Perot’s showing of nearly 19% in the 1992 election." In that aspiration, No Labels was handily overtaken by the independent candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who worries Dems far more than No Labels did.
RFK Jr is polling at 10.5% in the RealClearPolitics average of a five-candidate race that also includes Cornell West and Jill Stein. Kennedy is doing particularly well among Hispanics, with on poll showing him snagging a whopping 17% of Arizona Latinos. Pivoting from the No Labels announcement, MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting told Associated Press...
"Now, it’s time for Robert Kennedy Jr. to see the writing on the wall that no third party has a path forward to winning the presidency. We must come together to defeat the biggest threat to our democracy and country: Donald Trump."
