By Steve Brawner, © 2023 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
If you don’t want to vote for either of the two most likely choices for president in 2024 – President Biden and former President Trump – there may be an alternative, and the group pushing it says the alternative could win.
No Labels is working to obtain ballot access in all 50 states. Chief Strategist Ryan Clancy told me April 18 that it’s already on the ballot in four and has already gathered more than 600,000 signatures total.
No Labels has been known for trying to bring solutions-minded congressional Republicans and Democrats together since it was founded in 2009. While there have been some successes, the political system has only become more divided.
The group started looking ahead to the November 2024 presidential election and realized things could go from bad to worse. Its poll of 26,000 people nationwide found that 69% didn’t want Biden to run again, while 62% didn’t want Trump to do it. And yet that’s the most likely matchup.
By next March, we’ll probably know who the major party nominees will be. If one is acceptable, No Labels will cease its efforts. If both are unacceptable, it plans to have a convention next April and nominate a unity ticket with one Republican and one Democrat. It does not plan to create a third party – just a choice for 2024.
“If there’s not an opening, then there’s not an opening,” Clancy said. ”But here’s the one thing we know for sure: If a year from now, there really is an opening, but nobody had done the legwork, it would have been too late.”
No Labels has been asking people if they would vote for a moderate independent ticket if the election were between Biden and Trump. Fifty-nine percent were open to it, and 20% said they would vote for it.
A plausible path to victory
Clancy said No Labels’ polling and modelings see a plausible path where a unity ticket could win 25 states with 286 Electoral College votes. It takes 270 to win.
It considers a handful of states to be “stretch” states. One is Arkansas, which seems like a stretch to me. The state does have a lot of voters who say they’re independent, but Trump won with 62.4% in 2020. No Labels’ model shows Trump winning here, but a moderate independent could reach almost 40%.
In addition, No Labels this summer will release its policy agenda. Clancy said its polling in December showed solutions could be found to difficult issues. But that would require political leaders to listen more to the country’s middle than their party’s base voters on the left and right.
Immigration is an example. Respondents were asked if they would support a deal featuring both border security investments and a path to citizenship for the so-called “Dreamers” who were brought to America as children.
“Eighty percent of people are for that,” Clancy said. “All right, but why can’t we have it? Here’s why: Because if you are a Democrat today, you live in mortal fear of your left-wing flank because if you are for any kind of investment in border security, they’ll say you’re for putting kids in cages. And if you’re a Republican, if you’re for anything other than deporting 10 million people, then you’re for amnesty. And so on issue after issue, you get this dynamic where there’s something the broad public clearly wants, but the leaders in the established parties live in mortal fear of crossing their base.”
Clancy said there’s more of an appetite for what No Labels is proposing than in the past. When Ross Perot ran as the Reform Party candidate in 1992, one-third of Americans said they were independents. A recent Gallup poll found that number had risen to 49%. The experts say third party and independent candidates can’t win, but Clancy pointed out that the experts have been wrong a lot lately – about Trump winning in 2016 and about the supposed Republican “red wave” that didn’t happen last year.
No Labels wants a chance to prove them wrong again – if the election is between Biden and Trump, or some other combination many Americans can’t accept.
“We are here to create an opening for something that they clearly want, that they at least want there to be a possibility for a choice,” he said. “And frankly, people just have a real failure of imagination if they don’t think this can ever happen.”
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 18 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com.