NO LABELS SCRAPS EFFORT TO FIELD 2024 CANDIDATE
Centrist group failed to recruit any big names for ‘unity’ ticket.
The centrist group No Labels has abandoned its plans to run a presidential ticket in the 2024 election, having failed to recruit a candidate, its leader, Nancy Jacobson, said. The group, which said last year it had raised US$60 million (2.2 billion baht) to put forward what it called a bipartisan “unity ticket”, had suffered a string of rejections in recent months as prominent Republicans and Democrats declined to run on its ticket.
The group had told donors and members that it would put forward a candidate if President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump were the main parties’ nominees. “Today, No Labels is ending our effort to put forth a unity ticket in the 2024 presidential election,” Ms Jacobson said.
“Americans remain more open to an independent presidential run and hungrier for unifying national leadership than ever before. But 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. No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down.”
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the decision by No Labels to forgo a presidential campaign.
The group’s move means one fewer outsider campaign for the major parties to worry about, in a presidential field that has several independent and third-party candidates.
For months, Democratic allies of Mr Biden, who viewed No Labels as a prominent threat to his reelection effort, had worked to marginalise the group and pressured potential candidates not to agree to run on its ballot line.
In recent weeks, the party apparatus has focused its attacks on Robert F Kennedy Jr, the political scion mounting an independent campaign for president.
“From the beginning, our intent was to convince candidates that they should not accept the nomination,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, the centrist group at the middle of the effort to block No Labels’ efforts. “We and our allies in a broad coalition made the case that not only was there absolutely no hope of winning, but they would be spoilers for Trump.”
By last fall, No Labels’ leadership was prospecting among moderate Republican politicians to run as the group’s candidate.
But even among them, the recruitment efforts stumbled. As other outsider candidates emerged, No Labels began to seem like less of a threat.
No Labels said it would “build on the momentum we have gained over the last year to continue representing unity and giving voice to America’s commonsense majority”.
When former senator Joe Lieberman, the highest-profile No Labels supporter, died last month, the organisation was left with little political firepower to recruit potential candidates.
At that point, it had been turned down by figures including Sen Joe Manchin and former governors Larry Hogan Jon Huntsman and Bill Haslam.
“There was tremendous pressure on people economically and politically not to do it,” said former Republican Tom Davis, a No Labels co-founder. “What’s after this? You run, you lose.
You help elect Trump.”
No Labels was facing deadlines in the coming weeks to secure access to state ballots, some of which require a full presidential ticket on the application. On Thursday, Ms Jacobson said the group was on the ballot in 21 states.
The group also tried to court Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, both Republican former governors who abandoned their presidential bids this year. Both declined. Another prospective recruit, former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan withdrew his name from consideration last month.
David Petraeus, the retired general and former CIA director, was also approached and said no, he told The New York Times last month.
Only some would-be No Labels recruits talked publicly about why they had declined the group’s overtures. But several seemed to share Mr Christie’s sentiment. “If my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again,” he said last week, “then it is not the way forward”.
Bloomberg reports that No Labels had also considered as potential candidates billionaire Bill Haslam, the former Tennessee governor, and Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia.
The group, which was largely focused on fostering bipartisan policy in Congress during its 14-year history, spent months laying the groundwork for a third-party presidential bid.
No Labels called its plan an “insurance policy” in case of a Biden-Trump rematch that would pit two historically unpopular candidates against each other.
A Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released late last year found that appeal for an independent candidate in seven swing states was strongest among key Democratic constituencies such as young people and urban residents, demographics that are critical to Mr Biden reassembling his electoral coalition.
Sixteen percent of Mr Biden’s 2020 voters say they are drawn to third-party alternatives, compared to 11% of Mr Trump’s supporters, according to the poll.