The group has a reasonable criticism of American politics, but its approach won’t help matters.
The centrist group No Labels has been the object of furious scrutiny in the 2024 election cycle, with attention largely focused on whether a third-party presidential campaign launched by the group might play a spoiler role in the presidential race, putting Donald Trump back in the White House. Last week, No Labels went so far as to allege illegal sabotage by Democratic organizations and other political groups.
No Labels presents itself as the solution to a lack of democracy in the existing system—voters are stuck with two choices they don’t like and over which they don’t have much control. The problem is that No Labels’ proposed solution arguably involves even less democracy than the two major parties offer.
Understanding how strange the operation is requires going back in time to No Labels’ founding, in 2010. The group was established to foster bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans in politics, hence the name: Elected officials affiliated with the group would work together without regard to party in an attempt to fix ailing civil institutions. No Labels’ most prominent venture so far has been the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of U.S. representatives dedicated to bipartisan legislation.
Now No Labels is doing something markedly different: It is considering a plan to nominate a candidate to run as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican nominees. No Labels has obtained and is working to obtain ballot access for such a candidate in states across the country. The group says it will decide later this spring whether to run a candidate, and plans to hold a virtual convention in April, using a yet-to-be-determined nominating process.
“The initial premise was: We have no choice but to make the two-party system better,” the political scientist William Galston told me. Galston helped found No Labels, but he parted ways with the group in 2023 because he feared that a presidential bid would help reelect Trump. “The current effort rests on a different premise altogether—namely, that we have to go outside the two-party system to make things better,” Galston said.
In explaining its decision to enter the presidential race, No Labels gets some important things right. First, the group identifies fear and loathing of the opposite party as a huge animating force in current politics. “Why are both parties marching toward nominating such historically unpopular candidates?” No Labels asked in a public memo. “It’s simple really. In this era of negative polarization, Americans increasingly vote against, rather than for, candidates.” (In an apparent contradiction, the memo goes on to claim that “the American people are increasingly rejecting this fear mongering.”)
Second, No Labels is correct that voters have consistently said they don’t want the choices they are likely to get. The legal scholar Edward Foley points out that current polling suggests voters would prefer Nikki Haley to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden; despite this, her campaign appears to be on its last legs. At the core of No Labels’ plan to field a candidate is the assertion that “Americans like choices … and they want more choices.” And yet, many aspects of the plan offer voters little input and little opportunity to understand how the organization operates.
To run a candidate, No Labels is acting as a weird quasi–political party. “We’re not a party at all. We are and always have been just a 501(c)(4),” Ryan Clancy, the group’s chief strategist, told me. That’s true to an extent—it isn’t planning to run candidates for any offices besides president, it has no base of registered voters, and it has no platform. But it’s also not not a political party. It has obtained ballot access for a nominee and says it may soon pick a nominee, just as a party does.
No Labels is marketing its nomination to prospective candidates as a chance to enter the presidential race without having to mount a long and litigious battle to get on the ballot, and without the bruising, expensive experience of a primary election. But at no point in this does anyone vote. Clancy argues that primaries, too, are a flawed process: They rely on a small and unrepresentative sample of voters in a small and unrepresentative number of states, and in this cycle, they are producing a matchup that voters don’t want.
But primaries do provide some public input in addition to giving candidates a chance to test themselves and their messages. Moreover, No Labels isn’t offering much information at all about how it will choose its ticket without a primary. The group says it will make the decision about whether to field a candidate after Super Tuesday, based on an analysis of whether such a candidate would have a real shot. Many experts outside No Labels see such a calculation as basically impossible.
“There’s no metric by which you could look at the polling in March of an election year and say, We know how things are going to play out if we introduce a new candidate,” Lee Drutman, who studies political reform and polarization at the think tank New America, told me. “For one, the voters don’t know who that candidate is.”
Assuming No Labels does decide to nominate a candidate, how will the group choose that person? That’s a mystery too. Originally, the group planned an in-person convention of supporters this April in Dallas, but in November, it announced plans to hold the convention virtually instead. But No Labels hasn’t said what such a convention would look like or what role delegates would play in choosing the candidate.
“We’re going to have a dialogue with a lot of our members from across the country, so they’re going to be giving us a lot of incoming [sic] of what it is they want to see,” Clancy told me. “Once you get all this incoming [sic], how do you actually make the decision? And ‘we’re still working on that’ is the only accurate answer.”
Picking a candidate with a real chance at mass appeal may be impossible, for some of the same reasons that no major third-party candidate has emerged for years. No Labels is “completely convinced that Biden versus Trump is a contest that a majority of Americans do not want. The evidence suggests that premise is correct,” Galston told me. “They conclude from that fact that you can mobilize at least a plurality to choose someone other than Trump or Biden. The conclusion doesn’t follow straight from the premise.”
One problem is that voter attitudes on issues are all over the place, especially among those who don’t lean toward either party. They are likely to have divergent opinions on some of the same contentious issues that divide Democrats and Republicans, such as abortion and taxation, posing a challenge to any candidate trying to cobble together a centrist platform. Or, as Drutman told me, “What unites the voters who don’t want a Democrat or a Republican is one thing: They don’t want a Democrat or a Republican. And there’s nothing beyond that.”
So who does want a No Labels nominee for president in 2024? In the absence of clear answers about how the group will select a candidate or what positions that person might take, one proxy might be to look to the group’s funders to try to understand its constituents and their motives. This is especially significant because, although No Labels says it will not run its candidate’s campaign, the nominee would likely expect the group’s funders to become the donor base for his or her campaign. But determining the group’s backers is impossible, because No Labels doesn’t and won’t disclose its funders. (Past reporting has suggested that No Labels’ money mostly comes from large and corporate donors.)
“We’ve never in 14 years released our donors. We don’t think that necessarily advances any cause of transparency,” Clancy told me. “And we don’t have to, because we’re like the AARP or NAACP or League of Women Voters. In the end, if there’s a ticket, [the candidate will] have to disclose” their donors.
This is hard to take seriously. Of course transparency furthers the cause of transparency, and although the comparison with other nonprofits may have held in the past, the difference between No Labels and the AARP in 2024 is that the AARP is not choosing a candidate for president. (Save your jokes about the senescent Democratic and Republican contenders, please.)
“Are you a party, or are you not a party? It seems pretty important,” Drutman told me. “Because if you’re running candidates, and you have a ballot line, then you should be a party. And if you’re a party, then there are some transparency requirements and regulations that go with that. If you’re going to try to have it both ways, that just seems incredibly problematic, and it’s sort of like you don’t trust the voters.”
No Labels’ answer to these challenges is that voters will ultimately get the say, because if the group fields a candidate, voters will get a chance to vote for—or against—whomever that candidate is. A candidate who garnered strong but minority support would only introduce more prickly, unanswered structural questions. If no candidate won 270 Electoral College votes, no one knows what would happen, though there’s a good chance it would aid Trump. And in the unlikely scenario that a No Labels candidate somehow won, he or she would likely struggle to govern. No Labels argues that its president would be unfettered by party allegiances, but when I asked Clancy how such a president would navigate a Congress with a partisan speaker and majority leader, and committees arranged by party, he was vague. “If you imagine a world where there was actually enough momentum behind a ticket like this, for it to actually win—don’t you think that would probably engender some structural changes on the back end of it?” he asked.
That’s not a strategy, though. It’s wishful thinking, and it is wishful for the very reasons that No Labels exists in the first place: The two-party system dominates all aspects of American politics, and any other force soon runs out of gas. No Labels has no real plan to overcome that, just a deep belief that something should.
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