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Democrats averted a disaster last week when the centrist political group No Labels announced it would not nominate a candidate, who would primarily threaten President Biden. While the group apparently couldn’t get anyone it wanted to join its ticket, the leaders of the third-party effort raised roughly $70 million at a time when polls show large majorities of voters are unhappy with their choices this fall.
So I asked my Post Opinions colleagues Matt Bai and Jim Geraghty: Why are third-party efforts failing in 2024, when so many voters say they don’t like the two major-party nominees?
Alexi McCammond: Hey guys, is this proof that the so-called “sensible center” doesn’t actually exist?
Matt Bai: No, of course it’s not that. There’s a very significant sensible center. This only proved that you can’t build a party without a central personality or issue and then expect people to want to lead it. And especially not at a moment where the stakes are this high.
Jim Geraghty: There were a whole lot of lessons from the No Labels experience. A big one was that you can’t build a party or a campaign on a generic sense of “neither this, nor that.” In the past month or two, No Labels felt a little bit like a game-show option: “Or you could vote for whoever is behind Door No. 3!”
Alexi: It struck me as odd that they didn’t try to run down-ballot candidates in a midterm cycle to build an actual operation ahead of 2024.
Matt: That wouldn’t work, either. People always conflate independent politics with third parties. They are not the same thing. Independent candidates have a real future in America. Third parties do not. America doesn’t want or need more political parties built around hypothetical candidates. Our politics now is much more driven by personalities, for better or worse.
Jim: I also suspect that what gets called the “sensible center” covers a lot of territory. You could tell No Labels was in trouble when its biggest names kept turning it down publicly — Joe Manchin, Larry Hogan, Nikki Haley.
Alexi: None of them are particularly electric national candidates, in my opinion. Jim wrote recently that those “double haters” (voters who don’t like Donald Trump or President Biden) aren’t actually equally opposed to both candidates. What say you, M.B.?
Matt: I agree with Jim. Double haters aren’t just going to vote for Door No. 3. They have nuanced views, depending on their priorities.
Jim: Also, the formula of one Republican and one Democrat on the ticket was better in theory than in practice. As Haley observed, while she can agree with some Democrats on some issues, she would have been picking a running mate who probably wouldn’t have agreed with her on abortion, cutting government spending, etc.
Matt: I always thought it was sort of a bizarre conceit, this “if you build it, they will come” theory of centrist politics. You can poll all the generic candidates you like. Someone has to step up to run, and the minute they do, your own conception of the party changes. It just never conveyed to me a sophisticated understanding of how presidential campaigns actually work.
Alexi: All smart points, though I do wonder if those double haters are still looking for a way to protest (like sitting out the election entirely)?
Jim: I suspect the double haters will still be shopping around. We don’t know who the Libertarian candidate is yet, but almost all of their potential candidates are fairly obscure. An independent campaign like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s starts with one clear, obvious advantage: You know who the candidate is and what he stands for!
Alexi: And he’s a unique personality, that’s for sure.
Matt: In some ways, we’ve already had successful independent campaigns. Trump really was an independent who supplanted a party. But he had a huge, famous personality and a single galvanizing issue in immigration.
Alexi: That’s fair. Independent in all but name! So does No Labels ending its “insurance plan” make you guys feel any better about 2024?
Jim: No, I wanted an option beyond Trump and Biden, and I was curious to see who No Labels was going to be able to recruit.
Alexi: And do you think Democrats should be less worried about RFK Jr.’s potential threat given No Labels couldn’t cobble together a serious movement/leader?
Jim: It may well be that the notion that there are a lot of voters out there open to third parties is something of a myth. No one wants to seem closed-minded or to rule it out when a pollster calls, but few will actually vote that way. If the discussed Manchin-Hogan or Hogan-Manchin ticket had formed, I could see it doing something akin to Ross Perot in 1996, almost double digits.
Matt: I really don’t know how the RFK Jr. thing bounces. I don’t think anyone does. Let’s see how many ballots he can get on and whether there are debates that include him. It’s a very hard thing to game out right now.
Alexi: Wait, do you guys want debates that include RFK Jr.?
Matt: I do want debates that include him, yes. I think he’s a delusional and dangerous candidate, personally. But I think a serious independent candidate should have the opportunity to be heard, and debates are good for the process. You don’t silence delusion — you expose it.
Jim: I wouldn’t mind it. I don’t think including Perot was a mistake in 1992. But I honestly think either or both major candidates are going to look for excuses to dodge debates.
Alexi: Well, here’s to finding the right third-party personality and a good bar if we get those debates. 🙏🏽
Nicholas Goldberg argued in the Los Angeles Times that third parties are only a good idea in theory: “The two major parties don’t have a God-given right to a clear field. ... Voting for a third-party candidate is an OK strategy if you really don’t see much difference between the major-party candidates and want to register a protest. But voters who feel that way about a Trump-Biden race need to face reality. The notion that Biden and Trump are comparable ‘extremists,’ one from the left and one from the right, is an outrageous and dangerous untruth.”
What’s also outrageous and dangerous about any third-party candidate, as Goldberg explained, is the possibility that they would win enough electoral votes to “make it impossible for either of the major party candidates to win the needed 270 electoral vote majority,” therefore throwing the 2024 race to the U.S. House of Representatives (narrowly controlled by MAGA Republicans) to decide.
While that outcome would certainly make the history books, Joshua Spivak, author of the book “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom,” wrote a compelling op-ed for Time detailing why that’s unlikely to happen: “Throughout American history, the two major parties have proven to be exceptional at garnering Presidential votes. In 17 of the 24 elections since 1924, the two parties topped 98 percent of the vote. There have been only four elections in that span where the Democrats and Republicans did not combine to capture at least 94.1 percent of the vote — and two of those were Ross Perot’s runs in 1992 and 1996 (the other two were 1968 and 1980).”
But you know the third-party effort is truly over when you’ve lost David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who has supported No Labels since it launched in 2010. “If the 2024 election was Bernie Sanders versus Ron DeSantis, I’d support the No Labels effort 1,000 percent,” he wrote. “Donald Trump changes the equation. A second Trump presidency represents an unprecedented threat to our democracy. In my view, our sole focus should be to defeat Trump. This is not the time to be running risky experiments, the outcomes of which none of us can foresee.”
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