The No Labels party isn’t a political party, despite its aspirations to send a person to the White House, a lofty and admittedly as yet out-of-reach goal they won’t pursue if they can’t win or don’t see the need, according to a spokesperson.
Critics on the left have claimed the group is nothing more than a surreptitious attempt to secure a second term for former President Trump by drawing independent support away from President Biden’s bid for reelection.
The party that isn’t a party has seemingly come out of nowhere to sound the depths of the nation’s taste for another option as voters prepare to potentially face the choice between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump for a second time.
Once a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina and now National Director of the organization, former U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham told the Herald the claim his group is helping the 45th President become the 47th approaches absurdity, as he sat down for a call to explain what No Labels hopes to achieve in 2024.
“The notion that this is a covert plot to put Trump in office is about the most ridiculous thing you will ever hear,” Cunningham said. “I voted to impeach Trump. I wouldn’t be engaged in any effort that would attempt to put him back into office.”
Founded as a nonprofit by former Democratic National Committee finance chair Nancy Jacobson, the organization can now boast not just Cunningham, but former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, and former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Executive Director Ben Chavis among the political powerhouses pushing to have a third option available for voters in the fall of 2024.
The group recently held an event in New Hampshire, bringing together former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin for a campaign-style event where the Democratic senator refused to say he wouldn’t challenge Biden’s bid via a third party.
Cunningham said that though things seem like they are in the early stages for the party, the groundwork has been laid for more than a decade, more than enough time for them to make a move at a national level. He dismissed any comparison to other third party candidates.
“The data and polling that we’ve done shows that a unity ticket — Democrat and Republican or Republican and Democrat — would pull evenly from both sides,” he said. “It can’t really be compared at all to these ‘spoilers’ like Jill Stein or Ralph Nader because those were protest candidates, from the far wings.”
A better example, Cunningham suggested, would be Reform Party candidate Ross Perot, whose run in 1992 is said to have pulled support evenly from both incumbent President George H. W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
This time, and this race, may be different, according to one historian.
“The idea that this is being considered reflects the public’s dissatisfaction with the idea of a Trump-Biden rematch,” Ken Cosgrove, a presidential historian at Suffolk University, told the Herald.
According to Cosgrove, the left has a reason to be concerned considering how close the last race was.
“The Democrats are being proactive in trying to blunt the effort because it could cost Biden in just the wrong places with important subsets of the electorate. The impact is magnified because of his narrow margin of victory in a few states in 2020 that made the difference in the electoral college,” he said.
Cunningham maintains the group isn’t even a “party” in the classical sense — it’s a nonprofit organization, and he says he’s still a Democrat — but that people aren’t happy with what they are seeing elsewhere.
“You have to acknowledge the reality in which we live, where two-thirds of America doesn’t want this rematch, where 70 percent of the country doesn’t want Biden to run for re-election and where 60 percent doesn’t want Trump. Who is going to be speaking to these people?” he said.
“This is where the majority of Americans are, here in the middle, somewhere maybe to the left or the right, what have you, but not at the extremes,” he said.
Cunningham said the group will not enter the race unless they see both Trump and Biden at the top of their party tickets and only if the polling shows they can win. A decision will likely come after Super Tuesday, in March.
