Is No Labels the Political Group That Could Upend the 2024 Election?

• Armed with a $70 million war chest, centrist non-profit No Labels aims to upend the two-party status quo in Washington by offering a third way forward.
• Recognizable names including Republican Larry Hogan and Democrat Joe Manchin are flirting with potentially joining their ticket.
• But there are fears the group may simply hand the next election to the GOP and effect little if any change in D.C.'s corridors of power.

In the hit HBO show Succession, billionaire Connor Roy—the eldest child of fictional media tycoon Logan Roy—decides he wants to run for president.

Roy has no experience in politics, no real constituency, but, in the campaign's closing days, has managed to reach one percent in the polls. It's nowhere near what he needs to win, but good enough to ensure himself the ear of candidates who need his one percent more than he does. "Both sides are trying to squeeze my percent," he laments to family members in season 4, episode 1. "[...] the hope is I would maintain my percent."

No Labels, a centrist, non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., wants to be the upcoming presidential cycle's Connor Roy.

Once relegated to the halls of Congress, No Labels has been setting its sights beyond bridge-building on Capitol Hill to larger quarry, hoping to repair a national environment they believe is no longer sustainable. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported the organization had amassed a $70 million war chest in what the organization described as an effort to give a voice to hundreds of thousands of Americans they say feel unrepresented by either major party in Congress.

"For some reason, we, as a country, have just decided we should settle for this from our politics," Ryan Clancy, chief strategist for No Labels, told Newsweek in an interview. "A type of politics that is defined by fear and hatred of our neighbors and kind of a lowest common denominator set of choices. We can do better. We really think we can do better. And we know the public feels that way because they're telling us that right now, but nobody's listening to them."

And they threaten to win a whole lot more than one percent.

Like Ralph Nader's 2.74 percent in 2000 or millionaire independent Ross Perot's improbable 19 percent performance in 1992, No Labels' bipartisan unity ticket has the potential to capture wide swaths of voters from both parties, building a coalition of disaffected independents and moderates large enough to upend the 2024 election. According to internal numbers provided to Newsweek, some 69 percent of registered voters don't want Joe Biden to run for president in 2024, while 62 percent don't want Donald Trump to run. More recent polls show an even greater share of Americans who don't want a 2020 rematch.

And No Labels is already setting itself up to provide an alternative. As of April 27, the party has secured ballot access in the states of Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon, with plans to make inroads in the other 46.

They have recognizable names—former Maryland Republican Larry Hogan, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin—flirting with potentially joining them on the ticket. Others to work with the group include former Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and Democratic Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.

With mainstream support in-pocket, some are already pondering whether they could mount a credible bid for voters' support in 2024.

Polling already shows they could.

An Unprecedented Appetite

According to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll from last summer, 60 percent of voters say the nation's two major political parties fail to adequately represent their views, and believe the United States needs a third political party or multiple political parties to continue to thrive.

Of that number, 69 percent said they would want to see a third-party option on the ballot, while an eye-popping 79 percent of young voters—the demographic essential to Democrats' chances in the coming decades—said they want another option on the ballot.

No Labels sees opportunity in that demographic. Even if those numbers don't hold—59 percent of people are "open" to voting for a third-party candidate, their polling shows, if Trump or Biden were on the ticket—there's still a lot of people interested.

"The idea behind our contention—that there's a lot more unity than people think—isn't that that applies to every issue. There's a lot of issues people do disagree on strongly. They do it for a reason, because there are hard issues," said Clancy. "But there are a lot of issues where that's not the case, where there is a compromise just sitting there in plain sight. But we can't have it, because the loudest and angriest voices refuse to ever get out of the way."

And there's plenty to build on.

No Labels sees the overwhelming popularity of the bipartisan infrastructure packages passed under Biden—and the outrage it caused contained within the party's fringes—as a sign Washington can work—if people are willing to. They see data in their polling suggesting broad agreement on issues like improving the quality of American education and see the potential for a middle-ground on immigration reform. And they see fatigue with American culture wars and a desire for progress through policies unbound by the whims of party extremes.

Ultimately, No Labels has two goals, according to a policy memo provided to Newsweek: Wake up the major parties to moderate their policies or build up enough support to run a bipartisan "unity" ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican, which No Labels believes could appeal to a wide swath of the population.

"We think there is clearly the appetite if nothing else, more so than any time in the recent or even distant past," said Clancy.

Democrats—and even some advocates of a third-party run—are terrified of the prospect.

Splitting The Vote

Arizona Democrats have already filed a lawsuit seeking to block the group from the ballot while former advisers to No Labels, like William Galston, have previously denounced the organization, saying they are presenting a false equivalency between the right-wing's hold of the GOP and Democratic President Joe Biden's more moderate style of governance.

Others agree.

Where No Labels claims to be running in the tradition of third-party consensus builders, Bernard Tamas—a political science professor at Valdosta State University and an expert on third parties in American politics—notes the organization claims that it will only run a (currently unnamed) presidential candidate if the two major parties nominate candidates they believe are at the ideological extremes of their respective parties.

The non-profit is also not disclosing its funding sources for gaining state ballot access, though some media reports have noted its previous backers have included figures like GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, who recently came under scrutiny for a number of unreported gifts he'd made to conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

While they legally don't need to—the group is currently a non-profit, and is not currently registered as a political party—Clancy argues the group's motives are clear. They say they want to move beyond the emotion-driven politics that emerge among voters in a binary system, where people vote against the candidate or party they fear or hate more than the other one. They want to secure a plurality independent from left-wing rhetoric against fossil fuels or conservative outrage over transgender children and abortion. Being unwilling to break away from the two-party system, even if the timing isn't ideal, will only perpetuate those types of politics.

"That's the election we're going to have, absent some kind of interruption that forces different voices to the table," Clancy said.

Absent a candidate—or even a platform—has already raised questions their policies could be malleable, designed not to build the coalition needed to win, but to appeal to a certain type of voter. Under current conditions, observers say, that appears to be the moderate voters Democrats rely on to win.

"It is very hard to see any strategic explanation for No Labels' actions other than them attempting to spoil the upcoming election in the Republican Party's favor," Tamas told Newsweek.

Spoiler Candidates

Early polling supports that theory.

Data from other moderate groups—like Third Way—argue No Labels' bid could potentially hand the election to the GOP, saying its data indicates a potential No Labels candidate would likely sap more Democratic voters than it would Republican voters.

In a potential three-way race for U.S. Senate in Arizona, where incumbent independent Kyrsten Sinema is likely to face a Republican and a Democratic challenger, recent Third Way polling showed Sinema would more than likely garner a coalition primarily made up of liberal voters alongside a handful of moderate Republicans: potentially handing victory to a hard-right candidate like Kari Lake.

A similar scenario, critics say, would likely play out nationally.

"In the case where No Labels runs a moderate third-party candidate, the candidate would almost definitely pull more votes from Democrats than from Republicans," Aliza Astrow, a senior political analyst at Third Way, told Newsweek. "There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that Democrats rely more on moderate voters to win elections."

In 2020, for example, Third Way data shows Biden won self-identified moderate voters by a margin of 62 percent to 36 percent, helping give him an edge over Trump in battleground states where his margin of victory was tight. But he also won "double haters" (a term to describe voters who did not give favorable ratings to either candidate) by 15 points, a sign that with fewer options, voters tend to choose what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils.

A viable third-party option, Astrow argues, would likely do little to draw loyal supporters away from a Republican candidate.

"A moderate third-party candidate just appeals to more Biden voters than to Trump voters," she said.

Vulnerable Democrats

More worrying to Democrats still is that their party—even after a surprisingly mild defeat in the 2022 midterm elections—already appears vulnerable.

Democratic President Joe Biden, now 80 years old, is likely already locked in as the party's nominee in 2024 and maintains approval ratings lower than the majority of his predecessors did at this juncture of their presidencies. His vice president, Kamala Harris, is even more unpopular than he is and routinely underperforms Biden in pollsters' hypothetical head-to-head matchups against Republicans Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

While Biden ultimately defeated Trump by nearly five points in the 2020 popular vote, a viable third-party challenge leaves Democrats in an inherently precarious proposition. When judging by the electoral college outcome, Biden's victory over Trump in the battleground states he needed to win came by a razor-thin margin of just under 45,000 votes captured from voters in states like Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin—roughly one-third of a percent of the total votes cast that year.

Losing even a morsel of that support could likely put Biden in a bad position.

While Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader earned enough votes to cost him the plurality he needed in the electoral college, handing the election to Republican George W. Bush. Decades earlier, Bush's father saw the more conservative Perot capture a large share of the Republican vote, helping Democrat Bill Clinton to a double-digit win in the general election.

Then there was former President Theodore Roosevelt's so-called "Bull Moose" Party, which rode a progressive platform to the largest third-party result in American history to invalidate the policies of the more reactionary Republican Party.

While some accuse No Labels of taking the spoiler route, the group maintains it's pursuing the Bull Moose route, seeking to give disillusioned voters an option in an environment dominated by untenable choices.

"The immediate thing [the parties] will play is the fear card, the prospect that there actually might be a possibility and more choices in the process," Clancy said. "That is an existential threat to them. It's not an existential threat to democracy. It's a threat to them."

'Sting Like A Bee'

Tamas, the political scholar, says their approach lacks something Roosevelt's efforts had: a so-called "sting-like-a-bee" strategy mired in public anger and emotion against the status quo—the same approach No Labels is decrying.

"Like a bee, the third party stings/harms one or both major parties by stealing its votes and causing election losses," said Tamas. "In response to this threat, the major parties then shift ideologically to the middle and coopt the third party's rhetoric. While the net effect of such a strategy is that US politics shifts towards becoming more moderate, the fate of the third party itself is like that of a bee, which dies out after stinging the major parties."

This is exactly what happened with the Progressive Party, Tamas said, noting it succeeded in ending the reactionary politics of the Republican Party before itself disappearing by the end of the decade.

However, the sting-like-a-bee strategy only works if the third party runs candidates "at all levels," he said, not just a single presidential candidate.

"The third party has to be poised to attack the most right-wing or left-wing officeholders by running moderate candidates in their districts, especially when those extreme officeholders represent moderate districts," Tamas said. "No Labels is not employing this strategy, nor does it have a galvanizing issue to attract a large number of disgruntled voters.

"The most that it is likely to achieve," he added, "is to shave off a percent or two of voters at the presidential elections, thereby possibly spoiling the election if the vote is close in critical states, while having no transformative or positive impact on how U.S. politics actually works."