Election Countdown, 254 Days to Go: A Step Away from the ‘No Labels’ Brink.
In US presidential politics, third-party campaigns are always and only spoilers. That risk for the 2024 election receded this week, as did some other threats.
Cover of Harper’s Weekly in the summer of 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt was trying to get back to the White House as a third-party candidate from the ‘Bull Moose’ Progressive party. Instead, his campaign did what all third parties in the past 160 years have done: It split his side’s vote and helped the opposition. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, won a landslide victory over both Roosevelt, a former Republican, and his Republican successor, William Howard Taft. (Getty Images.)
This post is on four developments that could play a part in the upcoming election, and that have taken significant turns in the past week. I will start with the two that probably matter most. Then at the end I’ll have bonus item number five, an important extra reading suggestion I’ve just come across.
1) A likely end for ‘No Labels 2024.’
I have long thought that “the fundamentals” this year favor Joe Biden—despite his age, despite lackluster polls, despite friction over his Gaza policy and other issues.
The fundamentals include: a steadily improving economy, even if people say they don’t “feel” it; a steadily tightening web of legal and financial complications for Donald Trump; and a steadily lengthening list of electoral losses for the MAGA brand, whenever it leaves the hothouse of GOP primaries and is exposed to a general electorate.
Nikki Haley has made this last point the center of her campaign pitch. As she now puts it day after day, “How many times do Republicans need to lose before we realize we can’t win with Donald Trump?”
I have long thought that the biggest fundamental threat to change all that (setting aside the unforeseeable) was a strong “third way” alternative, which could inadvertently or intentionally split the anti-Trump vote and leave Trump on top. Every third-party group through my lifetime has said it is trying to “expand the discussion” and “give voters a real choice.” But that is never how it turns out. In modern presidential politics, third-party candidates serve always and only as spoilers.1
Despite Cornel West and possibly RFK Jr, the most publicized and apparently best-funded third-party group for this year’s cycle has been No Labels. Its dream ticket has been to pair a “centrist” Republican and Democrat who might tap the national appetite for “somebody else” than Trump or Biden.
Their original dream figure was Mitt Romney, but even Romney dismissed them as spoilers. Two follow-on dream figures have been Larry Hogan, a Republican who was two-term governor of heavily Democratic Maryland, and Joe Manchin, practically the last elected-Democrat in heavily Republican West Virginia. But this month, both have taken themselves out of No Labels contention. Hogan, by choosing to run instead for the US Senate. Manchin, by saying he would not run for anything this year.
In a very good piece for The New Republic, Greg Sargent explains why this is the beginning of the end for No Labels 2024—and why that is a good thing. An underpublicized hero of his saga is former Rep. Dick Gephardt, who in Congress was Nancy Pelosi’s predecessor as leader of the Democrats and who had twice run for president himself. Sargent begins:
Around six months ago, when speculation raged that Senator Joe Manchin might join a third-party presidential ticket on behalf of the centrist group No Labels, he privately consulted with Richard Gephardt, the former congressman who has taken up the cause of stopping No Labels in its tracks.
Gephardt showed Manchin private polling that he’d bankrolled himself, illustrating that such a bid could only help Donald Trump beat President Biden…
The whole story is worth reading. No Labels could still scrape up some other candidate—Nikki Haley?—and it hasn’t officially folded its tent. But time is not on its side, and its always-bogus “Perish the thought, we won’t be spoilers” argument is even more obviously false than before. If Hogan and Manchin (and Gephardt2) have helped beat it back this time, good for them.
2) A possible end for magical thinking about an ‘open convention.’
When it comes to the Democrats choosing a 2024 ticket other than Biden-Harris, I’ve long been in the “it’s too late” camp. The latest “not too late” time for Joe Biden to disclose that he planned to step aside would have been in the first half of last year.
At that point he would instantly have been transformed into a lame duck, on issues ranging from Ukraine to judicial appointments. You can easily imagine Mitch McConnell’s speech the very day after a Biden step-down announcement: “Next year, the American people will decide who should lead them in the future. We would do them a disservice by rushing to confirm any more nominees, or major policy changes, in this twilight period for a one-term president. Therefore... ”
Still, if Biden were going to do it, that was the time.3 Time enough for other candidates to make their decisions, assemble their staffs, raise their money. Time to try to protect the administration’s remaining plans—infrastructure investments, economic management—from being chewed up in the Democrat’s own primary-election struggles.
That didn’t happen. By last fall it was “too late” for any orderly Democratic alternative to Biden-Harris. But in these past few weeks, as I noted last time, the press has been abuzz with talk about Biden’s age and the possibilities of dumping him. The arguments mostly followed this two-step logic:
Step One: Sure, maybe Biden has been a good president. Perhaps a very good one. But his job now is to stay in office, and at that job he will be bad.
Step Two: Somebody else would be a better candidate! We don’t know who, but an “open convention” could be a good place to find out. (This is where the magical thinking begins.) So let’s talk more about dumping Biden, even though that will hurt him if he ends up as nominee, because the payoff will be getting somebody better.
I said a week ago that we couldn’t be sure whether this sentiment would grow. This past week there was powerful pushback.4
To me the most significant and sweeping was a long opening segment by Lawrence O’Donnell this past Monday. It was deeply informed, and highly informative, about what the job of political leadership actually entails, and why those realities worked strongly against the “dump Biden” concept.
You can watch the whole thing below.
To summarize its main points:
Everyone who’d like to swap out Joe Biden thinks “some other” Democrat would do a better job. But they never say exactly who that other Democrat would be.
That is because as soon as you name a specific person—Newsom, Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Wes Moore, Gina Raimondo, Rafael Warnock, on down the long list—the flaws of that person become the issue. Also, when you name one person, the ten people you’re not naming will say, What about us? If you start out by skipping Kamala Harris, you have urgent additional explaining to do. If your argument is that Biden is “too weak,” where do you turn for evidence that others would be stronger? For instance: I am a fan of Gavin Newsom. But so far in hypothetical polls he has done worse against Trump than Biden has.What about money? The $100 million+ that Joe Biden has raised so far has been raised for the Biden-Harris ticket. Legally it can be complicated to roll that over, to someone a wide-open convention might choose. So that new person would start out, in mid-summer, with a small rather than a bulging war chest, unless the person were Kamala Harris.
And what about experience? Almost none of these “better then Biden” people has ever run for national office. That process is surprisingly hard, and involves a lot of instructive bumps-and-bruises along the way. As Joe Biden knows, from the presidential races he lost in in 1988 and 2008. Kamala Harris knows it too, from having lost (to Joe Biden) in 2020. Some “better” candidate chosen at the convention would be set up for rookie season self-education, starting ten weeks before election day. You can already write the “Dems in disarray!” stories from the campaign trail.
The headline on Noah Berlatsky’s column on this topic was “No One Is Replacing Joe Biden, ffs.” Based on conditions as of February 25, that’s right.
(Media note: MSNBC has a niche audience, and TNR nichier still. But people in politics and the media will see these arguments, and they’ll have an effect.)
3) What should be the end for the latest impeachment.
As soon as it gained power in the 2022 mid-terms, the Republican majority in the House geared up to impeach Joe Biden on convoluted corruption charges stemming from Ukraine. These in turn were based mainly on the smoking-gun testimony of one star witness.
This past week that star witness, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested by the FBI for inventing the stories about the Biden family, apparently at the behest of Russian state intelligence.
In normal circumstances, this development would switch attention from the Biden family to whoever had been carrying water for Russian-government disinformation in the US.5
Circumstances aren’t normal, and that won’t happen. But even for today’s GOP, with its two-seat margin of error in the House and a lot else to worry about, this should take some steam out of the juggernaut.