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A No Labels presidential candidate can’t win — but could determine who does
No Labels, a self-styled centrist organization, is looking into running a third-party presidential candidate next year. It’s either a case of delusion, an ego trip or something worse.
No Labels says it’s raising $70 million to get on all 50 state ballots. It has a blue-ribbon panel of supporters and advisers. What it doesn’t have is any serious chance of electing what it considers a moderate independent as president of the United States.
The organization was launched more than decade ago by a Democratic fundraiser with the aim of forging bipartisan, centrist policies. It has achieved success on Capitol Hill.
But running a presidential candidate is a much different, and far greater, challenge. Democrats charge, credibly, that any candidacy would take more votes from President Biden than from the Republican nominee.
No Labels rejects this. It released a 26,000-voter survey showing that 64 percent of voters want options other than Democrats and Republicans, and that 59 percent said they’d be open to voting for a moderate independent presidential ticket if the alternative were a rerun of Trump v. Biden.
Prominent pollsters are very skeptical of these claims.
“In a contest with Biden and Trump, there is no way a No Labels candidate could win,” Whit Ayres, a leading Republican pollster, told me. “That candidate couldn’t win any states; they’d get zero electoral votes.”
Fred Yang, a leading Democratic poll taker, is only a bit less skeptical. “With the dissatisfaction of both Republicans and Democrats, it looks like an opening,” he noted, “But it’s a real leap to say that once there is an actual candidate and a platform that would be sustainable.”
But it might, as Ayres observed, affect the outcome. In 2000 Green Party candidate Ralph Nader got less than 3 percent of the vote, but that was enough to cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Most experts I spoke with tend to agree with Democratic consultant Paul Begala, who charged that in a Biden-Trump rematch, a No Labels candidate “almost certainly would elect Mr. Trump.”.......
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaig...didate-cant-win-but-could-determine-who-does/
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It is time for Americans to have more choices for who will run the country.
No Labels, a self-styled centrist organization, is looking into running a third-party presidential candidate next year. It’s either a case of delusion, an ego trip or something worse.
No Labels says it’s raising $70 million to get on all 50 state ballots. It has a blue-ribbon panel of supporters and advisers. What it doesn’t have is any serious chance of electing what it considers a moderate independent as president of the United States.
The organization was launched more than decade ago by a Democratic fundraiser with the aim of forging bipartisan, centrist policies. It has achieved success on Capitol Hill.
But running a presidential candidate is a much different, and far greater, challenge. Democrats charge, credibly, that any candidacy would take more votes from President Biden than from the Republican nominee.
No Labels rejects this. It released a 26,000-voter survey showing that 64 percent of voters want options other than Democrats and Republicans, and that 59 percent said they’d be open to voting for a moderate independent presidential ticket if the alternative were a rerun of Trump v. Biden.
Prominent pollsters are very skeptical of these claims.
“In a contest with Biden and Trump, there is no way a No Labels candidate could win,” Whit Ayres, a leading Republican pollster, told me. “That candidate couldn’t win any states; they’d get zero electoral votes.”
Fred Yang, a leading Democratic poll taker, is only a bit less skeptical. “With the dissatisfaction of both Republicans and Democrats, it looks like an opening,” he noted, “But it’s a real leap to say that once there is an actual candidate and a platform that would be sustainable.”
But it might, as Ayres observed, affect the outcome. In 2000 Green Party candidate Ralph Nader got less than 3 percent of the vote, but that was enough to cost Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Most experts I spoke with tend to agree with Democratic consultant Paul Begala, who charged that in a Biden-Trump rematch, a No Labels candidate “almost certainly would elect Mr. Trump.”.......
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaig...didate-cant-win-but-could-determine-who-does/
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It is time for Americans to have more choices for who will run the country.
