Moderate ‘No Labels’ Group Working to Establish ‘Launching Pad’ for Potential 3rd Party Presidential Candidate

People vote on the US presidential election at Santa Monica City Hall on November 8, 2016
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images
Nick Gilbertson

The moderate group No Labels hopes to get on the 2024 ballot in all 50 states as a political party to establish a “launching pad” for a potential third-party presidential candidate.

The group has already qualified in multiple key states, starting with Colorado in January. Last week, it officially qualified for the 2024 election in the purple state of Arizona as well as Oregon.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT), former Gov. Patrick McRory (R-NC), and Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. serve as the co-chairmen of No Labels, the Arizona Republic’s Ray Stern noted. The trio released a joint statement last week, calling its groundwork an “insurance policy,” writing:

No Labels has said this is an insurance policy in the event both major parties nominate presidential candidates that the vast majority of Americans don’t want. If this happens, No Labels itself will not run a candidate, but we will have the launching pad, specifically in the form of ballot access across the country.

They argued that an independent candidate would have a legitimate shot at the White House if the Democrat and Republican nominees were undesirable.

“No Labels has extensively polled and modeled voters in all 50 states, and our latest numbers show that an independent would draw votes equally from both major parties and could win outright in the Electoral College,” the co-chairs wrote.

They added that if it becomes evident that the electorate does not want an independent or if a pathway to victory is impossible, then it will not grant its “ballot line to any presidential ticket.” The chairmen asserted that the group does not wish to fuel “a spoiler effort.”

The New York Times reported in September that the group had raised $46 million for the effort to that point and was aiming to secure $70 million for the effort.

Some Democrats and establishment Republicans have become alarmed by the effort. As Stern pointed out, the leftist think tank Third Way published a memo days before Lieberman, McRory, and Davis’s statement, asserting the effort would help elect a Republican and that No Labels is “targeting” blue states.

“Rather than producing a third-party ticket that would defy the overwhelming odds and win, No Labels is on track to field a spoiler who would re-elect Trump or a Trump-like Republican,” the group wrote.

Never Trumper Rick Wilson, who co-founded the Lincoln Project, called the bipartisan group “a Trump Re-election Committee.”

No Labels was founded in 2010, according to Stern. It helped forge the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House of Representatives, which features 58 members from both sides of the aisle.

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