Dem
51
GOP
49
It would seem that even the associate dogcatcher of East Cupcake had prior engagements, as No Labels' national director Joe Cunningham announced yesterday that the group will not field a presidential candidate in 2024. Here are his exact words:
The short answer is, that to field this ticket, No Labels was looking for a hero and a hero never emerged. We've been very straightforward and upfront and honest with the American public that we were gonna field this ticket if two conditions were met. Number 1, if Americans wanted another option, which is definitely, box is checked. And number 2, if we're able to find candidates that we believe have a pathway to victory. And that's where we ran into the trouble. At the end of the day, we weren't able to find candidates we felt had a straightforward path of victory in this.
So there you have it, the problem was the lack of "a hero."
We tend to think there were two fundamental problems with the No Labels approach. The first is that they were never going to get a rockstar candidate to defect from one of the two major parties. Many such people are rising stars who don't want to acquire a reputation as traitors—think Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), or Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). Other such people are falling stars who couldn't even sell their wares as a major-party candidate, much less a third-party upstart—think Chris Christie or Tulsi Gabbard.
The second problem is that, despite Cunningham's pretensions to the contrary, all that No Labels could ever be is a spoiler. And the problem there is that it would be nearly impossible to find a candidate of any stature who could make that work out the way that candidate would want to make it work out. For example, let us say that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) agreed to run on the No Labels ticket. Scott would very much like to be a spoiler for Joe Biden, but given his politics, he would be much more likely to take votes from Donald Trump. Or, alternatively, Beto O'Rourke would very much like to be a spoiler for Trump, but given his politics, he would be much more likely to take votes from Biden. It's not so easy to find a right-winger who might steal Democratic votes, or a left-winger who might steal Republican votes. And if you cannot find such a person, then their whole campaign ends up hurting the presidential candidate that the No Labels candidate doesn't want to hurt.
Of course, the one ticket that kind of makes sense for No Labels is RFK Jr./Nicole Shanahan. Given that RFK Jr. sounds Trumpier by the day, while Shanahan is a self-described progressive, this would be the sort of "bipartisan" pairing No Labels talked about, and would have given the group some stature, and very possibly access to the presidential debates (if there are any). From the viewpoint of the candidates, No Labels has much-needed money, and claims to have ballot access in 21 states.
So, how come this potential marriage was never consummated? There's no way to know, but we can at least make some guesses. The first possibility that occurs to us is that RFK Jr. has a big ego and doesn't want anyone to have input into his campaign, even if they can help with funding and ballot access. The second possibility that occurs to us is that No Labels was, in the end, a de facto Republican front, and they concluded that Junior was more likely to take votes out of Trump's hide than Biden's.
On that note, RFK Jr. found himself at the center of yet another controversy yesterday when his fundraising operation sent out an e-mail that referred to the 1/6 defendants as "activists" who have been "stripped of their constitutional liberties." After 2 days' worth of blowback (the first e-mails went out Tuesday night), the Kennedy campaign distanced itself from the messages, and blamed them on the vendor that was hired to help with fundraising.
Truth be told, RFK Jr. has already peddled enough lies that we are disinclined to believe that explanation. At very least, whoever wrote the e-mail looked carefully at Junior's campaign and decided that this messaging was in line with what the candidate is all about. And that brings us to an observation that we already made once this week: The more that RFK Jr. looks and sounds like Trump, the more likely he is to take votes from Trump rather than from Biden. (Z)