No Labels Party and Its Impact on Election 2024

Politics & Elections
81

I haven’t read much about No Labels recently until I ran into this Kansas City Star editorial. Boom.

Maybe that’s why one of the biggest known donors to this dark money group is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ patron Harlan Crow, the Dallas billionaire who collects Hitler’s table linens and other Nazi niceties.

And it’s definitely why our message to anyone tempted by the vision of comity that No Labels is selling is the same as that of the former No Labels enthusiast Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat. In a recent op-ed in the Capitol Hill news outlet The Hill, Pocan wrote this:

“When I first came to Congress, I was enamored with the alleged ideal behind No Labels and their mission to take partisanship out of politics. A world where people can work together on ideas that help the American people despite ideological differences. Boy was I wrong.

“Their nonpartisan agenda is and always has been dishonest. My first disagreement with No Labels came when I realized they were only looking out for mega donor special interests, advocating for lowering taxes on the rich and powerful, and weakening regulations for big business, making it easier for them to exploit workers or the environment.”

Rick Wilson, the longtime Republican strategist and co-founder of the Never Trumper Lincoln Project, has been talking about what he thinks No Labels is really about for some time now. No Labels founders “Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn have one goal: to punish the Democratic Party that rejected and ejected them,” he has written. “Their profitable psychodrama revenge fantasy against Joe Biden and the Clintons is a lie from top to bottom, and their 2024 plan is designed to divide the anti-Trump vote and ensure Trump returns to the Oval Office.”

And in conclusion:

If the job here is electing someone who consistently and openly admires dictators, who has called for the “termination” of the U.S. Constitution, and who according to his own team was willing to use force to stay in power, then yeah.

82

Which for the most part would require voting for a third party candidate.

BwanaBob: I’m not entering that building until the fire department puts out the raging fire in it.
Sage_Rat: Then go into the building and call the fire department.

83

You can’t have proportional representation for House or Senate elections as it’s very rare for a state to elect both of their Senators at once, and allowing anyone to elect more than one House member at once pretty much defeats the purpose of “local” representation. Who would be “your” Representative?

84
  1. We’re the firemen. There isn’t some other person to call, you need to actually do your job.
  2. Use fire retardant building materials. The evidence, to-date, would say that we’re all horrible firemen and the ones who actually do it well are vastly outnumbered by active and unwitting arsonists. Giving better tools for firefighting would just put better tools in the hands of all the arsonists - who outnumber us.
85

Nm, wrong thread.

86

Youre altering the analogy in a way that totally misses the point of my argument which was the following.

I want both X and Y, but if I try to do X before Y happens I will die. Therefore telling me to do Y so that X will happen is not good advice.

But since I like analogies (possibly to a fault) lets go with yours.

The house represents our Democracy. There are a bunch of arsonists trying to burn it down and a bunch of valiant citizens trying to put the fire out. It would have been nice if it was built with a sprinkler system but hindsight is 20/20.

Now at a critical point in fighting the fire when every able bodied person manning the bucket line counts, a guy drives up in a bus and says. “I’m going to the Home Depot in Ogdenville to buy a sprinkler system, who’s with me.”

This person does not having the health of the building at heart, and appears to have been hired by the arsonists.

Making it even more simple, Sage_rat please answer the following two questions.

  1. If only Trump and Biden were on the ballot would you vote for Biden?
  2. If a No Labels candidate was put on the ballot would you consider voting for them instead?
87

This is a little depressing. We’re nearly all Democrats in this thread yet we have tacitly or even openly admitted that we can not convince our party to support RCV and give voters more than two realistic choices at the ballot box.

No Labels is only a threat because our elected officials continue to insist on FPTP and plurality winners.

88

Yes, unfortunately its one of those things like enhanced ethics rules for members of congress and getting big money out of politics that would be good for the country but are bad for incumbent politicians of both parties as individuals.

So they are exceedingly hard to change.

89

I realized that I was thinking I was in a different thread when I replied, so I’d have to go back and re-analyze what I wrote to see if it’s pertinent to this topic.

Now, as I recall, my advice in this thread was to be honest and open until election season, listen to others to see if they agree, and then decide which course seems more reasonable on that date.

6 months is (presumably) not further in the distance than your death date. If it is, then I’m sorry for you but I was writing to the average reader not, specifically, you and your tumor.

For nearly everyone else, 6 months is not past their death date. They can say whether they’d prefer a non-partisan, reasonable candidate or to stick with the status quo of two parties pushing to suppress reasonable positions under the banner of “never surrender!” and driving up the likelihood of political violence and secession.

It would depend on how things were looking before election season. If it looked like the status quo was winning then I’d vote for Biden. If the status quo seemed to be on the wain then I’d take advantage of that.

Lincoln won the Presidency with a new party. Saying that it can never happen again is just a story that people tell you to keep you from making better choices.

Next year, yes, those voices might be right and we’re stuck with the existing options. But it’s like all things in life, the longer that you keep making bad choices the worst your quality of life becomes. Eventually, it will break you and you’ll be forced to start making better choices.

If you’d be up for a better choice, all you have to do is say it today. I’m not saying to say it on voting day, I’m saying to just say it NOW, TODAY. That doesn’t stop you from making a different choice in 14 months. But it does let others know that you’re willing to join them on a better path.

If we end up as 70% of the electorate then saying that we’re going to split the vote and destroy everything is stupid. Sure, we split the Democrats and the Republicans. But we’re 70% so screw them.

If we’re 10% then, yeah, vote Biden.

There’s nothing lost by finding out that number in Spring 2024.

90

This thinking was exactly what gave us Trump in 2016. Clinton was obviously going to win and so all of the disaffected Democrats and radical centrists (both parties are always equally bad!) thought that that would be a good time to stay home or vote third party to teach Clinton a lesson. The result was Trump.

91

So what you’re saying is that it’s a moot point? I agree.

92

Not really. The thinking for most seems to have been an assumption that people will come around to make a good choice if you let them when, in reality, nearly all of them will give in to peer pressure from their favorite influencers. And if those influencers are just smart people who are thinking to themselves, “Well, these people need to make decisions for themselves! It’s a free country and every voice needs to be heard!” Then you’re going to get a 50/50 result because there’s two options and no one is taking the lead. You’ll get whatever random result, regardless of how little sense it makes.

And, ultimately, the election gave us two people who both couldn’t win against a paper sack. If someone is saying, “Stop eating poison.” And your counter to it is saying, “But I gave them asbestos and plutonium, and they chose the worse one.” Then that’s not really a counter.

This is all just a load of 4D chessing yourself into self-harm.

Smart people can make smart choices. When they do, the majority will follow. The tail does not wag the dog and all of the second-guessing and feints that you keep throwing in your own way to deal with gamesmanship is the product of a bored mind. If you’re able to control yourself and make rational decisions, then all you have to do is say that you’ll do that and give your rationale.

I can safely say that I’ll go for the best candidate. If the best candidate isn’t in the majority but he’ll also clearly win then, so far as I’m concerned, wunderbar.

There’s no 4D chess that gets around that. The person with the most votes wins, not the person who is a member of party A or B. There’s no rule or law that prevents any (35+, non-insurrectionist) native citizen of the US from becoming the President. Railroading yourself into believing otherwise just puts a limit on yourself that doesn’t need to be there.

Pick the right person on voting day, given the realities of the situation. But that person doesn’t have to be a Democrat, they don’t have to be named Biden, and they don’t have to be named Trump. If the best person is Hilda and the polls say that 70% of everyone is gung-ho for Hilda, vote for Hilda, regardless of her party.

93

I reject the assertion that there are two parties pushing to suppress reasonable positions and driving up the likelihood of political violence and secession.

As far as I can tell, only one party is trying to do that.

94

Which in a way is part of what got us where we are today, unfortunately, but that’s a somewhat different discussion.

95

I think one of the two parties is better and more reasonable than No Labels. But fortunately we have a year to discuss this, so I’d prefer a reasonable choice who in my view would be to the left of the democrats and I’m not so blinded by the two party system as to assume that because there are two major parties, they get to decide on the limits of what a reasonable government could look like.

And the political violence option is a zero for every political party except the republicans who are on like a 7 or 8 and the only way any party that opposes the GOP reduces their likelihood of being insurrectionist traitors is if that party isn’t a real threat to them.

96

Sure, if a politician advocated for and was trying to implement IRV or approval voting or something, I’d consider that a positive. But it’s way down on the list of my priorities. And there are very few politicians who are working for something like that, even among the third parties. And so I continue to vote based on the other issues, just like I always have.

97

The German system gives one answer:

However, there is an issue with the Article V prohibition of any amendment to reduce a state’s number of senators without its permission. Maybe, in some liberal future, the responsibilities of the less democratic chamber or Congress could be reduces.

98

No Labels would dissolve almost immediately if it looked like anything other than its real goal, to split the vote so that Trump could win, was being accomplished by its actions.

99

Agreed, and seeing how Biden and Trump are polling way too evenly for (my) comfort, the Democrats can’t afford to lose too many votes, at all.
While I’m still at pissed at Ralph Nader for 2000 (not that he was the sole reason for that election’s result), at least he wasn’t trying to willfully undermine the outcome.
Totally worried the MSM media will not trumpet this enough - ha, would love to see newscasters prefacing the No Labels Party with “…the Anti-Trump-Vote-Splitting…”, or “The No Labels Party, barrelling on with their toxically misleading Anti-Trump stumping, today sued…”

100

Try telling Garry Trudeau that…and note that if just 10% of the people who voted for Nader in Florida had voted for Gore, Gore would have won the state by far more than any recount would have made up: