Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) visited New Hampshire as part of a tour from the political group "No Labels," which has everyone inside the Beltway talking about third-party runs. Everyone needs to relax because this story is a) way too early to get excited about, and b) this group doesn't even have a candidate. Manchin said he'll decide on a potential No Labels third-party bid next year.
The West Virginia Democrat, who holds more conservative views than his party, could be looking at dismal re-election prospects as his state has become redder with every passing election cycle. Retail politics has kept Manchin alive in a state where Trump won with nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2020. He's liked by Democrats and Republicans in his state, though that's probably changed some since 2012 when he won his first full Senate term with 60 percent of the vote. He had won a 2010 special election to serve the rest of the late Sen. Robert Byrd's term, who died in office.
Manchin isn't alone. Former Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who ran in 2012, is joining the tour, speaking to voters at a diner in Manchester and holding a "Common Sense Townhall" at Saint Anselm College. Is a Manchin-Huntsman ticket in the works? Again, it's too early, but the fact that we're discussing it shows there might be interest due to Joe Biden and Donald Trump being unpopular figures. Also, "No Labels" is reportedly close to its $70 million fundraising goal, obtaining ballot access for whatever might come along in 2024 (via NBC News):
No Labels is taking another new, notable step advancing toward a potential third-party presidential bid in 2024, organizing a campaign-style event in New Hampshire on Monday featuring Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
The move comes as the Washington-based advocacy organization looks to recruit a Democrat and a Republican to form a bipartisan presidential ticket in 2024 — a prospect that could send an unpredictable jolt through the 2024 presidential race, which as of now is trending toward a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
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“It’ll be next year,” Manchin said about his timeline to decide what to do, meaning speculation about it (and his West Virginia Senate seat) will linger into 2024.
“Let’s see where everybody goes. Let’s see what happens,” said Manchin, an outspoken critic of partisanship in Washington. “Maybe they’ll come to their senses and start doing the job they were elected to do.”
Many national Democrats fear that Manchin, who has often bucked his party and scaled back parts of his Democratic colleagues’ legislative agenda in Congress, could siphon votes from Biden if he or another prominent Democrat were to join a third-party ticket next year.
One of the most striking differences between Biden’s win in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump four years earlier was the low share of voters who decided to pick a third-party candidate in 2020. The third-party vote share fell from 6% in 2016 to 2% in 2020.
And according to the NBC News exit poll, most of those who voted third-party in 2016 decided to back Biden four years later, helping deny Trump re-election. Now, Democrats worry that a growing third-party vote in 2024 would serve to lower the threshold Trump needs to win again — as in 2016, when 47% to 48% of the vote was enough for him to capture key swing states.
Former Sen. Joe Liebermann and former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory are on the No Labels train. The group intimated that their ticket could even include those who have never held elected office. Whatever the case, I'm not sure this group has time to wait and see regarding a third-party candidacy.
Should they pull the trigger, they must build the infrastructure to get moving on day one. Second, the Democratic Party must have had an angina attack when they saw the NBC News poll showing 44 percent would be open to a third-party candidacy. The national party will move to quash this effort. CNN devoted two pieces to the Left's worry about third-party insurgencies. The lower threshold for Trump is a sticking point I'm sure some Democratic operatives might be pondering right now (via CNN):
The headlines and the fears Democrats have about a third-party candidate are, at least partially, a tacit acknowledgement that Biden is unpopular. Worries about a third-party bid at a similar early point in the 2020 cycle did not exist at anywhere near the same level as they do today.
This speaks to one of the fundamental differences between this cycle and 2020: Biden is far more unpopular now than then. Unless something changes dramatically, the president will have to win over a substantial portion of voters who don’t like him in order to be reelected. In 2020, he merely needed the votes of people who already liked him.
Of course, the same holds true for Trump. The former president has mostly never had a higher favorable than unfavorable rating. He emerged victorious in 2016 because a plurality of the nearly 20% of voters who had an unfavorable view of both him and Democrat Hillary Clinton decided to go with Trump.
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The national polls I’ve seen over the past few months that have included a third-party or independent candidate have shown Biden losing ground to Trump relative to when only the two of them are matched up.
It’s not a substantial difference (1 to 3 points), as detailed by FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley. But all it may take is a shift of 1 to 3 points to change the electoral outcome if the race remains so close.
Of course, all this talk about third-party candidates may be just that … talk. We’re still well over a year from the election. Independent and third-party candidates almost always fade the closer we get to Election Day – see 2016, when Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson got about 3% nationally when early polling had shown him closer to 10%.
Biden and the Democrats better hope that a similar trend occurs, if he remains this unpopular.
That was Harry Enten, the in-house number cruncher there, formerly of FiveThirtyEight. Stephen Collinson had a lengthier piece about potential Manchin fever, saying that it could leave Democrats "shivering," but he did delve into the No Labels platform a bit:
No Labels is laying out its platform in a new “Common Sense” booklet that Manchin and Utah’s former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman will promote in a town hall at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. The platform contains multiple ideas splitting the difference between the Democratic and Republican position on key issues with bipartisan stances anchored to the political center ground.
On immigration, for instance, the group calls for tighter border controls, a reform of asylum procedures and a path to citizenship for Dreamers, or undocumented migrants brought to the United States as children. On guns, the group wants to uphold the right to bear arms but calls for dangerous weapons to be kept out of the hands of “dangerous people,” including with universal background checks and by closing loopholes that make it easier to buy weapons at gun shows. No Labels also wants better community policing and crackdowns on crime.
Given the gridlock, anger and dysfunction in Washington, it’s hard to argue that the current political system is working. But many of these solutions are familiar, having been tried by presidents in either party or groups of cross-party senators. Their failure to make it into law both encapsulates the rationale behind a third-party bid to smash Washington’s political deadlock, but also explains the institutional and political barriers to an independent president ever being elected or effective.
“We think there is an opening today, and if it looks like this a year from now, there could be an opening,” said Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, in an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish in May. “To nominate a ticket, we’ve got to clear two pretty high bars, which is the major party nominees need to continue to be really unpopular, but a unity ticket needs to have an outright path to victory.”
No Labels says it would draw supporters equally from Republicans and Democrats and argues that previous third-party candidacies – for instance, by Green Party nominee Jill Stein, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson – were unsuccessful because voters didn’t believe they could win. (Some Democrats accused Nader in 2000 and Stein in 2016 of siphoning away votes from Democratic nominees Al Gore and Hillary Clinton and opening the way for the GOP to claim the White House).
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The center-left think tank Third Way is warning that a No Labels candidate could be especially dangerous for Biden in the key states that will decide the election. It is highlighting research showing that in 2020, Biden won six of seven states where the margin of victory was three points or less. It argues, therefore, that 79 electoral votes are potentially at risk for Biden from the involvement of a third-party challenger.
Such a challenger would also need to win states where Biden won big, and at least some conservative bastions. And given that Trump’s deeply loyal voters are unlikely to desert him, a third-party candidate seems more likely to pull from the same pool of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate and independent voters Biden is targeting with a campaign rooted in his warnings against the threat to democracy from Trump’s “Make America Great Again” populism.
And there's the wet blanket. Trump's grip on his supporters remains ironclad. Second, these voters are gung-ho about immigration enforcement, with the former president being quite direct that a deportation force could be mobilized should he be elected again to deal with the horde of illegals that crossed the border under Biden. No Labels wants a pathway to citizenship.
It's talk for now, but the "this sucks" chorus regarding the two parties, while early, is quite loud. The red flag here is that No Labels said it wouldn't run anyone if its polling data suggested it would serve as a spoiler to get Trump or Biden elected again. Manchin also delivered that same line. It could be that No Labels wants to talk about issues, get some conversations started, and that's about it. It's not serious about the White House. I don't think it is due to the herculean obstacles it must climb to be feasible nationally, with ballot access being the least of its deficiencies. This group may talk about breaking the partisan mold of Washington and focus on solutions, but it's still comprised of politicians and former operatives. No Labels lies, just like the best of them. Given the history of loser third-party candidacies, there could be interesting town hall events, but keep your money in your wallets.
