Follow the money. Just as it applies to investigating illegal schemes, that advice can also help unravel political con jobs. And these days, one of the biggest cons in 2024 presidential jockeying is the innocuously named No Labels organization. It was founded in 2010 to counter political polarization but now has started raising a boatload of money — at least $70 million so far — to field a third-party presidential candidate if the “unacceptable” President Biden and Donald Trump are their parties’ nominees.
What’s the group really after, given the utterly dismal record of third-party candidates in U.S. presidential elections?
As an analysis by the moderate Democratic think tank Third Way has shown, No Labels doesn’t get close to the necessary 270 electoral votes in any remotely rational scenario. But the group has drawn up a fantasy map showing 40 states it supposedly could win. Members of the Democratic coalition are alarmed; three of their leaders wrote in a recent Post op-ed that No Labels is “obviously targeting blue states and Democratic voters” because on the map “two-thirds of its electoral votes would come from Biden states.”
No Labels insists it isn’t a Republican front group. But it won’t reveal its donors despite complaints about the lack of transparency. “No Labels is essentially running a presidential campaign without the requirements that apply to formal political parties; namely disclosures,” Politico noted last week. “Experts in campaign finance law say that the organization is walking right up to the line of what is permissible.”
Marc A. Thiessen: Democrats should panic about No Labels. So should Republicans.
Despite the group’s insistence on keeping its backers secret, dogged reporting has found strong connections to Republicans. Mother Jones followed the money. It found that CEOs of some major corporations have forked over substantial money to No Labels. And while the No Labels donor list does include a few rich people who have given to Democrats, it tends heavily toward those “who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes, such as past GOP presidential candidates and super-PACS connected to Republican congressional leadership,” Mother Jones reported.
One of the donors “provided a big chunk of political cash to Donald Trump,” according to the article. “No Labels supporters, who mostly made contributions of $5,600 to its 2024 project, appear to favor conservative candidates, though many have played both sides of the aisle, financing Republican and Democratic politicians,” Mother Jones found.
ADVERTISING
Sometimes the group’s promoters let the cat out of the bag. At a Washington Post Live event last month, Joseph I. Lieberman — a No Label booster, former senator from Connecticut and Democrat-turned-independent — told the interviewer, “I want my fellow Democrats to hear this — a lot of the people who have come in and given us money are Republicans who are just against Trump.” What he did not say is that people who want the only candidate with any chance to beat Trump, Biden, give their money to him. Lieberman surely knows exactly what is going on: He was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, when third-party candidates such as Ralph Nader helped hand the presidency to George W. Bush.
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Mother Jones’s David Corn has found that No Labels is associated with some significant Republican-aligned outfits. Its online fundraising is run by Anedot, founded by a failed 2014 GOP congressional candidate. Anedot handles the cash for right-wing organizations, Corn writes, such as “Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List (a prominent foe of reproductive rights), the Thomas More Society (a conservative Catholic group that supported Trump’s election deniers), the Reformed Theological Seminary (which is ‘committed to the Bible as God’s inerrant Word’), and the International Alliance for Christian Education.”
Likewise, Politico found in December that between 2017 and 2019, No Labels paid more than $563,000 from Targeted Victory for its work as a “revenue processor.” That company’s chief executive, Zac Moffatt, in a commentary in RealClearPolitics in December, described it as “the largest center-right digital advocacy firm in America that activates grass-roots supporters for campaigns and corporations.”
Guest Opinion: A No Labels candidate would likely throw the election to Trump
No Labels has thrown out a variety of claims to justify its 2024 plans. It has argued that Biden and Trump are equally undesirable (absurd on its face). Sometimes the line is that voters don’t really have a choice with Trump and Biden. (But they do since both parties run primaries, right?) Sometimes the group insists that the country needs a centrist (although Biden passed more bipartisan deals than any president in memory, including measures on infrastructure, chip manufacturing and the debt ceiling).
Equally baffling: the No Labels vow to drop out of the race if Biden is way ahead next spring (but not if he’s a little ahead?) or if Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the nominee. (Is it only Trump for whom they wish to siphon votes from Biden?)
No wonder some prominent allies of No Labels in the past, including New York Times columnist David Brooks and Brookings Institution policy scholar William Galston, have called foul and withdrawn their support. We are left to ponder: Would No Labels be doing anything differently if it were a front group for Republicans out to sink Biden?
What’s the group really after, given the utterly dismal record of third-party candidates in U.S. presidential elections?
As an analysis by the moderate Democratic think tank Third Way has shown, No Labels doesn’t get close to the necessary 270 electoral votes in any remotely rational scenario. But the group has drawn up a fantasy map showing 40 states it supposedly could win. Members of the Democratic coalition are alarmed; three of their leaders wrote in a recent Post op-ed that No Labels is “obviously targeting blue states and Democratic voters” because on the map “two-thirds of its electoral votes would come from Biden states.”
No Labels insists it isn’t a Republican front group. But it won’t reveal its donors despite complaints about the lack of transparency. “No Labels is essentially running a presidential campaign without the requirements that apply to formal political parties; namely disclosures,” Politico noted last week. “Experts in campaign finance law say that the organization is walking right up to the line of what is permissible.”
Marc A. Thiessen: Democrats should panic about No Labels. So should Republicans.
Despite the group’s insistence on keeping its backers secret, dogged reporting has found strong connections to Republicans. Mother Jones followed the money. It found that CEOs of some major corporations have forked over substantial money to No Labels. And while the No Labels donor list does include a few rich people who have given to Democrats, it tends heavily toward those “who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes, such as past GOP presidential candidates and super-PACS connected to Republican congressional leadership,” Mother Jones reported.
One of the donors “provided a big chunk of political cash to Donald Trump,” according to the article. “No Labels supporters, who mostly made contributions of $5,600 to its 2024 project, appear to favor conservative candidates, though many have played both sides of the aisle, financing Republican and Democratic politicians,” Mother Jones found.
ADVERTISING
Sometimes the group’s promoters let the cat out of the bag. At a Washington Post Live event last month, Joseph I. Lieberman — a No Label booster, former senator from Connecticut and Democrat-turned-independent — told the interviewer, “I want my fellow Democrats to hear this — a lot of the people who have come in and given us money are Republicans who are just against Trump.” What he did not say is that people who want the only candidate with any chance to beat Trump, Biden, give their money to him. Lieberman surely knows exactly what is going on: He was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, when third-party candidates such as Ralph Nader helped hand the presidency to George W. Bush.
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Mother Jones’s David Corn has found that No Labels is associated with some significant Republican-aligned outfits. Its online fundraising is run by Anedot, founded by a failed 2014 GOP congressional candidate. Anedot handles the cash for right-wing organizations, Corn writes, such as “Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List (a prominent foe of reproductive rights), the Thomas More Society (a conservative Catholic group that supported Trump’s election deniers), the Reformed Theological Seminary (which is ‘committed to the Bible as God’s inerrant Word’), and the International Alliance for Christian Education.”
Likewise, Politico found in December that between 2017 and 2019, No Labels paid more than $563,000 from Targeted Victory for its work as a “revenue processor.” That company’s chief executive, Zac Moffatt, in a commentary in RealClearPolitics in December, described it as “the largest center-right digital advocacy firm in America that activates grass-roots supporters for campaigns and corporations.”
Guest Opinion: A No Labels candidate would likely throw the election to Trump
No Labels has thrown out a variety of claims to justify its 2024 plans. It has argued that Biden and Trump are equally undesirable (absurd on its face). Sometimes the line is that voters don’t really have a choice with Trump and Biden. (But they do since both parties run primaries, right?) Sometimes the group insists that the country needs a centrist (although Biden passed more bipartisan deals than any president in memory, including measures on infrastructure, chip manufacturing and the debt ceiling).
Equally baffling: the No Labels vow to drop out of the race if Biden is way ahead next spring (but not if he’s a little ahead?) or if Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the nominee. (Is it only Trump for whom they wish to siphon votes from Biden?)
No wonder some prominent allies of No Labels in the past, including New York Times columnist David Brooks and Brookings Institution policy scholar William Galston, have called foul and withdrawn their support. We are left to ponder: Would No Labels be doing anything differently if it were a front group for Republicans out to sink Biden?
