The fledgling No Labels political group will not be entering a presidential ticket in the 2024 race, meaning, one less political headache for President Biden and former president Donald Trump to have to deal with.
No Labels had been floating former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin as possible presidential candidates, but the group’s founder and CEO, Nancy Jacobson, “told allies this week that the group would announce Monday that it won’t pursue a presidential campaign this year because it hasn’t been able to recruit a credible ticket that could win the election,” according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
This leaves, as the main third-party challenge, whatever Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to ultimately do.
RFK Jr. has signaled his intent to run in the November election, and is actively working to get on individual state ballots.
Kennedy is currently getting in the area of 8 to 10 percent in most of the national polls, though you have to note, it’s early, still seven months out from the election, and third-party candidates generally poll a lot higher well out from the election than they do in the actual final numbers.
The last third-party candidate to get in the double-digits in the final accounting was Ross Perot way back in 1992, and he topped out at 19 percent in that final accounting, nowhere near a possible winning number.
The effect that third-party candidates have had historically on presidential elections is as spoilers, as we saw in 2000, when Ralph Nader, running on the Green Party ticket, and his 2.7 percent of the vote helped throw the election to George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 440,000 votes, but eeked out a narrow Electoral College victory; and in 2016, when Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson (3.3 percent) and Green Party nominee Jill Stein (1.1 percent) helped Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million votes, get over the hump in the Electoral College.
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Chris Graham
