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WASHINGTON — About a month ago, No Labels voted to proceed with an alternative to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, but the effort fell short. While no viable candidate came forward, the former mayor of Dallas involved with the group said one day a candidate will move in on the growing appeal for a centrist.
The group No Labels said even though there is an appetite among voters for a candidate other than Biden and Trump, there isn’t a member with the courage and the chops to compete on a national scale — at least right now.
“We felt we needed two things. One, somebody that had really that common sense mentality, and linking with what most of America wants, so we knew that, and we needed somebody that had a clear pathway to win for the White House, which would take a lot of courage,” Mike Rawlings, No Labels convention chair, told Spectrum News. “We found a lot of the first. We didn’t find the second.”
Rawlings is also a former Democratic mayor of the City of Dallas. He said the group hoped to have a unity ticket, with a Republican for president and a Democrat as vice president. No Labels offered it to a handful of people, but none accepted. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin were among those who publicly rejected it.
Some political analysts are not surprised no alternative emerged.
“Finding the exact right candidate who can deliver that perfect message is just a really big lift for third parties who don’t have the infrastructure to pull off what the major parties can do,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “They don’t have the funding that’s already sort of stacked inside the system. They don’t have a built-in cadre of donors.”
The development was good news for some Biden-aligned organizations that fear a third-party candidate would end up helping Trump.
“No Labels was attacking Biden from the center. There’s just no doubt that was going to hurt him,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs of Third Way. The moderate Democratic group led an effort against No Labels.
“What they were purporting to offer was something that looked a lot like Joe Biden,” Bennett continued. Rawlings himself supports Biden and is worried that Trump has the “upper hand” this year.
“Who knows what’s going to happen in the future here in the next four or five months, but it’s something all of Americans should sit up and take notice about,” he said.
As for the future of No Labels, Rawlings said the group is still mulling it over, but they will encourage bipartisanship in Congress and seek to be a voice for centrists.
“The common-sense majority, people that are independent, that are in the center, and not beholden to the far right or the left, are growing, that’s going to be there,” Rawlings said. “Somebody’s going to take advantage of that, either somebody within those political parties, or somebody in the future.”
Because in the present, it seems the hold the two-party system has in American politics is hard to break.
