Leading democrats are growing increasingly uneasy as the list of third-party candidates who could potentially steal votes from President Joe Biden continues to grow.
They trained their ire on No Labels, an organization that bills itself as a “commonsense majority” advocating bipartisanship, after the group invited Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) to host an event a Anselm College in New Hampshire on Monday. Many fear that No Labels, which has promised to put up a bipartisan ticket featuring one Democrat and one Republican, could siphon crucial votes away from Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
“This is so disingenuous. The most successful 3d Party effort in modern times was Ross Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote. It is as certain as anything in politics that No Labels will be spoilers & highly likely in favor of Trump & the Republicans,” David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, tweeted on Sunday.
“Ah, yes, Democrats are just hysterical about the possibility of handing Trump a second term and potentially bringing the democratic experiment to an end,” MSNBC anchor Joy Reid said in response to a letter from No Label’s founding chairman, former Senator Joe Lieberman (D., Conn.), who chided Democrats for “overreacting.”
“Political operatives have met to discuss how to best counter the run. Their dalliance with a democracy-ending third party has become so terrifying, the top Democratic firm who worked with the group in the past now refuse to discuss their collaboration.”
Similar histrionics were on display on the network’s morning program featuring Joe Scarborough.
“I think absolutely devastating. There’s just absolutely no evidence that a no labels ticket like that would not be a total spoiler for Joe Biden or the Democrats. There just has not been, in 50 years, a single electoral vote that has been garnered by an independent candidate, even Ross Perot, who got 19% of the vote,” Newsweek editor-at-large, Tom Rogers, said.
Ana Navarro of The View said the development was “dangerous” and pleaded with Lieberman and Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah who participated in Monday’s discussion with Senator Manchin, to abandon their designs on the White House.
“This is dangerous because let’s just put things in context. This is not a normal thing. This is not Bill Clinton versus George Herbert Walker Bush with Ross Perot playing spoiler. No. This is Donald Trump. He is a threat to national security. He has threatened our democracy. He caused an insurrection. He has weaponized government against his enemies.”
“And so if you, Jon Huntsman or Joe Lieberman – I love you, Joe Lieberman, but you’ve got to stop this, Joe. Joe, Joe, Joe, this is insane, and you cannot do anything, anything, that could possibly help Donald Trump become president. You cannot be an accomplice on that. You are better than that, Joe.”
During Monday’s town hall event, Manchin pledged that No Labels would not play a “spoiler” role in the presidential election. “I’ve never been in any race I’ve ever spoiled. I’ve been in races to win,” the senator told the crowd. “And if I get in a race, I’m going to win.”
“We’re here to make sure the American people have an option.”
Democrats who are concerned about the threat posed by No Labels recently started an organization to combat the effort. The group, Citizens to Save Our Republic, is being run by former Democratic House majority leader Dick Gephardt.
The backlash comes on the heels of Cornel West’s leading bid to represent the Green Party in the 2024 presidential election. West, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, denounced President Biden in an interview on Sunday saying he “contributed to a crime against humanity.”
“Well, I think you’ll think Joe Biden contributed to a crime against humanity when he became the architect of the mass incarceration regime in the 1990s,” the former Harvard professor told the New York Post on Saturday.
West was referring to the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which then-senator Biden of Delaware sponsored in 1994. The bill, which was popular among Democrats at the time, earmarked billions of dollars for prisons and the hiring of thousands of new police. “I’ve taught in prison for 41 years. And the the level of barbarity in our prisons has something to do with that crime bill that he [Biden] put forward,” West added.
“Black folks are [a] low priority” to Biden, West argued, criticizing the president for placing “black faces in high places” rather than addressing underlying issues.
The academic’s rhetoric has deeply worried Democratic strategists. “This is not the time in order to experiment. This is not the time to play around on the margins,” DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison, a close confidant to the president, warned in early July, the Hill reported.
Axelrod struck a similar chord. “In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump. Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again.”