“No Labels” goes down the tubes
For about a year now there has been endless doomsday hysteria on TV and Twitter about how a group called “No Labels” was going to run a spoiler candidate in the 2024 presidential general election in order to throw the race to Donald Trump. But as I’ve been pointing out all along, this notion was based on a very mistaken understanding of why groups like No Labels even exist. And now that’s officially coming home to roost.
No Labels announced today that it will not be fielding a presidential candidate in 2024. Well duh. This whole thing was always going nowhere. Groups like No Labels don’t exist to play spoiler, or to throw an election in one direction after another. They exist to raise money.
Remember when No Labels held an event with Joe Manchin, and everyone thought it meant Manchin would be their candidate? Plenty of “both sides are the same, we need a third party candidate” rubes out there surely gave money to No Labels during that stretch of time. But Manchin’s public remarks at the time made it clear that he wasn’t going to run.
Nor was No Labels going to realistically be able to look anywhere else to find a viable candidate with any name recognition. When someone like Robert F. Kennedy runs for President, it’s solely to make money. So why would one of these types want to run as part of No Labels and have to split the money with them?
No Labels was never going to be able to find a name-recognizable candidate for President. The only question was whether the group was going to settle for running some totally obscure candidate who would have zero impact on the outcome, or whether the group wouldn’t run someone at all. And now we know it’s the latter.
My real concern is this: the talking heads on TV and Twitter spent like a year hyping No Labels in doomsday fashion, strictly because they wanted to milk you for ratings and retweets. And now it turns out it was all for nothing, because – as I’ve been trying to tell you for a year – No Labels was never going to be a factor at all.
How much time did our side waste sitting around fretting over the imaginary impact that No Labels was going to have on the election? How much could our side have accomplished if we’d instead spent that time on something like trying to help candidates win competitive House and Senate races? What a waste.
The “No Labels” saga is the latest reminder that almost every doomsday story you hear about from MSNBC and CNN (and from the Twitter pundits trying to get booked on MSNBC and CNN and by parroting every word they hear on MSNBC and CNN) is a bunch of nothing. These folks take whatever sounds the scariest, no matter how unrealistic or imaginary it might be, and they hype it as if it’s definitely going to happen. Then when it doesn’t happen, they’re counting on you being too relieved to notice you’ve been played. Then they just feed you some new scary thing to stare at your screen and fret over.
No Labels was always a non-story. All the time you’ve spent raging against No Labels, you should have instead been raging at the people on TV and Twitter who tried to trick you into believing that No Labels was some big story. It was simply never going anywhere. And now even No Labels is admitting that it’s not going anywhere. When will the media admit that it wasted a year of your life by pretending that a complete non-story like No Labels was somehow the biggest story in politics?
