The Dispatch Podcast - No Labels, No Problem

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Not since Abraham Lincoln has a 3rd party candidate been successful, but political nonprofit No Labels thinks the time for change is near. No Labels chief political strategist Ryan Clancy joins Sarah Isgur to discuss why he thinks there's a moderate majority in America that's ready to bust the two party system. Show notes - -No Labels' website -No Labels on North Carolina ballot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Champions out of by the Seven Time World's Best Leisure Airline Champions Air Transat Welcome to the dispatch podcast I'm Sarah Isger and with a special guest today Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for no labels we're going to dive in to what it means to be a third-party organization

just trying to make their way in the world Welcome, Ryan. So let's start at the beginning, because as I've seen it described, no labels isn't saying they're running a presidential campaign. No labels is saying they're a political party. They're trying to get ballot access, build sort of the foundation to nominate someone for the presidency. So what would you say you do here? That was a nice. Was that an office reference right there?

Yeah, of course. So we're actually not a political party. Most people, a lot of people get that confused. We're a 501C4. We've been around for 13 years. People have known us mostly over the years as a group that helped create the House Problem Solvers Caucus, which is this bipartisan group of members that are working together. But we've been working over the course in the last year to get ballot access in states across the country. And that's the analogy you used

of a launching pad. That's a good one. We're just creating the infrastructure that's necessary to nominate a ticket potentially. And y'all had some big news this week. We did. So we got on the ballot in North Carolina. We are now or our local affiliated. So the no labels movement is now on the ballot in 10 states. It hasn't been easy. We've been at this for over a year and a half. It has not been without some resistance from pretty organized partisan actors. But we knew that was coming and that they don't like competition. So they're trying to keep us away. All right. But if I'm listening at home here and I hear you've gotten on 10 states ballots and that that was really hard and it's a huge accomplishment, I'm doing some math here about how many states we have and how many states one might need to actually be competitive. like to win a presidential campaign? And don't you need to be on 50? Yes. And we have a plan to do that. So we are well ahead of our, of where we plan to be. The thing that everybody's got to understand about ballot access is our whole timeline is dictated

by the states themselves. So some states allow you to start last year. And we did. Some you can't even start till next year. And so every time a state opens up, no labels gets active in those states. And so we are right now active in dozens of states, gather in signatures. And so we feel very confident we're on track, Tim, the plan to get on 50 plus DC. What is the, obviously, your hope is to get on all 50. What is the minimum by which you'd say, you know what? We cannot field a winning presidential ticket at this point because we're only on X number of states. Yeah. You've got to be everywhere. You really do. Because even if there's certain states that you might imagine wouldn't be open to an independent ticket, you know, look, if you really want to compete to win, you have to be

everywhere. And we're going to be. We're going to be everywhere. We feel very confident that we're going to get there. We've been planning for this. All the obstacles that have been thrown in the way are ones we saw coming. So we think we've got what it takes to get on the ballot everywhere. Yeah, let's talk about some of those obstacles. Like you mentioned, one of the biggest hurdles to ballot access for any third party run of any kind is that the rules for ballot access are made by the two parties, the Republican and Democratic Party, the state legislatures, et cetera. As you said, they don't have a lot of incentive to invite you guys to their party. No, in fact, so Arizona is a state where months ago we were certified to get on the ballot. And then the state Democratic, party filed a ridiculous lawsuit, which I would sort of liken to, it was like the political lawsuit equivalent of I go into a grocery store, put a banana peel under my foot slip, and then sue the grocery store. So you see a lot of these kind of baseless lawsuits. The judge just

sided with us a couple weeks ago, so we're now on the ballot in North Carolina. But look, this is Sarah, this is, there's a lot of people in our politics that try to wear the man of we're protecting democracy. So they justify everything they're doing in the frame of we're protecting democracy. Well, unfortunately, that's kind of situational. There's a lot of partisan groups that are interested in protecting democracy insofar as protects their turf. But when it violates that, they're not so interested. So the level of hypocrisy here is pretty gallant, frankly. Okay. Here's my beef with no labels. It's not a beef. But as someone who's worked as a political operative for a long time and, you know, history major, whatever you want to

call it. It seems to me that you've got two paths that we've seen in our history of successful third party campaigns. And here, of course, successful doesn't mean getting into the presidency. We've never had one of those. But success here being defined as even a meaningful impact on a presidential campaign. And to me, they fall into two different buckets. One is a celebrity high name idea. candidates. Teddy Roosevelt being the best example of a celebrity candidate. And the other has been quasi-single-issue candidacies that rally around something that voters are particularly keen to buy into at that moment for whatever reason. I'm going to put Ross Perrault in that category. You know, all of his charts and quirkiness aside. I think a problem for no labels is that y'all have not, at this

point had either. You know, Joe Manchin is not a celebrity. He's not Teddy Roosevelt. Low name ID. John Huntsman is worse, probably on name ID, I would imagine. And I'm not saying you all have picked those people by any stretch of the imagination. But, you know, unless you're telling me no labels is in talks with Oprah, I've got some questions on that front. And then on the policy front, you've released an issues platform. And the criticism that you've gotten from that is, is that you've taken the middle position on a lot of the hottest issues, which I think a lot of people listening will be like, that sounds pretty good. What are you talking about?

Maybe so. And it's not that I think that's wrong per se, but I think it's hard to get traction when you're like, oh, my God, gets so excited about compromise, something I'm very in favor of. But again, hard to rally a whole lot of enthusiasm about. So just go to town, address my problems. So, look, I think you're right about previous candidacies and the impact that they've had. I mean, look, arguably the last third party candidate to win was Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

That was technically as a third party. You're right. If you look at 92, the biggest impact that Perrault had was around issues. He talked a lot about the deficit in trade. Bush and Clinton didn't really care about that until he made them care about it. So you could argue he had a really positive impact on that. race. I do think what's different this time is a lot of Americans do have an issue, a single issue, and it is not necessarily immigration or abortion, though certainly some people are animated

by that. It is this foundational belief that our political system has gone completely off the rails and that if we don't get off this cycle we're in where the extremes just feed off one another, we are going to end up in no place good. And the prospect of having a ticket that comes along against two very unpopular nominees, potential nominees, we think there's an opening there. Just defining yourself as, we are going to be a ticket that is here to solve problems, that is not going to be a contributor to the freak show that kind of passes for our politics today, we think there's an opening.

Even if you go back to, you know, 92, the country was split in terms of partisan ID. It was like a third, a third, a third independent Democratic Republican. Now half the country considers themselves independent or unaffiliated. And so the universe of people has grown. You've seen all those same polls we've seen that two thirds of people do not want to rematch of this election that we're likely going to get. And that's why we just did a battleground state poll, 10,000 registered voters last week. 63% of people said they'd be open to voting for a moderate independent ticket if the alternatives

were Trump or Biden. So the opening is there. All right. And here's where you get the criticism then from the Democratic Party, which is, all right, I hear you. Yep. There's definitely a lot of people who are concerned about the state of the republic, the state of our democracy. Those people aren't voting for Donald Trump. They're going to vote for Joe Biden. So if you come in as a third party, you're not going to take away Trump voters. They're not concerned that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. You're going to take away potential either stay-at-home voters or Biden voters. And if at the end of the day, you don't win and the result is that you handed this election to Donald Trump, isn't that sort of

the worst scenario? So this spoiler argument really falls apart in a couple ways. So one is there is this, some of our critics have this level of certainty, which is completely unjustified given we are more than a year away from the election. We don't know where the country is going to be. We don't know who the nominees were going to be. We don't even know whether no labels is going to put up a ticket. So for anybody to say with certainty, if a no labels ticket were in there, we know exactly the impact it would have, they don't know that. The other thing is, you know, there actually has been some polling. There was a big Monmouth poll that showed if there were a no labels ticket, it would actually pull more out of Trump and Biden's margin would grow. So you can kind of pick your poll

at this point. I think the big thing that where the spoiler argument falls down is let's agree what a spoiler is. It is a candidate that can't win and it is a candidate that whatever votes they get are votes that would otherwise go to one of the major party nominees. So Ralph Nader in 2003 percent of the vote, most votes he got probably would have went to Gore. You could say the same thing about Jill Stein in 2016. You could say the same thing about Cornell West, who by the way, Jill Stein and is his campaign manager, if he gets on the ballot for the Green Party in the cycle. No labels will never put up a ticket like that. By definition, the only ticket we put forward would be one that would have an appeal to the vast middle of the country. All right. Let's take this from the

other side then. You've said that you're going to, you know, if, if, if, but like you get on 50 states, you actually see a path to victory. And now we're talking about nominating candidates for no labels, a president and vice presidential candidate. You said you'd pick one from each major political party. But doesn't it kind of matter which one's on top? It does. It does.

So we're spending actually the next month or so really diving into what should the process be for how you'd select a ticket if you decided to run. And we're going to be out with details in it in the fall because what you're trying to find with the selection process is you need this sweet spot where, look, on the one hand, you can't have the smoke-filled room, can't be like how the Vatican picks a pope. Jonah would like you to do that, to be clear. I mean, Jonah would like every party to do that. So you've got at least one vote for smoke-filled room. But I hear you that probably that is not as popular with the not Jonah Goldberg constituency of the other 349 million people. There's at least a coalition of one for that option.

That's right, yeah. On the other hand, you can't have a free-for-all. There was a group of called Americans Elect that was trying to do an online convention years ago. And they just got opened up to way too many people. It can get hacked. You can have trolls come in. And before you know it, like Mickey Mouse is your candidate. So what you need to do is structure a process that's open and transparent, but has got some guardrails in place to ensure that the ticket that ends up in contention is one that reflects your value. So we'll be out with more details on that in the fall. All right. So again, let's go down this path a little bit. more. Now you've nominated two people. You have your platform. I mean, the Republican Party and Democratic

Party have platforms too. Well, they used to. Republicans do not have. Yeah, that's right. But there was a time where that was a thing that parties did. And yet, nobody really thought those platforms mattered so much as whatever the candidates said, their priorities were suddenly then the priorities of the political party. So no labels can have whatever platform it wants about sort of a middle way on all of these culture war issues and sort of designed, and I'm putting words in your party's mouth here, your organization's mouth, to like be able to attract the most number of people while offending the least number of people. But at the end of the day, when you pick a standard bear, that standard bear is going to say, here's the way forward. Well, this gets Sarah at,

I think some people either missed or maybe they're intentionally doing this, the point of this common sense policy playbook. So we released this in July. in New Hampshire. We had spent over a year surveying tens of thousands of people. So the ideas in there are reflective of what the public really wants. This is our view based on our conversations with the public on where most of the country wants to go on most issues. Now, what we did is we set up direction on all these issues, but we didn't fill in all the details by design, because that is for a candidate to do. We live in a system today where we have one side of our political debate says the sky is blue and the other one says the sky is green. So you can't jump from that to

debating all the policy minutia and we don't even agree on where we are and where we want to go. So the idea is this is a directional document and it's something that a potential future ticket could say, hey, I'm in alignment with where this policy playbook lays out where we should go as a country, but I've got some of my own ideas about how to get there. And that's by design. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious.

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With Amex platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and vary by race. Terms and Conditions Apply. Learn more at mx.ca.com. What are the biggest criticisms that actually strike home with you? Look, you know, this is a serious election. And we take very seriously the idea of doing something that's reckless or doing something that has unintended consequences. And that's why one of the ways we've set this up from the beginning, we've described it as an insurance policy. If you think

about what an insurance policy is, like, I have life insurance. I hope I don't have to cash in that policy. I'm happy I have. And this is the same thing. And this is why we are actually not going to decide whether to give our line to a ticket until sometime after Super Tuesday and before a convention we're having in Dallas and April. Because if there's not an opening, if six to nine months from now, one or two things happen, either the country feels very differently and much better about the two presumptive nominees, or maybe there's other nominees. And, you know, there's no opening for a no labels ticket. We're not going to force it. The reason we've been doing this from the beginning is because I think most people understand there's a common sense majority in this country

that is boxed out of most of our political debates. The way they think about and feel about issues just doesn't get discussed. And there's got to be another voice in the process. And ultimately, the signal we're trying to send to the two major parties is, look, you keep abandoning these voters and taking them for granted, election after election. And the reason you do it is because the parties have gotten to this point where they just don't even think they have to put up good candidates anymore. They just figure, look, as long as you hate and fear the other person on the other side more, you'll come home to us in the end. Well, if you do that for long enough, you're going to invite some competition. And that's ultimately what we're doing to try to force

them to pay attention of voters they're ignoring. And if they don't, they might have another ticket to contempt. Something that I think people misunderstand about our politics is this idea that it's, you know, a linear left-right spectrum. And so you have those in the far left, those on the middle left, those in the center, and it just runs along this line. When, in fact, when I see polling showing that the highest number of people ever identify

as an independent, don't identify with the two parties, that's been a real shift in our politics in the last 25, 30 years, that independent has now overtaken Republican or Democrat for party identification. But I feel like there can be a misunderstanding that that means there's all these people in the center when in fact it's at least two dimensional, if not three dimensional on how those quote unquote independence and especially the new independence, let's call them, actually where they are on the political spectrum. They may not identify as Republican because they think the Republican party's too squishy, two establishment. And ditto on the left that Joe Biden, you know, that's not my president because he's not progressive enough.

So I'm identifying as an independent. And so part of, I think, the appeal of no labels is to say, we're representing the center of the country that isn't being represented by the two parties, you know, break, break. Look at this polling showing all these people identifying as independent. And I'm thinking, well, independent's not helpful, actually, as a label for your purposes. No labels, no pun intended. That in fact, you need to actually drill down on why they're independent, who's actually open to saying, neither party represents me because they're too extreme.

So, Sarah, you're right. This vast group that exists, you know, that doesn't feel like they are getting what they want from either of the major parties, they're not as uniform, right? Like, as you see on the right or the left, this is how you saw this dynamic where people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary then came and voted for Trump. And you said, well, how could that be? And it has to do with exactly what you're talking about. It isn't so much about issues.

It can be about, you know, a tone, an approach, really just a middle finger to the establishment. He's just going to say, F the establishments, the through line on that one. Yeah. The reason though we think there's an opening here is if you go back to this poll we did, and again, this is the top eight battleground state, 10,000 registered voters. So 63% say they're open to voting for this kind of ticket. Well, you look at that and you say, well, wait a minute. Open to doesn't mean they're going to do it, number one.

And number two, well, what is a moderate independent? Can't we just all project our idealized version of that? And the answer to both those things is yes. But the reason we think there's still a path is that ceiling is so high, 63, that you can lose 40% of the open to universe and still get over the, the top, because remember, in presidential elections, it's winner-take-all. So in a three-way race, if you got 35, 36 percent of the vote in a state, you get all the electoral votes that come with it. I know I'm putting the card a little ahead of the horse here, but what are the states

that you think a no-label ticket would be most competitive in? You know, we sort of know our blue states and red states and purple states, but what you're talking about is, you know, shaking up the whole map, I don't even know which states we're looking at for green state. What are we, what color are we assigning to you? I don't think we have a color yet. I think we need to do that. Yeah. We should nail down a color. Please don't pick purple. Just, just don't. I know. That's a little over. Pick a real color. So we have done a lot of polling and modeling. And the last one we did showed a viable path to victory in 25 states, representing 286 electoral votes. And there was some surprising ones on there. So Florida, for example, is actually one where we think an independent

unity ticket can compete. Illinois is another. Now, you might think of those and say, well, Illinois is really blue and Florida is really red. And that's true. But that's in the context of a binary choice. Like you look at a state like Illinois, Illinois not long ago did have a Republican governor. And if people are forced to choose between blue and red and east, States. They've pretty reliably started making predictable choices where Illinois is blue and Florida is red. But our polling and modeling is showing that that's a little looser than you think. So one of the other things that's interesting that's happening is you see a lot of internal migration that's happened these last few years that is really shaking up states. Texas is a great

example where you have a situation where Hispanic voters in Texas, what we're seeing in our polling is they were formerly a lot of them in the Democratic Party. They're kind of leaving the party now, though, because they say, well, I don't like this flirtation with socialism. And I don't like your policies on the border either. But then they're looking at the right and saying, well, I think you might hate me. So they don't really have a home and they're looking for one. And so I think you see a lot of these voting populations are in flux and it creates some openings for a ticket like this. I wonder if you've seen a correlation between states that we think of as being a solid red or solid blue, but when you dive down,

they're actually mixed. So, for instance, I'm thinking Kansas and Kentucky, two states that we think of presidentially as deep red, but they have Democratic governors right now, for instance. Has there been, have you seen correlations in opening to third party candidates? That's interesting. We haven't really mapped it against, you know, whether there's a surprising governor in those states. But like we said, 25 states are in the mix. Look, interestingly enough, even a state like California, when we ran all the numbers, it actually showed a unity ticket tied with Biden and then Trump had 24. Now, for the purposes of our model, we did not put that in our column or even put it in a stretch state because we just made the judgment, look,

Democrats have such a structural advantage there. Come on, that's never. But there are a lot more states in the mix than people would think. A little fun questions for Ryan here. Y'all are doing something that has not, again, successfully been done. I actually totally hear you on 1864. But let's assume it's been a while since 1864. Where do you, I don't know, where do you get your inspiration from?

Where do you get your lessons from? What are you reading to help you think through next steps? You know, so interestingly enough, One of the things that got us thinking about doing this, it really started. We had members across the country in like late 2021, and they were starting to ask us questions about 24 and the possibility we were going to get confronted with this sequel that nobody wanted to see. And so that got us investigating what would it take to get on the ballot and is there an opening?

But ironically, I think a touch point for us was in a lot of ways the greatest success of our movement, which was the infrastructure bill that passed in late 2021. That really was no labels congressional allies driving the train there, and they got it over the finish line. But one of the things I think we learned from that is infrastructure is supposed to be the easy thing. This is not immigration. This is not abortion. Like every politician loves to go to the ribbon cutting with maybe their names on the bridge behind them.

And yet, this was such a knockdown, drag out fight. The far left hated it, the far right hated. I mean, one of the things you noted is, like, on the day after the infrastructure bill passed, Marjorie Taylor Green hated it and was saying all these rhinos that voted for it have to go. But so did the squad because they liked some of what was in the bill, but they didn't like the fact they weren't getting all the other social spending they wanted in the Build Back Better program. And I think the lesson we took from that is if it is now this hard to get what should be the easy issue, over the finish line. We have to look a little bit more expansively about just changing the

conversation that we have in this country and forcing the parties to think about issues and think about voters in a different way. And of course, the way we do that in this country is presidential elections. To the extent people think about issues, that is the lens through which they look at it. See, I feel like you're at a bit of a catch-22 there because you're exactly right. It's hard to get traction unless you've fielded a presidential ticket. But at the same time, if you wanted to actually build a foundation to win a presidential ticket, what you'd want is to win a bunch of local or congressional races, state legislative races, and actually sort of build a movement from the bottom up, why not start at the congressional level and just win a bunch of congressional

races, which would be cheaper to win. A ballot access would arguably be easier. and then you'd have, you know, a coalition in Congress, maybe 20 members after a cycle or two, and then say, now we're ready. I mean, that seems to me closer to the 1864 model in a way. Yeah. I think the answer has to do with the urgency. Whether you're talking about creating a new party, which again, we're not doing, like we've been trying to bring the two parties together, but whether you're trying to do that,

or whether you're trying to push some of these structural reforms people think, are going to help get us out of this mess, like rank choice voting or money in politics, whatever it is. The thing that all those things have in common is they're going to unfold over years and decades. And we just don't have that kind of time. We are in this moment. And this is what I, there's a million reasons you can look at what we're doing and pick it apart and ask questions. And look, we take criticism seriously. But the one answer that nobody in the establishment, or the one question that nobody has an answer for is two-thirds of the country doesn't want the election you're going to give us. Why is that what we should

accept? Why is there no way to create any kind of other options beyond two options that most of the public clearly doesn't want? And so there's this element where you have these people coming after no labels in the party establishment. And there's almost like a level of contempt for voters. It's kind of like, hey, look, we got it. You know, you'll have the choices that we deign to give you, and you'll be happy with it. And the idea that anybody could come in and break that up, well, we have to destroy that. That's just not where the public is. You know, one of the questions we asked in that poll, Sarah, that I mentioned, we weren't just doing horse race polling. We just ask people, do you support a group like no labels getting on the ballot in case an independent

wants to run? Sixty-nine percent of people say yes. So there is an inside Washington view of what we're doing, which is focused on this spoiler concept and finding all kinds of different ways to pick apart what this is doing. And then you get out into the country and you just, it sounds so simple and obvious to people. Yeah, our choices suck. We should have. have more. So what I may be hearing is that obviously you want your ticket to win. If there is a ticket, yeah, all the yes. But if it doesn't, maybe you would start spending more time in the longer term on some of those foundational questions. Yeah, look, that's why when we think about what does success look like for this whole effort, if, look, obviously the ultimate success would be

there's a no labels ticket and it wins and changes everything. But even if we never put up a ticket, if in the course of doing this, we catalyze this group of voters that feels completely disaffected from our politics, we scare the establishment in both parties enough to recognize, you know what, maybe we should just stop waking up every single day, narrow casting to our base, because if we don't start talking to these other voters, we're going to lose them. And if we start to pull people back to the center where more of the country lives, that's success. All right. Last question. There's no limits on who Ryan gets to pick for the ticket, except that they must be a celebrity. Who's your dream celebrity? Oh, wow. I mean,

you've got the rock. You've got Oprah. You've got Matthew McConaughey. You've got Michelle Obama. I'll include her as a celebrity at this point. You want to pick Prince Harry and really tank? go for it. Who's Ryan's celebrity candidate of the day? You know, I'll be honest. I have not thought of one. But I will say this. When we think about this process and who might be in the mix for a ticket like this, it isn't just current and former electives. We would be more than open to having some of the kinds of names that you talked about, business people, military leaders. It isn't just current and former electives that could compete here and that could catalyze the public's imagination. So this is going to be a wide open process.

I saw Matthew McConaughey on ABC News a couple weeks ago. Look, you've got to do something about the beard. It's getting a little out of control. We're leaning more Willie Nelson, less a time to kill maybe. But I think there's a lot of potential there. He's got, you know, man pulls off a button-down shirt. Let's just say that. He does. We all wish we could do that like Matthew. All right. Ryan Clancy, chief political strategist from no labels. Thank you for coming on here

and addressing all the things, explaining what y'all are doing, all the criticisms, and get back to work, dude. Thanks for having me, Sarah. You know,