From Ryan Clancy, No Labels Chief Strategist:
We wanted to send you — one of our top supporters — an insider strategy memo on
the 2024 race for president.
President Joe Biden would likely lose the 2024 election if it were held today.
Donald Trump has the biggest lead he’s ever had over Biden in the Real Clear Politics national polling average, and he’s winning in five of the top six swing states.
Senior Democrats know how bad it is. Former Obama advisor David Axelrod says Biden’s odds in 2024 are “no better” than 50/50, and it was reported this week that President Biden is “increasingly frustrated” by his dismal poll numbers.
Democratic Party leaders and consultants are panicking, and they should be putting their energy into finding a better candidate or developing policies or messages that are more persuasive to voters. Instead, some are focused on launching increasingly apocalyptic and hysterical attacks on No Labels.
The latest salvo was exposed yesterday in an exclusive story published by the Semafor media outlet, which described a secret call of political operatives “organizing an aggressive, multi-front campaign to stop the independent group No Labels from injecting a third major candidate in the upcoming 2024 election.” They claim, falsely, that No Labels will help elect Trump, and they leave no doubt how far they’re willing to go to bully and intimidate No Labels supporters, with one call participant saying, “If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it…We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find.”
Let’s put aside for a moment how hypocritical it is that these self-anointed defenders of democracy embrace the same attack-and-destroy mindset of Donald Trump. Let’s just focus on why they’re wrong that an independent presidential candidate can’t win.
We first need to remember how we elect a president. Every state in the nation, except for Maine and Nebraska, has a “winner take all” system of allocating their Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the most votes in the general election. That often means winning 51 percent of the vote in a two-candidate race. The central argument of many No Labels critics is that the “winner take all” system makes it too hard for an independent presidential candidate to win. In all, 533 out of 538 electoral votes are awarded via “winner take all.”
But they have it backwards. The Electoral College is one of the key reasons a No Labels Unity ticket could compete and win in a multicandidate presidential race.
Remember, because every single state, except for two, awards electoral votes on a “winner take all” basis, a No Labels ticket could theoretically win 100 percent of the electoral votes in a state by securing as little as 34 percent — not 51 percent — of the popular vote in a three‐way contest with Trump and Biden.
This is just one reason the prospects for a No Labels ticket are so much stronger than some might imagine. As No Labels founding chair Joe Lieberman just told Fox News host Neil Cavuto: “…we’re not the problem. We said it very clearly that we’re looking at running a bipartisan Unity ticket, because the American people are so fed up with the two parties and don’t want to choose between Trump and Biden again, at historic levels. But why the Democrats are turning their fire on No Labels and not looking at the problem they have with President Biden running for re-election, I don’t get.”
During the last two years, No Labels has polled tens of thousands of voters, and anywhere from 59 to 63 percent of voters have said they are “open to” a moderate independent in the event of a Trump-Biden rematch. If a No Labels ticket won a bit more than half of this “open to” universe, it could beat Trump and Biden in key states. We believe a Unity ticket could realistically win 25 states, representing 286 electoral votes. That would clear the 270 electoral vote threshold needed for outright victory.
Aside from our polling, No Labels has also done three separate exercises — in March 2022, January 2023 and November 2023 — in which we modeled the entire American electorate.
– The first time we did our modeling in March 2022, it showed 64 million American voters would “definitely” or “probably” consider voting for a Unity presidential ticket.
– By January 2023, this universe had grown to 77 million voters.
– Today, it is 83 million people, a 30 percent increase of some 19 million voters in under two years.
It is obvious Americans are desperate for better choices in 2024, but much of America’s political class refuse to see it. Most Americans dread the prospect of a 2020 election rematch, which would feature two candidates whose approval ratings are frequently at 40 percent or below.
It’s true, of course, that no independent presidential candidate has even won an electoral vote in 50 years. But the 2024 election is shaping up to be like no other election in the modern era.
The two likely major party nominees have never been this unpopular. The public has rarely, if ever, been this dissatisfied with the direction of the country or the representation they get from the two major parties. Voters have little to no confidence that our current political system, or the leaders in it, can solve defining problems like inflation, immigration and the border or America’s rapidly deteriorating fiscal picture.
If No Labels offers up our ballot line to a Unity ticket in 2024, it will look nothing like the Ralph Nader, Gary Johnson or Jill Stein protest candidacies of the past. It will be a ticket with leaders who can inspire and rally the commonsense majority to win the White House.”