Moderate donors should do something that isn't stupid

If you like the idea of No Labels, there are better ways to support moderate politicians

The organization No Labels has been around for a number of presidential cycles now, always promising to recruit a “unity ticket” featuring one prominent Democrat and one prominent Republican, looking to capture the White House and bring the country together.

The 2024 cycle, featuring two unpopular mainstream party options, seemed to offer their best chance yet, and they successfully raised tens of millions of dollars.

Ultimately, though, No Labels was forced to give up because a massive pressure campaign led by centrist Democrats convinced every semi-prominent politician in America that joining this kind of third party effort would be a gift to Donald Trump. That analysis was completely correct, I am glad the effort was made, I’m glad that nobody rallied to the No Labels banner, and I hope this whole dumb idea of a presidential unity ticket will die someday soon. Not only is third party politics pretty cursed given the realities of the American electoral system, the “unity ticket” concept is just violently at odds with the American constitutional order. A ticket with a Democratic president and a GOP vice president is not a close substitute for a ticket with a GOP president and a Democratic vice president, it’s a close substitute for a standard D-on-D partisan ticket.

One view of this whole thing is that No Labels was a deliberate plot to split the anti-Trump vote and help him win.

But while I’m sure there were some people with that intention, I don’t think that we should assume bad faith. A lot of people in the United States of America are somewhere between Trump and Biden ideologically and are frustrated by the extremism and gridlock in the American political system. I think people with that view tend to be a little bit disengaged from the practicalities of the political process. And almost everyone in America has a view of the political system that is more presidency-centered than the actual institutions of government. So it’s natural for people to sort of coalesce around the idea that if Democrats and Republicans are the problem, the solution must be some kind of neither-D-nor-R presidential campaign.

It’s not true, but I can see why people might believe it. And I think that it would really benefit the country if people with that mindset were encouraged to engage a little more deeply with the political and do things that are actually constructive.

The disengaged middle

Joe Biden’s 2020 voters are, on average, significantly to the left of the American population.

That’s natural and there’s no other way for a two-party system to work. What’s even more striking is that the donors and staffers who support the Democratic Party are even more left-wing than the primary electorate.

But this is not a law of nature.

It just happens to be the current convention in the United States that most of the people most inclined to be active in the political system also have relatively extreme views. Leftists disappointed with Barack Obama’s administration redoubled their efforts to engage with the system and secured more influence. Moderates who are disappointed with the political system tend to retreat sullenly or shake their heads about how partisanship is bad. This, of course, only exacerbates the problem. The system is responsive to people who participate in it, and if you don’t solve any problems by retreating in despair.

That’s the part of No Labels that’s genuinely kind of great and inspiring. They got a bunch of rich people who aren’t happy with the two parties to agree to put up meaningful money to try to do something about it.

The thing they came up with, unfortunately, was terrible. It’s terrible both because a third-party presidential bid doesn’t make sense, but also because principled anti-partisanship doesn’t really make a lot of sense. People in fact do need “labels” to make sense of and organize political conflict. If you look around the world, there is a lot of variety in how democratic politics is practiced, but there are always parties involved.

Indeed, part of the story of how American politics got so off-center is precisely that the parties as such became weak and hollowed-out. You no longer have a “party boss” who derives tangible benefits from winning and who therefore serves as a counterpoint to single-issue activists. The contemporary parties don’t really even function as membership organizations for elected officials that help them “organize victory,” as Ezra Klein thinks they should. They are vehicles for ideological agitators or (in the case of the GOP) for the personal ambition of one guy. The way to achieve a less extreme politics isn’t to bypass the party system, it’s to work within it in pursuit of something more like a median voter approach.

Embrace partisan moderate factionalism

The alternative to disengagement (bad) and moderate anti-partisanism (counterproductive) is moderate partisan factionalism. These are ideas I derived from Steve Teles and Robert Saldin’s “Future is Faction” essay, and they are implemented in a nascent form on the Democratic side by Slow Boring’s friends at Welcome PAC.

The core idea here is that no matter how frustrated you are with the two parties, there is almost certainly going to be one party that you are clearly closer to.

I have some complaints with Democrats’ post-Obama direction, but I’m still squarely closer to their camp. Other people who may enjoy many Slow Boring articles will have other commitments or experiences that leave them squarely in the GOP camp.

What we need is for people who have means — the kind of means that could lead you to donate to No Labels, for example — but are disgruntled with the current state of the parties to nonetheless pick a team and start investing in a faction within that team. That means making it known publicly that you’re a Democrat (or a Republican) and that you’re interested in investing money in politics. But when the party committees and super PACs come calling, tell them no thanks. Not because you’re not willing to spend, but because the party is too far to the left (or the right) and you’re investing in moderate factional projects. That means making individual contributions to a set of moderate party members who you like. And it means telling those members that you’re not supporting them reluctantly as “the only guy who can win this district” but enthusiastically as practitioners of a style of politics that you affirmatively prefer.

Ideally, it means providing financial support to moderate factional institutions or, if there isn’t an institution that does the kind of work that you want, finding like-minded people to help found them.

And I want to emphasize that both the actual giving of money and also the publicity are important. Something about No Labels that I liked was the pre-commitment to fundraising. They thought a unity ticket would be more likely to emerge if they could credibly guarantee that there would be money for it. Right now, my sense is that there are a lot of elected officials who would sort of like to be a little more heterodox. But they know that if they step out of line, they are guaranteed to take some fire. And even though everyone knows that there are lots of people who would like to see elected officials be less extreme, it’s not obvious that those people will step up and provide you with resources if you step out. You want to not only support the more moderate members of your party, but make it known to the world that that’s why you support them and that you are eager to support more people like that.

More labels

Parties are important in part precisely because labels are important. There are lots of elections in America and lots of policy issues out there, and knowing that somebody is a D or an R gives you valuable information about them.

But two is a very small number of political parties.

And the labeling dynamic tends to undercut the potential advantages of moderation. If you’re a Republican running in New York or a Democrat running in Florida, it would be helpful to adopt more moderate positions on policy issues. But doing that is bound to alienate a handful of intense policy demanders in your base, and swing voters may not even realize that you’ve done it. Back in the heyday of the Democratic Leadership Council, the idea of a “New Democrat” served to help solve this problem by creating a partisan sub-brand that was reasonably well-known.

Today that sub-brand lives on in the form of the New Democrat Caucus in the House of Representatives, but the NDC is very large at this point, quite diffuse, and not particularly clear or well-known in its identity. Beyond that, in its heyday “New Democrat” signified something larger than a caucus membership like NDC or Blue Dogs. It was a brand that included state legislators and mayors and governors and an affiliated think tank and a big national conference that featured elected officials from all around the country, plus various policy experts and staffers and operatives. It was a shorthand that was legible to journalists and to people who cared a lot about politics.

On the GOP side, there have been plenty of moderate figures over the years, but they’ve never had a clear factional sub-brand. And I think you’ll see that in practice, this is going to be a big challenge for Larry Hogan’s Senate campaign in Maryland. He’s very popular in the state and there are clearly lots of people there who like him. But the message that he’d just be a pawn of the generic national MAGA GOP is powerful, and absent an identifiable sub-brand he can credibly commit himself to, it’s hard to dispel those fears. Investing in not just individual politicians but the creation of meaningful sub-brands could make more elections competitive and pull more politicians to the center.

You need ideas, too

DC is drowning in propaganda but actual policy analysis is rare and undervalued.

Investments in that kind of thing probably shouldn’t be partisan. “No Labels” is a dumb strategy for electoral politics, but if you like the spirit of No Labels, then supporting groups like the Niskanen Center that have integrity and an ecumenical approach is a great idea. Those kinds of institutions give would-be moderate politicians something to talk about and something to do.

In some respects, I think that “mushy middle” politics and just telling people to chill out a little is underrated. But when your entire political persona is just editing stuff down, that does become kind of tedious and uninspired. Investing in idea generation is a way to give politicians something to talk about and to distinguish themselves.

Ideas are useless if nobody hears about them, though. The internet has demolished most media revenue models (not Slow Boring’s though — thank you again to our paid members!) but has also made producing and disseminating content cheaper than ever. That should be a great era in which to launch various factional journals, and certainly we’ve seen intriguing growth in both far-left and right-wing culture war niche media. But we don’t really have new journals for moderate factions that can highlight effective politicians, cultivate new generations of take-slingers, and do the other work of media. There’s Slow Boring, of course, and we do publish a lot of content for a small operation, but there’s a lot more that can be done in this space.¹

None of these ideas are especially original, and they’re a little tedious relative to the shortcut of electing a presidential unity ticket. But that’s the point — the impulse behind the shortcut makes sense, but it’s illusory. Politics doesn’t require super-geniuses, but it does require a lot of work.

1. Or you could just buy a Slow Boring gift subscription for someone special in your life.