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Former Sens. Joe Lieberman and Doug Jones on Sunday faced-off in a debate over the viability of No Labels’ potential bipartisan third-party presidential ticket in 2024
Former Sens. Joe Lieberman and Doug Jones appeared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” to debate the viability of a bipartisan third-party presidential ticket in 2024 – and whether that effort could serve as a spoiler in the race for the White House.
Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent who represented Connecticut, is the founding chair of No Labels, which is preparing a possible “unity” ticket that would include both parties and offer, he said, another option for those voters dissatisfied with a potential rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
“We’re in this to give the majority of the American people who feel that the major two parties are failing them a third choice, both in policies, such as we’re going to release in New Hampshire [on Monday], but also possibly in a third candidate,” Lieberman told “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “And we’ve been very explicit … If the polling next year shows, after the two parties have chosen their nominees, that, in fact, we will help elect one or another candidate, we’re not going to get involved.”
Jones, an Alabama Democrat and staunch Biden ally who has joined a group to counter No Labels, rejected that thinking.
“Those polls right now mean nothing,” he shot back at Lieberman, referencing reticence for both Biden and Trump. “This past weekend, you saw that the Biden-Harris team raised $70 million, 30% of those were new donors,” Jones added. "That is not a candidate that is being rejected by the American people.
Of No Labels, he said, “There is no way on God’s green earth that they can get to 270 electoral votes, which means they will be a spoiler, one way or another.”
Not so, Lieberman insisted. The problem wasn’t No Labels, he said. “The problem is the American people are not buying what the two parties are selling anymore. And I think the parties would be wiser to think about that.”
Lieberman has experience facing third party bids himself: As the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000, he and presidential hopeful Al Gore lost Florida by a few hundred votes in a state where the Green Party’s Ralph Nader got nearly 100,000 ballots, with Lieberman at the time calling any vote for Nader actually a vote for opponent George W. Bush.
The dueling views on No Labels come amid Democratic handwringing over whether the group’s plan – which it says would comprise of one Democrat and one Republican on the same ticket next year – is more likely to peel off disaffected Republican voters who would vote for Biden in a pure head-to-head with Trump next year.
Lieberman said Sunday that No Labels would hold off on its campaign if Democrats and Republicans both embrace centrism.
“We have said all along that we’re not yearning to run a third-party ticket. If one or both parties move more toward the center in their policies … and maybe think about the two candidates being so unpopular among the American people, we won’t run,” he said.
Jones said there was already a more moderate option available in Biden, noting the president’s cooperation with Republican lawmakers in Congress.
“Look at what he has done, bringing the infrastructure package together, pulling that together for the first time in decades to do infrastructure, for the PACT Act [for veterans], the CHIPS Act [for manufacturing],” Jones said.
“I don’t know why in the world somebody thinks that Joe Biden’s administration is so far left, unlike a Donald Trump or someone else that is an extreme right,” he argued.
In interviews and public statements, the group has repeatedly insisted that while polling proves there’s an appetite for a third option in 2024, No Labels would take an “off ramp” if they are wrong.
“That sort of runs against human nature, doesn’t it? Once a campaign starts, it’s hard to stop,” Stephanopoulos pressed Lieberman on “This Week.”
“The American people don’t like what the two parties are doing,” Lieberman responded. “And they particularly don’t like the two candidates that they seem set on nominating.”
Jones, however, took issue with No Labels largely operating outside of public scrutiny.
“They’re not disclosing their donors. They’re not playing by the same rules,” he said. (A No Labels spokesperson previously told ABC News: “We never share the names of our supporters because we live in an era where far-right and far-left agitators and partisan operatives try to destroy and intimidate organizations they don’t like by attacking their individual supporters.”)
Jones on Sunday criticized how No Labels might also put together its ticket – not through a series of public primaries but through back-room discussions that undercut the very pitch Lieberman was making.
“That’s not very democratic. That’s not a choice,” he said. “It’s a false choice and really an illusion as to what they’re doing.”
Even some Republicans have cast doubts on No Labels’ viability, pointing to past failures by third-party candidates to make a legitimate run at the White House. The group has also faced roadblocks in its effort to get access to the ballot in all 50 states.
“I think it’s a fool’s errand. … I’m not in this for show time. I’m not in this, you know, for making a point. I’m in this to get elected president of the United States,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is running for the White House as a Republican, said on “This Week.”
“And there are only two people who will get elected president of the United States in November of '24 – the Republican nominee for president, and the Democratic nominee for president.”
Sure, but this misunderstands voters. Both Democrats and Republicans seem to want someone more extreme and effective, less concerned with political grandstanding and more concerned with doing what the American people voted them in to do. DeSantis got it right…until he kept focusing on bullshit the general population didn’t want. Young Democrats pine after Sanders because he too gets it right, except that most older people don’t want that either.
No Labels talks like it can somehow smooth over the contradiction about abortion between Democrats and Republicans, but everyone knows it can’t. No Labels lauds unifying rhetoric over actual bipartisan policies. It’s one thing that say that everyone wants more done about gun control and gun crime, and it’s another to implement a policy that recognizes both views as legitimate because the two are largely contradictory.
In short, it’ll absolutely be a spoiler.
There certainly is middle ground on those policies. The US had the Brady Act but still allowed people to own firearms. Most people favor access to abortion with some term restrictions. It’s disingenuous to say there isn’t a middle ground, particularly when most things in life are a compromise. Moreover, we disenfranchise a lot of people when we say that something is either black or white.
Regardless of what you may think of Lieberman, McCain, Murkowski, Sinema or Manchin, these are the folks that are willing to cross over to the other side of the aisle and make those compromises. They are the big tent people. Why do you think they are villainized in the media? Particularly because they don’t fit neatly into one pigeonhole or the other, and more particularly because it’s a great ad seller.
We have got to stop thinking we’re Republican or Democrat, we shouldn’t be aligned to one party at all. We should be voting on the issues of the day, the candidate’s platforms and our representatives voting records. Aligning to one party is a poor proxy and it’s a cop-out of civic responsibility.
Yes, there is middle ground for these policies, but it wasn’t acceptable to people on the right. Safe, regulated abortion on demand for any reason at any point prior to labor is the farthest left; no abortion access even in the event of miscarriages, rape, or incest is the furthest right. We had safe, regulated abortions almost on demand until the end of the second trimester. That was the middle ground and conservatives pushed and pushed to either completely remove access through nonessential bureaucratic hurdles such as how Texas passed a law in 2013 that all abortion clinics have admitting privileges at local hospitals and all hallways and doors in the center had to be wide enough to wheel gurneys through in the event of an emergency - ostensibly solutions in search of a problem, just to shut down the large majority of abortion providers - or have engaged in a decades long push to manipulate the right type of Manchurian president into attacking the Supreme Court into overturning Roe v Wade.
In the years following that 2013 law, Texas dropped from 41 abortion centers to 10. The law was overturned in 2016, but the damage had been done. Leases for centers had changed terms, funding streams dried up, staff had scattered to the winds… If what we already had in place wasn’t an acceptable middle ground, then we as a country would have been able to codify Roe v Wade.
To put it a different way: I’m not saying there is no middle ground. They have said there is no middle ground. To use your own words, it’s disingenuous to act as though both sides are being intractable in the policymaking process.
Also, I can’t believe that Joe Biden out of all people is currently labeled as far left.
In Europe his position would be considered as a right wing politician.
But anyway even within US, he was known to be moderate and actually a politician who had talent to struck deals with both sides. More so that the examples GP gave.
From those you listed, the only person that was willing to cross party lines was John McCain.
Manchin, Sinema basically are Republicans that just run as Democrats, their voting record shows that (especially Sinema outraged her voters, because she changed after being elected, Manchin doesn’t hide who he is, so I have less problem with him). Lieberman is just spiteful and was willing torpedo single payer that he himself was pushing, because he lost primaries). Murkowski only says that she is moderate, but she still votes with the party when her vote would actually made any difference.
McCain was a Republican and believed that is the right way, but unlike those rest you listed he put country first. If you would have discussion with him and convince him that specific bill actually benefits Americans he had no problem to vote against his party (last example was where he actually stopped repeal of ACA).
Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins also blocked the repeal of ACA, McCain was just the last vote needed, and his vote was so dramatic due to his circumstances.