No Labels To Launch Presidential Campaign

No Labels will launch a presidential campaign for the November election, the group announced Friday.

“I wasn’t sure exactly where No Labels delegates would land today, but they sent an unequivocal message: Keep going,” said Mike Rawlings, chair of the group’s national convention, in a statement the group posted to X. “They voted near unanimously to continue our 2024 project and to move immediately to identify candidates to serve on the unity presidential ticket.”

The group’s 800 delegates made the decision at a virtual town hall on Friday. No Labels will announce the process for selecting candidates on May 14, Rawlings added.

How the group’s effort will impact the presidential race—that will presumably be between former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden—is unclear. No Labels’s leadership has long maintained that it will not endeavor to field a candidate if he or she would be a spoiler to help Trump. At the same time, some polling has indicated that Trump, who already leads Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, sees his advantage widen with third-party candidates in the mix.

In the aftermath of the announcement, attention turns to who will be on the No Labels ticket that will most likely feature a Democrat and a Republican.

Some had speculated that Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) would mount a run with the group, but he said last month he would not do so. People also thought former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R.) would run when he stepped down from No Labels’s leadership, but he announced a run for his state’s Senate seat in February.

The names of Republicans who have dropped out of the race for the party’s presidential nomination have also surfaced in speculation about a No Labels ticket. No Labels founding chairman Joe Lieberman floated former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, but she later shot down the possibility.

A report surfaced after former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dropped out of the GOP race in January that No Labels was in contact with Christie’s allies about the possibility of a run in the weeks leading up to the suspension of his campaign. Although he said in July that running on a No Labels ticket would be a “fool’s errand,” he indicated he was open to it early last month.