We represent different political parties. For most of our careers, we have fought on the opposite sides of many issues. But we love our state and our country more than we love our parties, and we are in complete agreement: in 2024, to save the American republic, Donald Trump must be defeated.
2024 will be no normal election. With Donald Trump threatening to terminate Constitutional norms, democracy is on the ballot.
As we saw in 2020 in Pennsylvania and in other swing states, Donald Trump will likely narrowly lose a head-to-head contest with President Biden in 2024. But as we saw in 2016, a third-party candidate entering the race in this and other swing states provides Trump his best, and perhaps his only path to re-election.
For that reason, we call on the political group No Labels to abandon its effort to nominate a third-party presidential candidate if Trump wins the Republican nomination.
If he is nominated, we believe that all Americans who care about democracy must unite behind a single candidate to assure that Trump, in the words of former Representative Liz Cheney, “can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.”
Even a wounded Trump will be formidable in 2024. Eighty percent of his voters nationally and almost 90 percent in Pennsylvania in 2020 came from hard-core Trump supporters. With so many committed loyalists, his vote is unlikely to fall significantly below its 2016 and 2020 level — about 46%.
Because Trump loyalists don’t represent a majority of the national electorate, he lost the popular vote in both of his presidential runs and did not top 47% in either. As long as the anti-Trump, pro-democracy vote is unified behind a single candidate, Trump is very unlikely to win in 2024.
That’s why a No Labels third-party candidate would be such a threat to our democracy. If he or she takes even a small part of the anti-Trump, pro-democracy vote away from Biden, the outcome of the 2024 election is likely to be reversed and Trump returned to the White House.
The threat applies to all third-party “spoilers,” including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — remember that Green Party candidate Jill Stein got just 1.2% of the vote in 2016, but it was enough to put Trump over the top — but as things stand today, the No Labels candidacy clearly poses the greatest threat.
In the five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — most likely to decide the 2024 election in the Electoral College, the numbers tell the story. Together they have 73 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump narrowly won all of them. In 2020 Biden won all five.
Our state is a case in point. In 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania by less than a point with 48.6% of the popular vote. In 2020, his vote grew slightly to 48.8%, but he lost the state by 1.2%. In 2016, the third-party vote was just 3.2%, but that was enough to tip the state to Trump. In 2020, it was down to 1.2% — and Biden won the state.
In all five swing states, Biden’s razor-thin margins came from a massive anti-Trump vote — voters who told the exit polls that their vote was less for Biden than against Trump.
In all of them at least one in three Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump; in Pennsylvania that number was 35%; in Wisconsin, it was 38%; in Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot) a whopping 45%
The bottom line is this. Our calculations show that if a No Labels candidate had won just three percent of the popular vote in 2020, Donald Trump would likely be sitting In the White House today.
Biden has no margin for error. Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10,000,000 cast — less than one-half of one percent — in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — in 2020 were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the electoral college that would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.
In 2020, Biden needed every anti-Trump, pro-democracy vote to win. Moderate Republicans and Independents were critical to his winning margin. If the No Labels organization concludes it wants to put a third-party candidate into the race, he or she would almost certainly split that vote and throw the 2024 election to Trump. That’s a danger to our democracy we need to avoid.
For the sake of our democracy and our nation, we urge No Labels to abandon its efforts to get on the ballot as a third-party in Pennsylvania and nationally. At the very least, the organization should pledge not to put up a candidate who will split the anti-Trump vote if Trump becomes the Republican nominee.
Jim Greenwood is a former Philadelphia-area congressman. Ed Rendell was governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011. They help lead Citizens to Save Our Republic.
First Published: October 25, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
