Now that the presidential campaign is over

way, that low moan you hear is the sound of voters pondering their probable fate

,:

a choice between two elderly retirees, President Biden and former President Trump.

Last week’s NBC News

P

All confirmed a consensus: hardly anyone longs for this resit. A whopping 70% of Americans do not want Biden to run, including 51% of Democrats. Almost as many, 60%, do not want Trump to run, including about a third of Republicans.

But Americans are inventive. Can’t some political entrepreneur find a way out of this dilemma?

Enter

the

group in Washington

No labels, which ones

has done admirable work promoting bipartisan cooperation in Congress.

The leaders say they are mortally disappointed by Biden and Trump, and they are determined to offer a third-party alternative.

in 2016,

Trump promised

to be a break from the antiquated version of conservatism that had previously dominated the GOP, the group’s founder, former Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson, wrote last year. Likewise in 2020,

Biden voted

to lead Democrats away from their activist base and toward unity.

“yet” b

other presidents eventually largely succumbed to their supporters at the various extremes

,

she said.

Jacobson’s big idea is to put a new party on the ballot and nominate a bipartisan ticket elected from the center, like Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat and former head of government. Larry Hogan, a Republican from Maryland who have both spoken to No Labels and have not ruled out running.

Jacobson, who once worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, says he raised and received $ 70 million

a ticket

on the ballot in all 50 states. No Labels has already qualified as a party in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Alaska.

In a three-way race, she noted, a candidate doesn’t need a majority to win a state’s electoral vote. All you need is 34%, she said.

This is a uniquely American moment, she told me last week. Can you imagine a Democrat and a Republican walking arm in arm down Pennsylvania Avenue?

It’s an attractive image, even if the walking heroes are the less than charismatic Manchin and Hogan. What could go wrong?

Enough, warn concerned Democrats.

For starters, history strongly suggests that a third party cannot win, because it never did. The closest it ever came was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, at 27%. The unintended result: He split the Republican vote and delivered the White House to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. More recently, Ross Perot managed to win 19% in 1992. No one else came close. The lesson: 34% is harder than it looks.

That means a third-party ticket would almost certainly be a spoiler, with just enough votes from one of the two majors

–

party candidates to tip the outcome. That’s probably what happened in 2000, when Gore lost the deciding state of Florida to George W. Bush by 537 votes. (Ralph Nader was a third party candidate.) And in 2016, when Hillary Clinton left Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with less than

1%

. (Green Party candidate Jill Stein was the wild card at the time.)

The 2024 presidential election promises to be close; Polls show that Biden and Trump were evenly matched. Of course, early polls are not predictive, but five of the last six presidential elections have been won by margins

by

less than 5%. There is no reason to expect this

will would

be different.

Democrats worry that Biden voters will be less committed and more likely to drift to a third party than Trump supporters.

According to the NBC Poll:

a

Nearly 70% of Republican voters said they are determined to vote for Trump no matter how many charges he faces.

A third party would likely get more votes from Biden than from Trump, said William A. Galston, a former Clinton aide who worked with No Labels for a decade but split from the group over his presidential project.

Many Republicans agree, although they are less vocal about it. A third-party candidate like Manchin would most likely help Trump, Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, recently wrote.

The main problem with Jacobson’s view is more fundamental: the choice between Biden and Trump is not just a coin flip between alternative policies. Trump has publicly proposed ending parts of the Constitution that stand in his way. Biden, regardless of his flaws, is committed to preserving our basic institutions.

There is no equality between President Biden and a former president who threatens the survival of our constitutional order, Galston said. The risks of a second Trump presidency are simply too great to take chances.

Jacobson says No Labels is alert to those dangers and will not nominate a candidate unless there is a clear path to victory.

We are determined that this experiment will not spoil the election, she said. When it looks like it’s going to spoil, there are exits. This means that No Labels can withdraw from the race.

This is an insurance policy, she added. What happens if something happens to Biden?

But off ramps don’t always stay open. Once a party is on the ballot, it may not be easy to take it off.

A third-party centrist ticket might sound appealing in theory. In practice, it looks less like an insurance policy and more like a landmine.