A bipartisan group of former national lawmakers is warning No Labels off its third-party unity ticket campaign, arguing that it could send the 2024 election to the Republican-led House of Representatives for a vote.
Many legislators and political groups are worried about the possibility of a “contingent election” in the event that no presidential candidate receives a majority. A contingent election is sent to the House for a special vote to select the president, while the Senate elects the vice president.
Given that Republicans hold a delegation advantage in the lower chamber, Democratic lawmakers and groups such as Third Way have warned that a contingent election will all but ensure the election of former President Donald Trump.
In a recent letter to No Labels, former Sens. Doug Jones, a Democrat, and Jack Danforth, a Republican, as well as former Democratic House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, told the group that the election process could get messy if it continued down its path of seeking ballot access in all 50 states.
“A No Labels presidential ticket could produce a constitutional crisis by triggering a ‘contingent election,'” they wrote in a letter obtained by Axios. “Because the procedures are not set in the Constitution, the party with a narrow majority in the House at the start of the 119th Congress could, no doubt, adopt biased rules that advantage their favored candidate — even if the voters clearly preferred someone else.”
“A contingent election would be calamitous,” the former lawmakers added.
There have been very few instances of contingent elections in United States history. In 1824, the House determined the presidential election and elected John Quincy Adams, and in 1837, the Senate selected the vice presidential winner as Richard Mentor Johnson. However, those elections were not due to a third party but rather the inability to secure a majority in Adams’s case and the lack of support from electors in Johnson’s case.
Third-party campaigns have not had much success in preventing a deadlock of electoral votes. Votes garnered from Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948 and American Independent candidate George Wallace in 1968 did not prevent Harry Truman or Richard Nixon from securing a majority in the Electoral College.
The 2024 election is shaping up to be a 2020 rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden, a contest that a majority of voters have expressed they do not want. No Labels plans to make an announcement on whether to launch a unity presidential ticket to combat the incumbent and former president by the middle of March.
However, No Labels has repeatedly said its participation in 2024 is tied to who the nominees are and that it would drop its unity ticket bid if it did not see a path to victory.
“This ballot access campaign that we launched two years ago, it’s something that we’ve said from the beginning: We’re doing only for one office and for this one election,” No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy told the Washington Examiner over the weekend. “And if No Labels ends up putting up a unity ticket, it’s not going to help fund or run a campaign. That would be the responsibility of the campaign itself.”
The group has achieved ballot access in at least 14 states, and Clancy said No Labels expects to be on the ballot in 32 states by the 2024 election. He said the group is confident a unity ticket would be able to compete in all 50 states.
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No Labels remains undeterred despite facing an onslaught of legal challenges from Democratic-aligned groups accusing the organization of abusing its nonprofit status and violating campaign finance laws, which legal counsels for No Labels have called “baseless” with no merit and dangerous to voters.
“Ultimately, the victim is not just No Labels. It’s the voters who are being deprived of the ability to vote for the candidate of their choice and to have a — you know, being able to have something different of a choice than just the candidates for the two leading parties,” lawyer Brad Schlozman said in an interview over the weekend.
