“We can just rig our own poll to make it look as shit as possible…”
“Block signature-gathering…”
“Make [them] seem like they might be totally crazy/right-wing wackos to mid-low-info voters…”
“Hijacking their ballot line and pushing extremist candidates to muddy [their] brand…”
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above quotes are just a few excerpts from incredible documents made public after a long court fight. Details of a plan to “shun,” “stigmatize,” and “destroy” the third party No Labels suggest a Rosetta Stone of corruption, showing groups aligned with the Democratic Party using dirty tricks and elaborate fakery to attack anyone in their electoral path, all while presenting themselves as “pro-democracy” forces.
When filed a year ago on December 4, 2023, No Labels vs. No Labels seemed a picayune trademark dispute. It concerned No Labels, a political alternative founded in 2010 by longtime Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and backed by since-passed former Senator Joe Lieberman. Armed with $70 million and plans for “nationwide” ballot access, No Labels was whispered about early in the cycle as a potentially serious threat to the Democrats’ election chances, especially in a race with widespread diffidence regarding the two likely nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal article about them from July 2023 was headlined, “A Mysteriously Financed Group That Could Upend a Biden-Trump Rematch.”
The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a “looming forest fire” that would be a “nuclear grade threat” if it nominated a candidate and reached a “live campaign environment.”
To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of “brand destruction,” using “controlled burns” to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be “burned to the fucking ground politically.”
Key No Labels figures knew there was an organized effort to oppose their run, but didn’t start to learn how organized until filing the trademark lawsuit last December. The case seemed more like a matter of trolling than corruption at first. The actual No Labels website, located at nolabels.org, was suing an irksome imitator who’d bought and begun to use the domain nolabels.com. The mystery doppelganger used the same black banner, same font, same yellow oval signup button, even some of the same language, like the slogan “Commonsense Majority”:
LIVE OR MEMOREX? Left, the real No Labels. Right, a rebranded imitator
But there were differences. The actual No Labels was and is more of a centrist pushback against both parties. Its leading voices included Lieberman and former NAACP chief Ben Chavis, who together that year published “Donald Trump Must Never Again Be President” on the real No Labels site. The imitator, meanwhile, prominently featured a photo of Trump and identified TikTok phenomenon Tyson Draper as a “No Labels Senate Candidate,” even though No Labels was not supporting congressional candidates. The Delaware suit accused the imitator site of “deceiving the public” and “sowing confusion about what No Labels stands for,” and sought emergency relief.
Right after that filing, on December 19th last year, Semafor published details of an 80-minute conference call between Democratic Party-aligned activist groups. Attendees included the aforementioned Mehlhorn, prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol, and representatives of Third Way, Move On, and “the Lincoln Project, American Bridge, Public Citizen, and Reproductive Freedom for All.” The piece said attendees agreed on an all-out strategy to stop the No Labels bid by sending the chilling message:
If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it… We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, we should have, and we will not make that mistake again.
Former Emily’s List chief Emily Kane, now of Third Way, wrote a letter after the discussion reported on by Semafor, summing up the conclusions of what she called, in the subject line, the “Anti-No-Labels Coalition meeting.” Notably acknowledging they were indeed “working together as a broad coalition” to “fight the anti-democratic operation that is No Labels,” it added without irony that this fight for democracy should also include “deterring other third party presidential efforts.” Groups identifying themselves as “pro-democracy folks” saw no contradiction in an organized effort to prevent people other than their candidate from participating in elections.
Fighting “anti-democratic” forces by “deterring other third-party presidential efforts.”
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Openly talking about “deterring” other candidacies on principle, or stopping a third party from “successfully signature gathering” (as they did in a different memo), is striking given the Democrats’ stance on other voting access issues.
“If you look at the actual law, federal and state law, ballot access has the same kinds of legal protections as voter registration,” says Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels. “So in other words, the law sees it as equally serious if you’re preventing somebody from being registered to vote as they do preventing somebody trying to get on the ballot.”
Shortly after, on January 11th, 2024, No Labels — not aware yet that an “Anti-No-Labels Coalition” existed on paper — took the step of sending a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the activities of its opponents, highlighting a list of bizarre obstruction efforts like the fake site. Another episode involved a serving official, Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Bellows at the time had just made national headlines by declaring Donald Trump an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible for the ballot in her state (she would later be reversed by the Supreme Court). Bellows, like Emily Kane a Maine Democrat, took an extraordinary step in May 2023. She wrote to 6,500 Maine residents registered for No Labels, essentially to ask are you sure: “If you did not intend to enroll in the No Labels Party,” she wrote, “please be aware that you can change back”:
ARE YOU SURE? Letter by Maine Secretary of State Shauna Bellows to Maine residents who registered with No Labels
The No Labels letter to the DOJ went unanswered, and from there, the effort ran into one problem after another. On January 16th Lieberman sent a letter to his old friend from his Senate days, Joe Biden, asking him “respectfully… to help put an end to this shameful attempt to silence voters.” That letter too went unanswered. Two days later, news broke that American Bridge hired former Hillary Clinton attorney Marc Elias to help “thwart” third-party candidacies.
Lieberman, the former running mate of Al Gore, died on March 27th. Former New Jersey governor and rumored potential nominee Chris Christie announced the next day he would not seek a No Labels nomination. A week later, amid much snickering in the Beltway, No Labels quietly announced it would not field a candidate in 2024. Members of the “Anti-No-Labels” coalition did an end zone dance and reoriented to new targets. “Good Riddance,” sneered End Citizens United. “Next up, RFK,” chortled Wilson.
“Once we backed out, it’s like, all right, let’s go kill off Bobby Kennedy,” said No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy. “Some of these same people before were saying, let’s go kill off Dean Phillips.”
Forgetting about the dubious ethics and legality of using the courts and trickery like fake sites to stop opponents, the Democrats by spring had loudly advertised efforts to block ballot access not just for No Labels but for Kennedy, Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Trump, i.e. every candidate they faced in an election in the last cycle. Was this smart? Theresa Amato, the former campaign manager for Ralph Nader and author of a book about an earlier generation of eerily similar schemes called Grand Illusion, doesn’t think so.
“Scapegoating isn’t a successful election strategy,” Amato said. “You shouldn’t be trying to eliminate the competition instead of winning the hearts and minds of the future voters. But that’s the way it’s played out the last 20 years.”
