Said Dan Webb, a No Labels volunteer legal adviser, quoted in "No Labels goes after opponents of third-party presidential bid in court/Clowns, early-morning noise and mobile billboards in the Georgetown area of D.C. are among the proposed tactics revealed in subpoenas" (WaPo)(free-access link).
The headline fails to specify that the "opponents" in question were Democrats, but it's in the text of the piece: "Leaders of the centrist group No Labels abandoned a planned third-party presidential bid in April after a successful campaign by Democratic allies of President Joe Biden damaged their public appeal and undermined their ability to recruit electable candidates."
The "mobile billboards" connected the leaders of No Labels to Donald Trump using the slogan: "There is no place for MAGA hate in Georgetown."
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62 comments:
…at least they didn’t try to kill you by relaxing security and massaging a patsy…
I’m all for them trying to destroy each other but despite some defiant words from kooky mayors where are the clowns and the mass protests and the defiance this morning? It’s been three weeks. Are they still shocked they lost?
Dan Webb is the Chicago Machine's loyal opposition. Yes, he was a Republican-appointed US Atty for NDIL, but you don't get that job unless the Dem Senator from IL thinks you're harmless to the people on top of the Machine. I would expect that this case goes nowhere important.
JSM
Third party candidates are spoilers gaming the system, nevertheless. So they're not exactly pro-democracy since they change the (otherwise) democratic winner.
“ She suggested using “allies connected in media/etc.” to try to obtain a complete set of No Labels polling; placing op-eds against No Labels; and organizing moderate politicians and regular voters to reject the effort.”
Now why would the Dems think the media would comply? Maybe experience?
The more interesting thing to me would be a lawsuit about how the Dems kept Bobby out of the Dem primaries. More interesting than that would be a lawsuit to find out how the Dems stole the 2020 election.
Americans need to realize that the Democrat party is run like the Mafia.
From the WaPo comments, “ Think about what upheaval this country is facing with the pathology of the incoming administration.”
Ignorant of basic politics? No one told them to read Machiavelli?
Conventional wisdom:
* All is fair in love and war
* Politics makes for strange bedfellows
* Wolves come in sheep's clothing
* If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen
Etc.
That allied media thing worked on lots of seemingly normal people for a long time for some really dangerous and catastrophic ideas. While we’re still spreading blame, those people who were so easily seduced and duped need to atone…
…really looking forward to it.
I see what you're saying, they are essentially non-binary
Long overdue
I recall the Post readers (and its journalists) being all for change and upheaval back in 2008 and 2012.
Can we just start calling it the “Anti-Democratic Party”? Truth in advertising and all that, you know
The headline fails to specify that the "opponents" in question were Democrats
Every person who pays attention to political event in the US knew immediately that the opponents were Democrats. Which, sadly, means most Democrats thought it meant Republicans.
If Trump lost the popular vote, I think we’d see the usual post-election lunacy. That really took the wind out of their sails.
Nothing in the Constitution requires limiting the candidate pool to only two parties. Running as a 3rd party is not "gaming" anything.
This “hate” business is ludicrous in its seeming insistent that there is some group or faction that does not experience hatred. Hatred is a normal human emotion. Every person experiences it at times. There is no political ideology or religion that rids humans of this emotion. The best we can do is to recognize it and pray to overcome it, even when the object of our hatred seems to deserve it.
To also stress a point- the incoming made no attempts to hide how bipartisan the cabinet was going to be. These are people you kicked out. Maybe you should have listened…
No, it's gaming. There's no expectation of a win, just a desire to split the vote that you actually oppose so as to get the 2nd place vote into the winning position.
Third party candidates are fine. The SNP in the UK were fringe, until suddenly they weren't. Same goes for UKIP and Reform in the UK, and FN in France and AfD in Germany. Existing parties hate you, but their existence forces existing parties to listen to voters, with any luck. I despise Green parties, but they've moved from fringe to forcing parties to take their concerns seriously. And that's a good thing. Did Jill Stein cost Hillary Wisconsin? Maybe they wouldn't have turned up at all if she hadn't been on the ballot.
In the various analyses of how Kamala lost, this lawfare on who can be on the ballot played a huge role. Even other Democrats know what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Putting Kamala at the top of the ticket and then blocking others, left many with no other choice than to endorse the DNC playbook or rejecting it by voting against it.
Doing all that put a lie to the claim Trump was a threat to Democracy.
Yep, Every day.
Actually, I would assert that the 2024 election was in fact won by a third party. The MAGA Party. Trump is really neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and he took over the apparatus of the Republican Party by forcing out the former kingpins of the RNC, replacing them with his loyalists, worked tirelessly to defeat and block various Senators and Representatives who previously conspired against him, and ultimately attracted and formed a new coalition of voters that were never reliable Republican voters.
If you look at his nominations for Cabinet and other key positions, they're not your typical Republicans. In fact, they include notable national Democrats, independents, and even a union-supported Labor official. No, this will not be a Republican administration. It's the first MAGA administration.
Its a fusion faction
Were the Dems afraid they would lose GEORGETOWN?
Seems like voters were looking for upheaval this time around, even if it didn't bring all of them to vote Trump - over 70% thought the country was headed in the wrong direction just before the election.
Then you get the opposite of keeping third party candidates off the ballot. You get the liberal female WI Supreme Court who wouldn't let RFK Jr OFF the ballot when he requested.
“There's no expectation of a win, just a desire to split the vote that you actually oppose so as to get the 2nd place vote into the winning position.”
Not necessarily.
There may be a desire to tell both parties: “Look. I vote. I’m a reliable voter but And I’m unhappy with both my choices.”
That was the motivation (Ithink) behind the Perot voters. And maybe another successful businessman saw the support for Perot and began thinking about his own run for President 30 years later.
The UK has a parliamentary system - many parties with enough in common coalesce to form a government for as long as the coalition lasts in spite of various frictions. We don't. There's no coalition, the winner takes all, for four years.
Clinton won as a result.
I think the fishiest thing about Tammy Baldwin's Senate victory is that a third and fourth party got votes. Generally the Dems would only allow this if the "others" would hurt Republicans.
"“Our main focus should be brand destruction but, where possible, we also need to throw up any and all roadblocks to stop them from being successful at signature-gathering,” Lucy Caldwell, one of the anti-No Labels strategists, wrote in a document uncovered during the legal battle."
I hope they are granted discovery as wide and deep as the ocean. Dirty dealing has been part of the Progressive Democrat playbook for so long, it's become indelibly imprinted on their political DNA. They can't help themselves from playing dirty, even if a gun were to their head.
I overheard a story last night about a subgroup of Air BNB property holders, that are trying to organize to deny housing to any Republican daring to come to WDC to celebrate the inauguration. The scheme is to remove short term rentals from any GOP celebrant, or alternatively, to drive the price as high as possible through collusion between owners. Resistance !
Of course, Air BNB has stated this is a violation of policy (wink wink). But in a larger sense: Who does this? The inauguration is one day. Do you then expect the same people to come to you over the next 4 years with their business? I can easily see a GOP group banding together to make a list.......
“Clinton won as a result.”
Michael Medved said on his radio show all those years ago (speaking about Perot) that if you want to run as a third party candidate - first convince one of the 2 parties that you should be their candidate. His reasoning was - if you can’t win the support of one of the 2 parties how do you think you’re going to win the support of the whole country. That’s the path Trump followed.
(Although Medved was an antiTrumper on Trump’s first run. I don’t know who he supported in 2024.)
It's a running joke that an article that makes the Democrats look bad will hide the party affiliations as long as possible.
Not even close to the fishiest thing. A 4AM ballot dump in Milwaukee is
"Pathology..." Doctor, heal thyself.
That was true in 2016, when President Trump was opposed by all of the Democrats and the establishment Republicans. Like any third-party candidate, he didn't have an organization to fill 10,000 vacancies with MAGA people. He used Republicans, and got screwed over by some of them.
By 2024, he had captured the Republican Party. That may be how a third party has to work.
The democratic/dictatorial duality. #HateLovesAbortion
I suspect Joe Scarborough, who has been hawking 'no labels' for a few years now, had more to do with its lack of national appeal than any billboards around DC.
Didn't RFK Jr. assert the same thing? He and Shanahan claimed the RNC used every legal weapon available to keep them off the ballot in several states. Then, when he stepped away from the race, they fought to keep him ON in battleground states.
DNC...
No Labels is lying quite a bit here- they weren't forced out of the race by the Democrats even though the Democrats were the ones putting up the road-blocks. The entire purpose of No Labels was to split the vote on the right but they were ignoring an iron law of politics- third party runs always damage the incumbent party no matter what the ideology of the 3rd party candidate is. When they realized that any candidate they put up would draw off support for the Democrats, then and only then did they abandon their effort.
I am old enough to remember how the media were certain that John Anderson's candidacy was going to save Jimmy Carter and the country from Ronald Reagan- but the reality was that Anderson's presence on the ballot allowed Reagan to win states like Massachusetts and New York.
Medved voted for Harris this election.
An example of a successful third party run was the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota in 1998. The secret of his success is that the DFL and Republican candidates, Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman, were so awful.
No Labels is just NeverTrump. They won't fight. They won't stand up to the tactics of the left. They are folks who have been well served by the system and they don't want to risk or change that. Their campaign slogan says, "Eat me last...no, wait...eat my kids."
The tactics No Labels is suing over are nothing compared to what was done to Trump, but these people don't give a shit about "protecting democracy" when it comes to all that. In fact, they approve.
Discovery works both ways. A lot to learn about No Labels.
Yes, good old mr "show me the man, I will show you the crime"
What "system" Where is this established "system" codified? Did you vote for the "system"? Why should I give a shit about the imaginary "system" that only exists in your head and the heads of the Democrat party?
In California, the Democrat's have, effectively, eliminated third parties from being on the final ballot. They changed the primary system so that, instead of the top vote getter in each party advancing to the final ballot, the two candidates who get the most votes advance to the final ballot. Not only has that locked third parties out, often we find that we can only choose between two Democrat candidates for a particular state office on the final ballot.
"So they're not exactly pro-democracy ..."
That's exactly how democracy is supposed to work. A third party candidate siphoning votes away from another party's candidate is how the system works.
It's not just "No Labels." It's every third party that is a threat to the Dems. You do know by now that Trump would have won Wisconsin in 2020 if the Dems didn't get the Greens kicked off the ballot (on a technicality)? Look it up: the vote counts for the Greens in 2016 and compare to the differential in 2020.
This time around the Dems attacked the Greens, RFK Jr., and Cornell West. Whether you like No Labels or not (I know nothing about them), manipulating ballot access is the MO of the Democrat party.
No labels is the plaintiff. File a civil complaint, produce your documents and produce your employees for deposition
What "4 AM" ballot dump? Citation? What did the Republican observers who were there do about it? Why didn't they go to court to challenge those ballots? Do you understand how any of this works? If there were not observers, why not? Did the observers go to bed? I haven't heard a single thing about this so show citations please.
As one of those who voted for Jesse in 1998 (my first general election voting), it wasn't quite that they were awful, it was that they were also as inoffensively milquetoast as could be for major-party candidates. Republican-leaning independents weren't so repelled by Skip that they felt a need to vote for Norm just to keep Skip out of power, and vice-versa for the Democrat-leaning independents (which would have included me at the time). At least in large enough numbers that they could risk voting for Jesse to give the establishment the middle finger.
If Skip had been an unreformed former Communist and if Norm had been Pat Buchanan's heir, Jesse wouldn't have had a chance.
Arrow's theorem (there can be no satisfactory voting system) ranks it as a flaw in this particular system. One of the things that can happen that a fair system would not allow.
It's the WaPo, Dave. High school kids are so dramatic.
Oops. You're right!
He wasn't a 3rd party candidate at first. That wasn't the plan. He was a candidate in the Democrat primary, just like uncle Ted back in 1980. The Democrat primary was a fucking joke. It was fixed in advance for Biden. They made it impossible for Kennedy to compete within their alleged "democratic" primary. They didn't want the Democrat voters to have a say in regard to who was a better nominee, Biden or Kennedy. (Obama ran for the Senate in the same way, by removing opponents from the ballot). The Democrat party's move to make it impossible to vote for opposition is utterly anti-democratic and fascist. (See also the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot in Colorado). They operate like a one-party state and it is that fascist and ugly truth that turned Bobby Kennedy into a Republican. Wake the fuck up.
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