Here’s Who No Labels Should Actually Nominate

Shortly before I finished college, I went to see a campus speaker representing a group that was trying to foster a third-party campaign for the presidency. This was during the 2008 election and the organization, a hyped-up entity known as Unity08, looked like a political vehicle for my hometown mayor, New York City’s Mike Bloomberg.

But I didn’t go to the event because I was fired up about Unity08 or Bloomberg. I went because the Unity08 pitchman was the actor Sam Waterston and I love Law & Order.

The content of his presentation didn’t stay with me. I vaguely recall asking a question and finding his answer unsatisfying. What I remember is meeting District Attorney Jack McCoy.

There is a lesson here for No Labels.

The heavily promoted centrist group has been trying for many months to concoct a third-party ticket for the White House. It has gathered up funding, hired consultants and secured ballot access in a number of swing states. It has driven Democrats mad with anxiety about the potential for an independent centrist who could draw votes away from President Joe Biden.

What No Labels doesn’t have is a presidential nominee. It is running out of time to find a willing figurehead before key state filing deadlines pass.

The core of the problem is that its whole theory of candidate recruitment is defective. It is looking for political insurgents in all the wrong places.

Chris Christie on Wednesday became the latest person to rebuff No Labels. But before him came a long parade of prominent politicians (Joe Manchin, Mitt Romney, Larry Hogan) and not-so-prominent ones (Geoff Duncan, a one-term lieutenant governor of Georgia; Will Hurd, who ran a dead-on-arrival campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.) Overtures to Nikki Haley went nowhere.

But if one of these people had said yes, they would still have been doomed in the presidential race. Enlisting a conventional politician with mainstream views is no way to upend the basic structure of American politics.

The evidence from the United States and around the world is overwhelming on this point. The most successful political disrupters are flamboyantly different in their style, ideas or both.

They are famous entertainers and athletes, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine and Imran Khan in Pakistan. They wear showy hairstyles, like Javier Milei in Argentina, Beppe Grillo in Italy and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. They have Olympian egos that they make no effort to conceal, like Emmanuel Macron in France and, well, basically all of the above.

Most of them look and sound more like Donald Trump or Ross Perot — the voluble Texas tycoon who in 1992 ran the most successful third-party campaign in American history — than anyone we know of on the No Labels wish list. The fringe-friendly Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his new running mate, wealthy tech lawyer Nicole Shanahan, come closer to the mark.

Against the global roster of successful political insurgents, the No Labels fantasy ticket of Manchin and Romney looks bloodless and gray: two cautious men from political families who have been in the electoral arena, as candidates or officeholders, for 70-some years combined. Both are accomplished leaders. Neither can deliver a body blow to the two-party system.

No Labels would be better off nominating someone like Sam Waterston. An incorruptible TV crime fighter, even a fictional one, has more magnetic power than the real-life former chair of the Senate Energy Committee.

Bill Hillsman, the veteran political strategist who helped make pro wrestler Jesse Ventura the independent governor of Minnesota, told me the No Labels strategy was “misconstrued from the beginning.” Few voters, he said, would see a unity ticket forged from within the political establishment as an answer for their grievances with the system.

“I don’t know who’s really looking for a ticket that has a Republican and a Democrat on it, if Democrats and Republicans are the problem,” Hillsman said. “If you’re a voter out there looking for more and different choices, that doesn’t sound like a real good idea.”

Hillsman said he was not so sure the Argentina-Italy-Ukraine model of political insurgency would work in America, where the two-party system is far stronger and the powers of the presidency are different. But his judgment on the No Labels model was categorical.

“I don’t understand what No Labels is trying to do,” he said, “but I know that it’s not going to work.”

My point here is not to belittle No Labels. That is an empty exercise. Whatever else there is to say about the group, it has a formidable tolerance for ridicule.

Instead, I have three alternative candidates to propose — if not for this election then for the next one, and if not for No Labels then for the next group to try this scheme. It will happen again; the basic idea has not really evolved since the days of Unity08.

The first is Ramit Sethi, the financial self-help guru, newish Netflix star and bestselling author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich. The 41-year-old is not yet a mega-celebrity in the Trump mold, but he is lively, telegenic, increasingly ubiquitous and thoroughly branded as an authority on the close-to-home checkbook issues that are most important to most voters.

The cost of living is likely to remain a dominant issue in American politics for the foreseeable future. It is not too difficult to imagine Sethi in a few years as the American version of Martin Lewis, the British TV presenter and personal finance expert who shows up in polls and focus groups as some U.K. voters’ fantasy prime minister.

A second more-credible-than-Manchin option is Dave Chappelle. As Biden would say: not a joke. The comedian got a taste of the culture wars and liked it enough to keep at it. A former Andrew Yang supporter, Chappelle has an eclectic ideological profile and a developed sensibility about the grievances that animate a range of disaffected Americans, including what he calls “the poor whites” who vote for Trump. (“I’ve never seen a white male billionaire screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘This whole system is rigged,’” Chappelle told a Saturday Night Live audience in 2016. Trump, he explained, was “an honest liar.”)

Is Chappelle weird and controversial? Yes and yes. Has that been an obstacle to entertainers in other countries? It has been an obvious advantage. Would Americans really elect someone who tells stories about hanging out with strippers, mocks trans people and people with disabilities, offends Jewish voters and makes excuses for Bill Cosby? Check who’s currently leading in the 2024 election.

Third, last and best is one of the most accomplished comedic actors of our time, a genius of the screen who is instantly recognizable to every American of voting age. Like Zelenskyy, she even played the president in a TV satire. More memorably, she played the vice president.

I mean Julia Louis-Dreyfus — America’s Zelenskyy.

As Veep’s Selina Meyer, she rendered the absurdity and corruption of our politics more convincingly than any lectern-thumping populist. She emceed parts of the 2020 Democratic convention, mingling earnest pro-Biden sentiment with banter and snark that made party strategists uncomfortable.

As an active Democrat, Louis-Dreyfus has no reason to run for anything as an independent; like Sethi and Chappelle, she has shown no interest in running for office at all. But in a future scenario where the Democratic Party lost its head and nominated someone extreme, perhaps she could run with a third party and resurrect the Meyer campaign’s reassuring slogan: Continuity With Change.

There is no one better suited to offer this country some new beginnings.