The Hub, a newsletter published by Independent Voting, interviewed the organization’s president, Jackie Salit, following No Labels' decision to end its 2024 presidential campaign.
The Hub: A year ago, No Labels announced a plan to create independent lines on the 2024 presidential ballot in all 50 states for a yet-to-be-named unity ticket. This was billed as an “insurance policy” in the event both major parties nominated presidential candidates that most Americans didn't want. The announcement, coupled with polling and predictions of a path to victory with 270 electoral college votes, immediately met with backlash inside the Beltway, especially in Democratic Party and anti-Trump Republican circles. Meanwhile, the search for a presidential ticket foundered. No unity candidates of stature would sign on to run. Then, on April 4, No Labels announced it would not run a ticket in the 2024 presidential election. Many in our network have been asking about this. Jackie, your thoughts about what happened and why they abandoned their plan.
Salit: I'm going to give you my best answer, but I’m not an insider at No Labels. I can only share what it looks like to me from the outside. But maybe that’s useful since the No Labels drama rests on a plot line where political insiders decided to go “outside,” and then suddenly there was a giant target on their back.
The Hub: Sounds like quite a drama
Salit: Drama, indeed. So, there are a few levels here. There’s the public presentation of what the No Labels objective was. And then there's a subtext. As you know, I'm a playwright and a would-be novelist. Subtext is something you pay a lot of attention to. At least on the stage and on the page.
I'll start with the text. No Labels was launched in 2010 to stand up a bipartisan governing coalition. This Problem Solvers Caucus in Congress would draw ideas and solutions and compromises from across the spectrum without regard to party. Then, coming into the 2024 presidential cycle, a circle of No Labels leaders and donors saw that the two legacy major parties were likely to nominate Trump and Biden, a re-match that most Americans did not want. So, they set out to offer an alternative, a Unity ticket, a sensible Republican, and a sensible Democrat, that could run up the center of American politics and win the election. They were not running to build a new party, or any kind of new institution, they just wanted to fix the old ones, a kind of shock-therapy for the two parties. They raised a lot of money, in cash and in pledges, and began executing the plan, acquiring ballot lines on which they could place this imagined, if not imaginary ( as it turned out), ticket on the ballot. So that's the text.
The subtext is more nuanced. Here's the subtext. Trump, under no circumstances. Biden, maybe, but only if he turns away from the left wing of the Democratic Party. Put another (subtextual) way, We don’t want Trump, he’s too crazy and even dangerous, but we’re worried about the left-wing of the Democratic Party. From Bernie, to Warren, to AOC, etc. They’re socialists, but they’re popular and they hold a lot of sway at the base of the party. So maybe, the No Labels crowd says to each other, we can wave the independent flag and scare Biden into backing away from the Left and pressure the Left into standing down from making any demands on Biden. After all, Trump is the devil incarnate, and nobody wants to see the devil in the White House.
Under normal circumstances, that subtextual strategy could be effective in achieving No Labels’ centrist objective. It’s an old playbook, after all. Watch the new Netflix movie about Shirley Chisholm’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. She was muscled into releasing her convention delegates to line up behind the party’s pick – Senator George McGovern – on the grounds that Richard Nixon was the “devil incarnate.” Or recall how Jesse Jackson’s threat of an independent bolt from the San Francisco Democratic convention in 1984 had to be quashed on the grounds that Ronald Reagan was the “Devil incarnate” and everyone had to line up behind Walter Mondale. Footnote, lest we forget: Nixon crushed McGovern and Reagan beat Mondale handily.
The catch now is that these aren’t normal times. The “Devil incarnate,” aka Donald Trump has the Republican Party by the throat. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters of color, young voters, and white working-class voters. Independent voters broke for Trump by a small margin in 2016 and then for Biden by a huge margin, 13 points nationally, in 2020. In this cycle so far, independents are split, and many independents are disillusioned with Biden. They gave him the presidency in 2020, but they’re not sure they want to do that again. Given how close the election is likely to be, Biden can’t afford to turn his back on the party’s progressive wing, he’s got to have those leaders on board the re-election campaign to defeat Trump. And we know that Democratic Party heavyweights, including at least one former U.S. president, delivered that message loud and clear to anyone who was on the No Labels wish list.
So, the subtextual objective of forcing Biden to repudiate the party’s left wing, as Bill Clinton essentially did in 1992, became difficult to achieve. Meanwhile, the main objective came under heavy fire. No Labels simply couldn't recruit a ticket. None of the hoped-for standard bearers would step up. No Labels is clear in its public statements as to why. The pressure from the Beltway was too great.
The Hub: What about the grassroots, the folks that No Labels had inspired to go down an independent path?
Salit: One of the most interesting moments in the whole process, for me, was the Convention No Labels held after Super Tuesday when Trump and Biden became the unofficial nominees. Even though the window for finding a ticket was closing, the delegates voted to continue the work of putting together a ticket. They didn’t want to stop the fight to challenge the dominance of the two legacy parties. No Labels had opened a Pandora’s Box.
I think the original plan of the No Labels leadership was to open the Pandora's Box and then have the Unity ticket control and manage what got opened up, to make sure that the base stayed within the confines of No Labels’ centrist save-the-two-parties-from-themselves trajectory. Whoops! They opened Pandora’s Box, but then they couldn't produce the ticket. In some ways, that's a snapshot of the state of our country right now. The Pandora's Box is opening, but now that it’s been opened, it’s an open question as to where it goes. Just look at the numbers of people who identify themselves as independents. Gallup has the number between 41 and 45%. The Pew Research Center and the New York Times are trying to persuade the public (and themselves) that the true number of independents is really very small because they “lean” one way or the other. But as the research I’ve done with Dr. Thom Reilly at our ASU Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy shows, the leaner methodology doesn’t hold up. Independents are very fluid in their voting patterns over time. They vote situationally, not out of party loyalty. The country is going independent at the voter level, but the political parties are fighting that tooth and nail.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.