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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.