Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
Jim Messina, who ran President Barack Obama's re-election campaign and served as deputy chief of staff in the White House, is the latest Democrat to argue that a No Labels “unity ticket” would lead to a Donald Trump victory because a ticket featuring a Republican and a Democrat would siphon votes from the President Joe Biden. I am not aware of anyone who has brought forward as much impressive data as Messina did in his recent Politico Magazine article to show why third party candidates have never won a U.S. presidential election.
Messina is probably right. If Trump and Biden win their respective parties’ nomination and a No Labels ticket is on the ballot, then Trump probably wins. The key word is "probably." Most arguments about the future are inductive in nature. If you take 99 beans out of a bucket containing 100 beans and all 99 are green, you would be wise to bet a lot of money that the remaining bean is green.
Inductive arguments build up evidence of the observed from which inferences to the unobserved can be made. The stronger the evidence, the stronger the inference will be. You can never infer a conclusion that "must" be true. That is the way deductive arguments work.
In deductive reasoning, an argument is valid if the conclusion follows logically from the premises, and it is sound if it is both valid and the premises are true. When you argue “all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal,” you have given a sound deductive argument. Your reasoning is valid, your premises are true and your inference therefore gets you to a conclusion that must be true.
Messina runs a strong inductive argument. He really is giving an analogical inductive argument. He is saying that our political situation today is similar to the political situation of every presidential race, including those where George Wallace, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein ran third-party campaigns. He argues that third-party candidates always lose big because the Electoral College system makes it nearly impossible for them to win states – only Wallace has won states in fact.
Messina’s reasoning indicates that even if a No Labels ticket can get 35 percent of the overall votes, it will not be clustered in a way to win 270 Electoral Votes; and if no one got to 270, Messina would presumably say, the House of Representatives would pick the nominee of majority’s party and not a third-party candidate.
This is the fundamental question for Messina and others: Are the political and social conditions in America today sufficiently analogous to every previous presidential election year to argue that a third-party ticket has virtually no chance of winning?
In an analogical argument, you say that Object X and Y are similar in having properties a, b, c and d. Object X has property e. Thus, Object Y also has property e. In our case, Object X would be previous third-party candidates and Object Y would be the No Labels unity ticket. The relevant properties are: running in a presidential race, the Electoral College system determines how to count the votes, a two-party system dominates politics and both parties have considerable respect, and the public is not severely polarized. Property e represents losing the presidential race.
The question is whether Object Y, the No Labels ticket, is really running in a race with properties c and d. Given both the low regard both major parties have in public opinion polls, and given the threat to our democracy of a Trump presidency felt by over half of the public and which is a major cause of polarization, it could be argued that the political and social conditions are not similar to the political and social conditions when previous third-party candidates ran. Thus the inference to e (the third-party candidate will lose) is not strong.
Perhaps enough Democrats and Republicans would vote for a No Labels unity ticket, particularly Democrats, Republicans and independents who were not planning to vote at all. When the world changes it frequently does because situations in the present are not analogous to situations in the past.
Are we at such a point? No one really knows the answer to this question. Yet it is just as important to try to answer this question as it is to gather the data Messina has gathered to argue that Trump would win the election if there is a No Labels unity ticket.
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.