Jan. 29, 2024
Lee Drutman was quoted in The Atlantic about No Labels.
But primaries do provide some public input in addition to giving candidates a chance to test themselves and their messages. Moreover, No Labels isn’t offering much information at all about how it will choose its ticket without a primary. The group says it will make the decision about whether to field a candidate after Super Tuesday, based on an analysis of whether such a candidate would have a real shot. Many experts outside No Labels see such a calculation as basically impossible.
“There’s no metric by which you could look at the polling in March of an election year and say, We know how things are going to play out if we introduce a new candidate,” Lee Drutman, who studies political reform and polarization at the think tank New America, told me. “For one, the voters don’t know who that candidate is.”