News in Centripetality

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Oh, Axios! Oh, Kraushaar! 

The big picture: For all the talk of a No Labels third-party effort, the reality is that politicians —and by extension, many of their constituents — are still in a no-compromise mood.

• Donald Trump is barreling his way to the Republican nomination, gaining more momentum by the day. President Biden, who has made some moves to the center, hasn't won over many swing voters for his efforts.
• Moderating forces in the Senate like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) are facing long odds returning after 2024, despite their bipartisan appeal.
• A partisan gerrymander is now likely in North Carolina (after a new state Supreme Court ruling), jeopardizing the prospects of some of the most-moderate Democratic lawmakers in the House.
• If Trump is at the top of the ticket, the 18 House Republicans in districts Biden carried will face existential danger. One House GOP strategist told Axios another Trump nomination would shrink the battleground map and limit the party's appeal in the suburbs.

No, the "No Labels third party effort" is not an effort at "compromise". What's it going to compromise with?  The plan is to offer voters an unpolarized presidential ticket (on the order of Manchin-Sinema) so they don't have to compromise with their deeply held principles and vote for an extremist candidate like Biden. As the No Labels founding chairman, former senator Joe Lieberman put it,

“If we don't run a unity ticket and it's Trump versus Biden, the choice for me is an easy one,” he said. “I will support Biden, even though I may think the Democrats ... would be better off with a different candidate for president. If it comes down to Trump versus Biden, I think for the good of the country, I will vote for Biden and do so with general confidence that I'm doing the right thing.”

So that's clearly why his organization has raised $70 million to run the "unity ticket" they'll be selecting in their April 2024 convention in all 50 states, so Lieberman isn't forced to do the right thing but can vote for a hopeless candidate like Larry Hogan or Susan Collins instead. Lieberman says,

the point of No Labels trying to get ballot access in 2024 in as many states as possible was not only to make a statement about the partisanship of the two-party system, but also “to make sure that Donald Trump is not reelected as president.”

but I really don't see how that adds up. How exactly does that peel any votes off of Trump? 

Also, the group gets its polling done by HarrisX, the company owned by Mark Penn, who is the husband of No Labels CEO Nancy Jacobson, it gave a job to sexual harrasser and professional bothsiderist Mark Halperin (that was two years ago—they fired him last March, possibly because he was making the work atmosphere toxic), and it's collected $100,000 from Justice Thomas's close friend Harlan Crow, who also brought them a couple of dozen of his richest friends, according to The New Republic.

Biden's "moves to the center" are aren't much, in my view. All they seem to be talking about is his approval of the ConocoPhilips Willow Project for drilling oil on federally protected land in Alaska's North Slope, which I think, to tell the truth, is some kind of trick that's expected to fail, because it makes almost as little business sense as environmental sense (it won't start making a profit till 2035, the year we're supposed to achieve 100% zero-emissions vehicle sales). 

Manchin's and Sinema's troubles, "despite their bipartisan appeal" (Manchin seems to be facing his old Republican patron governor Jim Justice, richest man in West Virginia, in the 2024 Senate race. and he's something like 14 points behind, Axios thinks because of his support for the "Inflation Reduction Act" the stupid name Manchin gave it), suggest that that bipartisan appeal really isn't a thing, no matter how much Axios may wish you would think it was.

It's four House seats Democrats may lose in North Carolina, by the way, which makes the 18 we might gain (according to Axios) across the nation out of opposition to Trumpiness look like a pretty good chance of recapturing the House next year.

I'm not trying to handicap anything here myself, my sense is that it's very hard to guess what's going to happen, and I don't think that's what we can learn from the evidence here. What I think it does show is that wherever Democrats' salvation may lie, the Holy Grail of the Center isn't it, and my preferred alternative to that foolish old spectrum, the idea of the coalition bringing together interests economic with interests involving identity might be. We really do need to be in a mood to compromise, but not with Republicans—with each other.