This joke isn’t funny anymore

Joe Lieberman is joining with the effort to create a third party ratfuck campaign to throw the 2024 election to the Republican candidate. because Democrats might run an unacceptably radical candidate like…Joe Biden:

Former senator Joe Lieberman knows better than most the impact third-party bids can have on presidential elections. His 2000 Democratic campaign for vice president fell just 537 Florida votes short of victory, in a state where Ralph Nader, the liberal activist and Green Party nominee, won more than 97,000 votes.

But that didn’t stop the Connecticut Democrat turned independent from joining a meeting Thursday in support of plans by the centrist group No Labels to get presidential ballot lines in all 50 states for 2024. The group calls its effort an “insurance policy” against the major parties nominating two “unacceptable” candidates next year.

Asked if President Biden, his former Senate colleague, would be unacceptable, Lieberman said the answer was uncertain.

“No decision has been made on any of that. But we’re putting ourselves in a position,” Lieberman said. “You know, it might be that we will take our common-sense, moderate, independent platform to him and the Republican candidate and see which one of them is willing to commit to it. And that could lead to, in my opinion, a No Labels endorsement.”

But don’t worry — even though they’re getting ballot access in crucial states, they will only run if they think they can win:

Cross tabs of a June 2022 HarrisX poll show Democrats, liberals and urban voters to be more open to a moderate independent candidate than Republicans, conservatives or rural voters. Nesho said that in a larger poll after the midterm elections, the spreads narrowed.

A No Labels ticket would only run to win, Clancy added, unlike the protest campaign of Nader in 2000, which had a goal of earning a single-digit percentage of votes to qualify for matching funds.

“We have very tight guardrails around this effort,” he said.

Given that 1)there is no chance this party could be competitive in a single state and 2)they had Mark Penn torture some polling data to falsely show that a No Labels campaign could be viable, I trust these “guardrails” to work about as much as.I trust Joe Lieberman’s political judgment. If they existed, this whole effort would disband immediately, because the only possible material effect of a No Labels campaign is to throw the election to the Republican candidate.

It is true that a No Labels ticket wouldn’t attract many voters, but given the margins of 2016 and 2020 that doesn’t mean it can’t matter. In the end, not many people who would have otherwise voted for Gore voted for Ralph Nader, but enough did to get hundreds of thousands of people killed. As we all know, Lieberman was ironically happy with how that turned out, and he might be trying to do it again.