The political group No Labels is creating a shell campaign. It will acquire a candidate later.
One of the greatest obstacles that an independent candidate faces when running for president is ballot access. Each state has its own requirements for names to appear on the ballot. In Tennessee, it’s 275 signatures; in California, it’s more than 200,000; in Iowa, a statewide caucus can be used instead of signatures. Winning ballot access across all 50 states is a massive undertaking for an independent candidate, which can cost $20 million to $30 million and begins up to two years before Election Day. Because of campaign-finance laws, for decades, only someone who was independently wealthy, like Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg, could plausibly run as an independent.
Campaign-finance laws place limits on the size of the contributions an individual can give to a federal political campaign or party committee. The maximum individual contribution to a campaign is $3,300, so a candidate who can’t self-fund would have to raise maximum contributions from 10,000 donors, or smaller contributions from an even larger number, simply to get on the ballot.
Lora Kelley: RFK Jr.’s wild-card run
But in 2010, the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United infamously declared that “corporations are persons,” and so allowed a flood of money into politics. For the first time, both individuals and corporations could contribute to super PACs. Unlike regular old political-action committees, the supers didn’t have caps on the size of the contributions they could receive. The committees can spend as much as they please, as long as they don’t donate directly to candidates or coordinate their expenditures with political campaigns. And Citizens United also opened the way for some nonprofits—registered as 501(c)(4)s—to receive unlimited contributions from donors who don’t need to disclose their identity, and then spend it on advocacy or pass it along to overtly political super PACs. For the past decade, we’ve lived the result of Citizens United, as big money has entered politics and big politics has invaded every facet of American life, polarizing our society.
Citizens United is a well-known story. But another court case, decided two months later, is also transforming American elections, although it has received far less attention: Unity08 v. FEC. The case was brought by Unity08, an organization that in the 2008 presidential election sought to put a Republican and Democrat on the same ticket to bring the country together. Unity08 didn’t get very far. When confronted with the challenge of raising money for ballot access, an effort that involved my late father, the organization folded. When Unity08 sued the Federal Election Commission, its complaint stated that contribution limits “would hamper its ability to engage in core political speech, such as petitioning and other ballot access activities.”
The ruling, in favor of Unity08, found that the organization was not subject to regulation as a political committee so long as it didn’t favor any single candidate. Although Unity08 was at this point defunct, the ruling created a breach in one of the walls the two major parties have used for decades to prevent independent candidacies. An entity like Unity08, dedicated to creating the infrastructure for an independent candidate to run, could now raise unlimited funds to put a candidate, to be named later, on the ballot.
No Labels, organized as a 501(c)(4), has raised more than $30 million according to 2021 and 2022 tax filings. It is using these resources to “offer our ballot line to a Unity presidential ticket if the American people demand it,” according to its website. If Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, were to run for president, it probably wouldn’t be under the banner of a minor party—like the Greens or Libertarians—or as a straight independent. Instead, he’s more likely to try to take advantage of what No Labels has done. Regardless of your politics, it’s worth paying attention to the group’s efforts. The organization it has created has the power to break the grip that the major parties have maintained on presidential politics for generations, a grip that has delivered ever more unpopular candidates.
Even as our politics becomes more polarized, the number of Americans who identify as Republican or Democrat has been eroding for years; a historic plurality of Americans, 49 percent, now identify with neither party. This shift away from the two national parties mirrors the disaggregation occurring throughout American society. The two parties once wielded near-exclusive financial power in the political process; Citizens United upended that. And the power that the two parties wield over the ballot has been significantly diminished by Unity08 v. FEC as well. If Manchin decides to run for president, his candidacy will be the first to combine the power of Unity08 and Citizens United. But it’s unlikely to be the last.
Read: The states where third-party candidates perform best
In business terms, the combination of Unity08 with Citizens United has allowed for the creation of political entities that act like special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. These “blank-check companies” are formed by investors with expertise in a particular sector who raise capital in advance to be deployed when an opportunity arises. SPACs existed for decades before their popularity soared recently, with $3.5 billion raised in 2016 and $162.5 billion in 2021. If the two parties continue to nominate unpopular candidates, they could find themselves fending off an increasing number of “political SPACs”—and they may not all be centrist in inclination, like No Labels. Well-funded ballot-access initiatives could form on the far left, the far right, or anywhere in between. If there’s one thing we’ve seen in a post–Citizens United world, it’s that well-heeled corporations and individuals are happy to pump money into politics, particularly presidential races, when they believe they will get a return on their investment.
The amount of money spent in presidential elections has ballooned in the past 40 years. In the 1980 election, spending by Republicans and Democrats combined totaled $60 million—roughly $200 million adjusted for inflation. By contrast, the 2020 election saw $4.1 billion in spending—that’s a 2,050 percent increase. Comparatively, $20 million or $30 million seems like a drop in the bucket, potentially a far more potent deployment of resources than an ad buy on Facebook or some television commercials in Iowa.
The way Americans pick presidents has consistently evolved, from the first televised presidential debate, in 1960, to the first binding party primary, in 1972, to the proliferation of mail-in ballots in 2020. What No Labels has created might have an impact far more profound than any candidacy it enables. No Labels has shown that there’s a way to fund ballot access, one of the greatest barriers to entry for any independent presidential candidate. Whether it will save our system of government remains to be seen.
Meet the Super SPAC
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01.12.2023
The political group No Labels is creating a shell campaign. It will acquire a candidate later.
One of the greatest obstacles that an independent candidate faces when running for president is ballot access. Each state has its own requirements for names to appear on the ballot. In Tennessee, it’s 275 signatures; in California, it’s more than 200,000; in Iowa, a statewide caucus can be used instead of signatures. Winning ballot access across all 50 states is a massive undertaking for an independent candidate, which can cost $20 million to $30 million and begins up to two years before Election Day. Because of campaign-finance laws, for decades, only someone who was independently wealthy, like Ross Perot and Michael Bloomberg, could plausibly run as an independent.
Campaign-finance laws place limits on the size of the contributions an individual can give to a federal political campaign or party committee. The maximum individual contribution to a campaign is $3,300, so a candidate who can’t self-fund would have to raise maximum contributions from 10,000 donors, or smaller contributions from an even larger number, simply to get on the ballot.
Lora Kelley: RFK Jr.’s wild-card run
But in 2010, the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United infamously declared that “corporations are persons,” and so allowed a flood of money into politics. For the first time, both individuals and corporations could contribute to super PACs. Unlike regular old political-action committees, the supers didn’t have caps on the size of the contributions they could receive. The committees can spend as much as they please, as long as they don’t donate directly to candidates or coordinate their expenditures with political campaigns. And Citizens United also opened the way for some........
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