William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a long-time analyst of national politics. He speculates here on the effects of independent candidacies on the 2024 election.

In 1948, President Harry Truman was on the ropes. He was personally unpopular and faced breakaway candidates to his left (former Vice President Henry Wallace, running as the head of the Progressive Party) and to his right (the Dixiecrats, headed by Strom Thurmond). Although Truman lost 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes to Thurmond and another 2.4% of the vote to Wallace, he managed to beat Republican Thomas Dewey by 49.6% to 45.1% (4.5 percentage points).

The story of the 2024 presidential campaign could be a rerun of 1948 — with a different ending. As in 1948, an unpopular incumbent Democratic president may well face Democratic defections to his left and his right. A leading Black public intellectual, Cornel West, will be filling Henry Wallace’s slot as the presidential nominee of the Green Party. To Joe Biden’s right, No Labels is threatening to run an “independent bipartisan” ticket that could be headed by centrists such as Larry Hogan, the former never-Trump Republican governor of Maryland; Joe Manchin, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia; or Arizona’s independent senator, Kyrsten Sinema.

It is much too early to assess the impact of this dual threat, but the early signs are not encouraging for Biden. A recent poll by Echelon Insights, a Republican-leaning survey research firm, found that while Biden would narrowly defeat Donald Trump in a rematch of their 2020 contest, Cornel West would receive 4% of the vote in a three-way race, giving the edge to Trump. West would draw about three-quarters of his support from potential Biden voters, especially Blacks, young people, and voters with graduate degrees.

Meanwhile, a poll by Data for Progresssuggested that a centrist independent candidacy would also hurt President Biden more than former President Trump. Like Echelon Insights and other polling firms, Data for Progress found that Biden would defeat Trump in a closely contested two-way race. But in a three-way race featuring Trump, Biden, and an unnamed “moderate Independent candidate,” Trump would come out on top, because the third choice would draw 6 percentage points from Biden’s support versus 3 points from Trump. Otherwise put, in a two-way race, 41% of the potential supporters of a moderate independent choice would support Biden, compared to just 24% who would opt for Trump.

It is very early in the race, of course, so these findings should be read with a healthy pinch of skepticism. Still, they suggest that a four-way race might not go as well for Joe Biden in 2024 as it did for Truman in 1948. The difference, I would suggest, is the baseline balance between the two major parties. In 1944, Democrats were on a roll. In that election, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Thomas Dewey by 7.5 percentage points, 53.4% to 45.9%. The Republicans nominated Dewey a second time in 1948, and the Republican candidate ended up with roughly the same share of the popular vote as he had four years earlier. Truman could afford to lose almost 5% of the baseline Democratic vote to breakaway candidates to his left and right and still prevail. Still, it was a narrow victory. If Dewey had done 1 percentage point better in the popular vote, he probably would have won three large states — Ohio, Illinois, and California — that he lost by less than 1 percentage point, allowing him to win a majority in the Electoral College despite losing to Truman in the popular vote.

By contrast, Joe Biden begins with a narrower advantage in what I am calling the “baseline” vote. In 2020, when just about everything went right for him, he defeated Trump by 51.3% to 46.8% (4.5 percentage points) in the popular vote. Because Biden’s baseline edge is 3 percentage points lower than Truman’s, he cannot prevail with losses to his left and right as large as those Truman experienced. If a four-way election were held tomorrow, Biden would probably lose.

Fortunately for the incumbent, the election will not occur for another 16 months. As often happens with new Third-Party possibilities, Cornel West’s 4% showing in the Echelon Insights poll may well prove to be a high-water mark. Running on the Green Party ticket in 2016, Jill Stein received just 1.1% of the popular vote. And notably, when the Data for Progress poll replaced the generic No Labels candidate with an actual candidate (Larry Hogan), support for the moderate independent option fell by more than half.

Still, Joe Biden’s room for maneuver is dangerously small. Even though Stein received just over 1% of the vote in 2016, her vote total was higher than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — with enough electoral votes to turn Hillary Clinton’s defeat into a narrow victory. Although we cannot say for sure that Stein cost Clinton the election, we cannot rule out the possibility that she did.

Even though Biden gained a healthy popular vote victory in 2020, a shift of a handful of votes in three states — Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin — would have created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, where Trump would have prevailed. If Cornel West ends up with even half of his current support, he will double Stein’s share, imperiling Biden’s reelection chances. If a No Labels candidate were also in the race, the hill Biden must climb would be even steeper.

Michael Hiltzik is my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times. In this post, he exposes the emptiness behind the “No Labels” platform. The possibility that No Labels will run a third party candidate in a Trump v. Biden race seems likely to elect Trump by drawing independent votes away from Biden. If ever there was an election where a third party is not needed, it’s 2024.

Hiltzik writes:

Presidential campaigns start earlier and earlier these days, and so too do pleas that politics in the U.S. would be so much more effective if we could, in the words of Rodney King, “all just get along.”

So here comes the purportedly centrist political group No Labels, which recently released a 72-page political manifesto entitled “Common Sense,” in an overt echo of Thomas Paine.

“Most Americans are decent, caring, reasonable, and patriotic people,” declares the document’s preamble. “Instead, we see our two major parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics rather than what’s best for our country.”

There’s a clue right there to the “both-sides-ism” of this fake party. Who are the “angry and extremist voices” on the Democratic side? No one like Greene, Boebert, and Gaetz.

No Labels says it may back a third-party candidate for president next year unless President Biden seems to be running well ahead of Donald Trump. That sounds more like a threat than a promise.

The politician the group has been most assiduously promoting lately is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). Manchin has demonstrated his centrist bonafides by doing things such as killing an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, an anti-poverty program of proven effectiveness, and blocking initiatives for renewable fuels in favor of protecting coal and other fossil fuels (he’s an investor in the coal industry).

That might tell you all you need to know about No Labels, but there’s more. The organization doesn’t disclose its donors, but Mother Jones has reported that they include private equity investors, a natural gas billionaire and real estate and insurance industry figures.

The best window into No Labels’ approach is its “Common Sense” policy document, which boasts of providing “a clear blueprint for where America’s commonsense majority wants this country to go.”

Would that were so. In the flesh, the document is an agglomeration of misinformation, platitudes and premasticated nostrums.

The document tends to make its points by listing problems and saying, in effect, “something must be done”—but doesn’t give many specifics about what that something would be. It makes assumptions about what is desired by “commonsense Americans” (whoever they are) without actually showing that its assumptions are valid.

Housing? “Building more homes in America will make housing more affordable for Americans,” says No Labels. No kidding? So what are you going to do about it? The policy document doesn’t say, beyond endorsing a couple of federal tax credit proposals in Congress that on the gonna-happen scale are a “not.”

On some issues, No Labels merely tries to split the difference between two sides, never mind that one side may be right and the other wrong. Abortion? No Labels calls for a “compromise” between the belief that “women have a right to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life.”

That word salad gets us nowhere, skating glibly over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade, as played out in states where stringent antiabortion statutes have had devastating consequences for the health of pregnant women and their access to medical care. If that’s the best that No Labels can offer, why does the organization exist at all?

Social Security? No Labels calls its fiscal condition “a textbook example of how leaders kick the can down the road in a manner that makes a foreseeable problem even harder to solve for the next generation.” This is a textbook example of balderdash.

“The longer Washington waits to fix Social Security,” No Labels says, “the harder it will be to do so.” The truth, as the political geniuses behind No Labels surely understand, is just the opposite. The closer the deadline, the easier it is to come together for a solution.

No Labels bases its argument on the fact that if Congress defers a decision on shoring up the program’s finances, the solutions will require more stringent benefit cuts or tax increases than they would today. But acting now would mean reducing benefits or raising taxes long before that’s necessary, and possibly more than will be necessary.

And who would pay that price? No Labels says that “no one in retirement — or close to it — should face any benefit changes.” Why not? Why place the burden of benefit cuts only on the younger generation? If “fixing” Social Security is “a challenge that we can and must solve together,” how come those in their fifties or older get a free pass?

The real reason that Social Security may need more funding is that wealthier Americans aren’t paying their fair share of the payroll tax that funds most benefits. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, which exempts wage income over $160,200 (this year’s limit), would eliminate almost all the program’s funding deficit for the foreseeable future. But that, obviously, would hit the taxpayer class No Labels seems determined to protect….

No Labels calls for a deficit reduction commission to issue proposals for spending cuts and revenue increases that Congress would have to vote on as a unified package. The model here is the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Responsibility Commission of 2010. No Labels calls its report “sensible and responsible, and dead on arrival.”

That’s a neat bit of historical revisionism. The reason the report went nowhere was that the commission itself was so split that it never got around to issuing recommendations at all. The co-chairs, the noxious former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and the conservative Democrat Erskine Bowles, traveled the country trying to sell their snake oil, with no success.

The truth was that the commission was a front for the wealthy. The Simpson-Bowles plan was a road map for cutting services and benefits for the working and middle class — including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits and disaster relief — while preserving the tax breaks that the rich valued most highly. By taking Simpson-Bowles as a model, No Labels shows us what it’s really about.

Some of the policy document’s “ideas” are based on popular mythologies and received wisdom (or really, received misinformation). Some are self-contradictory. On crime, for example, the document says, “Americans are worried about the surge of crime,” but two paragraphs later acknowledges that violent crime is “down 44 percent since the 1990s.”

What’s the solution? To No Labels, it all boils down to putting more cops on the street. “It’s a simple equation: the more cops patrolling a given community, the less crime that community experiences.” There’s no hint there that among law enforcement experts this is a heavily disputed claim.

It’s based on dubious data and a very narrow definition of “crime” — leaving out offenses such as wage theft and air and water pollution, for instance — and overlooks numerous proven approaches to reducing street crime that don’t require more cops. Nor does it recognize that in some contexts, more police leads to morecrime. But why claim to be exploring the complexity of criminal justice, when you’re just parroting the simple-minded conclusion that more cops invariably make a community safer?

On these and many other issues, No Labels is claiming to map out a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans that doesn’t really exist. No Labels says its goal is to combat political polarization in America, but the country is not, in fact, polarized. Large majorities favor abortion rights, gun control, making the rich pay their fair share in taxes, and protecting voting rights.

No Labels tries to both-sides the GOP’s allegiance to an extremist former president and its platform of eliminating abortion rights, constricting voting rights and advancing discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals. That Democratic Party policies are the polar opposites of those hardly makes it as “extremist” as the GOP. Where’s the middle ground when one side wants to expand rights and opportunities, and the other wants to destroy them?