The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Nancy Jacobson. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: As I do from time to time, I recently published an essay. In fact, did it today. It’s called the Republican Electoral College Advantage. It’s bigger than you think, and it’s all about the wasted votes. You can find a link to the article at the episode page at jimruttshow.com. This is the last of my series of four election-oriented episodes where I talk to people not deeply aligned with either party about their take on the 2024 US presidential elections. Today’s guest is Nancy Jacobson, founder and CEO of the No Labels political organization. Welcome, Nancy.
Nancy: Good to be here.
Jim: Yeah, it should be a good conversation, very timely right before the election. We’re going to push it through the production process and get it out in two days. You can learn more about No Labels at Nolabels.org. Prior to No Labels, Nancy worked in many political campaigns and held senior positions in the Democratic Party, including Finance Director of the 1992 Presidential Inaugural Committee, Finance Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, as well as Finance Chair for the Democratic Leadership Council. For the 15 years prior to founding No Labels, she worked closely with Evan Bayh, who was the former governor of Indiana and two-term US senator, and then she started No Labels. This should be a very interesting conversation. Full disclosure, our listeners are used to the fact that I sometimes give these disclosures. I was a supporter of No Labels starting in 2023 in their attempt to find a credible presidential candidate who wasn’t named Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I was a delegate to their nominating convention and participated in numerous meetings, both large and small and was a financial contributor. Nancy, let’s start out with, what is No Labels?
Nancy: No Labels is a movement of Republicans, Democrats, and independents organized to give a political home to people that just want our government to work again and want our leaders to solve problems together.
Jim: Maybe you could tell people a little bit about the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is one of the first and actually quite significant things you all did.
Nancy: We founded this organization 14 years ago in Columbia University. 1,000 people from all 50 states on their own dime came to launch this movement and very soon after, we started the matchmaking to build something we call the Problem Solvers. It wasn’t a formal caucus. It turned into a formal caucus in 2017 when Josh Gottheimer and Tom Reed took it over, but it is, at this moment, the only bipartisan go-to caucus in the House of Representatives.
Jim: Maybe just very quickly, we don’t have time to get into the points. Talk about the common sense platform. I’ll say that was one of the things that hooked me, as we’ll talk about later. I really am not fans of either party at the moment, but I went down the list of the common sense platform, and there are a few of them I disagreed with, but I agreed with most of them, which is unusual in the current politics.
Nancy: Yeah, we put together, and really what we always do is, we get the public input and see where the majority of the public is and we fashioned our common sense document and tried to list out for people different topics that people agreed on across the country, so that’s been just a nice resource for us.
Jim: Again, we’ll have a link to that on the episode page. The sad thing about it, it’s common sense. It’s good stuff, but you can see why it would never pass in the current Congress. We are so polarized into the tribes of red and blue that something that actually makes sense for the citizens, what’s its chances of passing? Very, very small.
Another thing I want to say about No Labels from my, a little over a year involvement, year and three or four months currently, is I was amazingly impressed by the quality of the people I ran into in the No Labels delegates process. These were volunteers from all over the country volunteering their time, many of them contributing in money and they were sane and solid citizens. I’ve dabbled in politics a little bit with both parties at different times, and this was the first time in my dabbling in politics that the people weren’t a bunch of zanies and zealots. You go to these party activities for either party and if it’s not all lobbyists who are just out there to make money, a lot of them are crazy. They’re just overly zealous. This was absolutely not that. This was real citizens there to do the work of citizenship for our country and I just loved it, I must say.
Nancy: Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. It is. It was unique and it continues to be a unique band of leaders all across the country. I always think of it as the good people of the world, and it may just be because we’re just about common sense that we do attract just the unsung heroes that live in the communities all across this country.
Jim: Frankly, I was staggered by the quality of the people. It really just was utterly exceptional. What happened to No Label’s attempt to get a presidential candidate not named Biden or Trump?
Nancy: Listen, it was quite a journey. No good deed goes unpunished here. We just thought we were offering a good opportunity for the country, knowing three years ago, we made a bet because we just sensed that we’d probably have this rematch of Biden/Trump. Then we polled, as we always look at the country, we don’t want to move ahead of the majority of common sense Americans, and we realized that 60-plus percent of this nation wanted another option, so we got to work building the option to have another choice.
To do that, you’ve got to do the signatures and all of the states to get the opportunity to possibly offer a line for somebody else to put their name on this ballot, so that was our effort. We were never running a campaign. We were simply trying to provide the citizens of this country another option if they wanted it. We underestimated the lengths that adversaries of this project would go to to try to stop this constitutional right of our citizens. I think there was a highly coordinated campaign with so many folks that tried to instill so much fear that it really made it impossible to try to recruit a credible, solid candidate to want to take the ballot line.
Jim: I’ve got to say I was very disappointed. It made me think historically, around the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the United States had a population of about 3 million people, about the same as Kentucky today. Yet our leaders were people like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, the Morrises, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and many other amazing people, some of the best people in our country. Here, several hundred years later, we have 330 million, more than 100 times as many people and we end up having Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I started calling them doddering Joe and demented Donnie in my occasional posts online and what have you. There is something really broken about the whole profession of politics that from 3 million people, we can get a whole generation of exemplary, brilliant, committed moral leaders and from 330 million, we get, “Oh, dear.” Any thoughts on what’s so broken about our politics that we end up with this very low quality of candidates?
Nancy: Listen, there’s so much. It’s hard to break it all down, but somehow, a couple of decades ago, it started to unravel. Some people say it was the moment that Gingrich insisted that people live back in their home districts, and that that started the polluting environment, but denigrating the other side, running against. It’s very hard. If you run against incumbents, why would anybody want to govern with the opposing member of a party that’s gone for broke to try to marginalize them and kill them off and character smears and attacks in an election? You could just go on and on.
The fact that independents can’t vote in the primary, that they have no say. The primary is the most important election. Most of the elections, it’s very clear, whoever comes out of the primary wins, is just the de facto winner of the general election. You could go on and on where this has, but we’ve come to a point where every party wants to amass the majority in the House so that they can rule the roost and run the table to trying to do it in the Senate. It’s just become a runaway train where it’s just very hard to think through, how do you bring it back? I think truly when we have a president, I think, that can take the temperature down, that may be the time that we can turn the tide.
Jim: I had Catherine Gell on back in EP-219 and she wrote a book with Michael Porter. Yes, indeed, the famous Michael Porter, who’s the business strategist called The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. Very well worth reading the book and listening to the podcast for some more detailed examples about how we can have institutional change. In particular, Catherine’s organization is pushing for open primaries where everybody votes. Then the final five go to ranked choice voting. Now you can argue against any voting methodology, but I’m a believer that one would make some big changes away from this hyper-polarization where a small number of the most partisan members of each party end up selecting the candidates.
Nancy: I’d say one thing, Jim. Listen, we don’t know exactly what’s the best way to get people to Washington. We believe, though, that the problem also, the major problem is in Washington once you get there. Let’s just say you have the perfect way for these members to get to Washington. Once you get there, the party leader’s in control. You’ve got to bow down to the party leader to get the right committee assignments to get your favor. We need more independent leaders. Unfortunately, these parties control through money and supporting the campaign so much, so the more that we can get independent leaders and maybe an independent funding source, that would be something very useful.
Jim: Yeah, of course. That’s one of the problems. If you’re going to run for public office today, you’ve got to figure on spending 50% or 60% of your time rattling the old tin cup. People who’ve accomplished something in their life, they don’t want to do that. They’re happy to run, put their ideas out there and serve. They’re not going to go around begging all the time to a bunch of nitwit business dudes. I think that’s another reform that we certainly need. Let’s turn a little bit to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. What are the things that you don’t like from an issues perspective about the current parties? Hit the Dems first.
Nancy: Hit the Dems? Listen, I think getting something meaningful done on immigration would be good. Dealing with our open border would be good. I think we weren’t so happy with the Build Back Better. That was a one party only major expenditure of several trillion dollars that really was trying to be rammed through on a one party only basis. We definitely, at No Labels, stand for two-party solutions and that’s why we did so much work to really lay the groundwork and put folks together to promote the infrastructure bill that was a two-party solution and was a bipartisan solution. We just know that durable, lasting change only happens when two parties engage. Either party that’s pushing just their way, with the Trump first tax bill, that was really just a one-party solution. You’re always going to find us calling for both parties to somehow get engaged and that way you don’t keep re-litigating it from cycle to cycle.
Jim: That seems like it’s more of a process issue than a policy issue.
Nancy: Process can be policy and we’re moving to a way now that it’s just not the norm anymore to solve these big problems. Even the Obamacare was really one of the first times in our history where you had a big social program like that where you didn’t get the buy-in from both sides. That’s so essential, because it’s just always left on the table. It’s like the Supreme Court. You’d like to try to find, elect, select these Supreme Court justices, not with the 51 vote, but really with more of a 60-vote margin.
Jim: Hell, I’d like to require a 75 vote for the Supreme Court justices. That would really force them to find people of quality, not partisanship. That would be a quite interesting thought experiment. I gave my laundry list of things I hate about the Democrats and Republicans, but it’s too long to give today. I probably did the best job back in EP-262, where I talked to Cliff Maloney on the libertarian case for Trump. People that want to hear my diatribes against the two parties with plenty of F-bombs, check out that episode. We unfortunately had very little time today. Nancy’s schedule is extremely tight, so I’m going to cut right to the bottom line. Nancy, what’s your take about the 2024 election? Who are you going to vote for and why?
Nancy: I’ve been wrestling with it and I am thinking that I may not. I just may not vote this time. That itself carries a little bit of a weight and conflicts, inner conflict, but I just feel this process went astray. I’m just not certain, knowing where we came from and the project that we were involved in and the desire to have this other choice for the public. I think for me, I’m tempting to just sit this one out, so I haven’t made up my mind fully. We still have a little week to go, but that’s where I’m resting right now.
Jim: That’s an honorable choice. To be lazy and not get up and go to the polls is one thing, but to make the principled choice not to vote for either one, I respect that. I remain where I’ve been, which is very reluctantly going to vote for Harris, at least as of this moment. Mostly not on the issues. If I had to put the issues side by side, I might actually tilt a little to the Republicans this time, but I find Donald Trump to be an intolerable person. I wouldn’t hire him to run the mail room at one of my companies. I made that assessment back in 2015. I’d be damned if I’d hire him to run the United States, so almost anybody would be superior to Donald Trump even if I disagreed with them a bit on the issues, which I do. On the other hand, my wife and I have decided for the first time in many years to actually cast our vote on Election Day, so it’s always possible I’ll change my mind, but pretty hard to imagine. One last question before I let you go, Nancy. What’s next for No Labels?
Nancy: What’s next? In fact, we’re meeting. Are you going to be coming December 11th and 12th?
Jim: I hope to.
Nancy: We hope that you’re going to be there. Our community is getting together. We really want to find and identify, and we’re speaking with many right now, the core group of mature legislators that are going to really be acting responsibly, meeting on a regular basis in a bicameral way. Senators, congressmen, and then really, what No Labels can do and what we do do. We have members all across this country. We have members that support the good, courageous leaders, but in this time of so much tumult, it’s important for No Labels as an organization to find the leaders that we can count on as our own insurance policy as we go forward in the next four years, so we’ll be focused on supporting those people and helping to convene them when necessary. A smaller, leaner group than the 64 at the Problem Solvers Caucus, but that’s our next mission.
Jim: Any thought about re-engaging with electoral politics?
Nancy: Not on the presidential level. We’ll keep our minds open for the Congress in 2026, but not the same way that we did it in this last time.
Jim: Alrighty. Nancy, I really want to thank you for this brief appearance on the Jim Rutt Show. We covered the things we needed to cover and it was great talking to you, and I look forward to remaining aligned with the No Labels party, at least for the time being.
Nancy: Okay, we hope to see you in Washington, Jim. Thank you for taking the time.
Jim: All right, bye-bye.