MRC Concern-Trolled Over Third-Party Candidate, Hid That Main Effort Has Right-Wing Ties

Dating back to last year, the Media Research Center did a lot of concern trolling over the idea of a third party running a presidential candidate not getting traction in non-right-wing media. Kevin Tober huffed in a June 22 post:

On Thursday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The ReidOut, host Joy Reid opened the show panicking over the centrist group “No Labels” and the news that they are laying the groundwork to run a centrist third party ticket in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. This apparently frightened Reid who lashed out and fear mongered over what will happen if No Labels manages to take enough votes away from President Joe Biden in the November election and reelects Donald Trump. As you can imagine, it was a completely unhinged prediction of the “end of democracy” in the United States. 

“They’ve been openly flirting with recruiting moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin who just happens to also be a co-chair. He has not said if he will run for president as a centrist,” Reid said angrily.

[…]

What Reid fails to understand is that third party bids traditionally hurt Republicans just as much as Democrats, if not more. In 1992, independent presidential candidate Ross Perot was widely believed to have cost Republican President George H.W. Bush a second term against the perverted Bill Clinton. 

Nicholas Fondacaro did some as part of his usual hate-watching of “The View” in a July 17 post:

Over the weekend, Senator Joe Manchin (WV) sparked fear in Democrats after he was announced as the headline speaker for a New Hampshire event put on by the No Labels Party, a group looking to launch a third-party run for the White House. ABC’s The View was in full-blown panic on Monday (the day of the event), as they lashed out at the No Labels Party for threatening President Biden’s reelection. This comes after The View had previously called for the Republican Party to be broken up.

“But there’s been a lot of debate around the No Labels Party which is planning to run their own presidential ticket if Democrats and Republicans don’t come towards the middle,” moderator Whoopi Goldberg announced at the top of the show.

But Goldberg, in particular, was vehemently against No Labels attempting to run in the middle in 2024. “Well, I think it’s, you know, now is not the time to try the experiment,” she chided. “You should have talked about this four years ago if you thought this was something we should be thinking about, because now it’s going to be a breakneck race, and that’s not the way to do this.”

[…]

But as NewsBusters had previously reported, The View’s called for a third party when the goal was to harm Republican election efforts.

The same day, P.J. Gladnick huffed:

Wow! No Labels is irking all the right (or is wrong?) people. Why? Because as MSNBC contributor and Dean of the [Bill?] Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Victoria DeFrancesco Soto worried on Monday’s edition of MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart Reports, that group could jeopardize Joe Biden’s re-election chances.

Soto’s shtick is that America has a two party system and how dare a third party jeopardize the chances of the Democrats remaining in power.

Mark Finkelstein groused in a July 18 post:

Biden dead-ender Joe Scarborough is on guard for anything that might jeopardize his guy’s re-election prospects.

So when Joe Manchin, the Democrat senator from West Virginia, yesterday floated the possibility of a third-party presidential run, Scarborough was quick to lead the charge against him on today’s Morning Joe….with his usual F-words for Trump.

When, teasing the news at the top of the show, Mika Brzezinski mentioned Manchin’s musings, Scarborough twice interrupted with a skeptical, “come on, man.”

Tim Graham rehashed much of this in his July 19 column:

Polls show that voters are not thrilled at the prospect of a Trump vs. Biden rerun in the 2024 presidential election. That makes the idea of a fresh third-party candidate more interesting. One might think the media would enjoy a curveball, but there’s one big problem. Democrats think a third party ticket would sink Joe Biden.

The “No Labels” group held an event in New Hampshire on July 17 with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and former Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-UT). They like the idea of a bipartisan presidential ticket, one Democrat and one Republican. There’s more than enough establishment Republicans who hate Trump enough to run on a bipartisan ticket.

[…]

Remember this: Democrats were fine with a third-party candidate in the race in 1992, when Ross Perot took more voters from President Bush than he did from Bill Clinton. Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote, and journalists pretended that was a mandate. Their position on a third-party challenge is situational. It’s entirely about who benefits.  

Manchin told the crowd in New Hampshire that he would never run to be a spoiler, that he would only run to win. Everyone running as a third-party candidate should say that, but with disapproval of Trump and Biden as high as it is, one could imagine a three-way nail-biter. On the other hand, if polling suggested such a strange scenario, it’s easy to predict our Democrat media outlets would fiercely dig into the opposition research on whoever decided to threaten their incumbent.  

All of these writers failed to mention, however, that No Labels has indisputable links to right-wing activists, as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin documented:

Despite the group’s insistence on keeping its backers secret, dogged reporting has found strong connections to Republicans. Mother Jones followed the money. It found that CEOs of some major corporations have forked over substantial money to No Labels. And while the No Labels donor list does include a few rich people who have given to Democrats, it tends heavily toward those “who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes, such as past GOP presidential candidates and super-PACS connected to Republican congressional leadership,” Mother Jones reported.

One of the donors “provided a big chunk of political cash to Donald Trump,” according to the article. “No Labels supporters, who mostly made contributions of $5,600 to its 2024 project, appear to favor conservative candidates, though many have played both sides of the aisle, financing Republican and Democratic politicians,” Mother Jones found.

[…]

Mother Jones’s David Corn has found that No Labels is associated with some significant Republican-aligned outfits. Its online fundraising is run by Anedot, founded by a failed 2014 GOP congressional candidate. Anedot handles the cash for right-wing organizations, Corn writes, such as “Focus on the Family, the Susan B. Anthony List (a prominent foe of reproductive rights), the Thomas More Society (a conservative Catholic group that supported Trump’s election deniers), the Reformed Theological Seminary (which is ‘committed to the Bible as God’s inerrant Word’), and the International Alliance for Christian Education.”

No wonder the MRC wants a third-party candidate so badly — it thinks such a candidate would hurt Biden more than Trump.