[No Labels says its not a political party. It runs on dark money.
But now its setting up state parties. Democrats and Never-Trump GOPers
are worried about its 2024 plans. ]
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NO LABELS SAYS IT’S NOT A POLITICAL PARTY. BUT IT’S SETTING UP
STATE PARTIES.  
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David Corn
July 17, 2023
Mother Jones
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_ No Labels says its not a political party. It runs on dark money.
But now it's setting up state parties. Democrats and Never-Trump
GOPers are worried about its 2024 plans. _

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No Labels, the self-professed centrist group that is preparing to
possibly run its own presidential candidate in 2024, says it is not a
political party. That means it does not have to reveal the donors that
have pumped tens of millions of dollars in recent years into its
coffers. Parties must disclose their funders; nonprofit outfits, as No
Labels claims to be, do not. But in several states, No Labels has
established an affiliate that explicitly declares it is a political
party, and some of these groups, particularly the party it set up in
Florida, have deep Republican roots.

No Labels’ plan to gain ballot access in states across the nation so
it can place on the 2024 ballot a supposed “unity” ticket
including a Democrat and a Republican has unnerved Democratic and
Never-Trump Republican strategists. They cite polls to contend that
such a move would likely draw more votes from President Joe Biden than
Donald Trump, assuming these current front-runners end up being the
nominees. No Labels’ officials, including co-chair Joe Lieberman,
the former senator and vice-presidential candidate who switched from
Democrat to independent, insist they will not proceed with a candidate
who would be a spoiler. But the outfit’s refusal to disclose its
donors and media reports revealing that significant funders of the
group include Republican fat-cats have fueled the suspicions among
professional Democrats and anti-Trump operatives that No Labels may be
pursuing a secret agenda to aid Trump or the GOP. This week
it released
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is essentially its policy platform—a mish-mosh of middle-of-the-road
prescriptions and vague notions. (It urged “a sustainable abortion
compromise most Americans can live with”—without defining what
that would be.)

The group’s activity in Florida will likely not reassure those
Democratic and Never-Trump No Labels critics. 

In September, the No Labels Party of Florida registered with the
state’s elections division as a political party. Two months later,
it received its first donation: $35,000 from No Labels Ballot Access,
an outfit formerly known as Insurance Policy for America, which was
created by No Labels and initially seeded with $2.4 million in dark
money—meaning funds from sources No Labels won’t identify. (Last
month, _Mother Jones_ published
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list of 36 donors to Insurance Policy for America that included major
GOP funders and a few Democratic donors.) The only contact information
on the No Labels Party of Florida website is a P.O. box in Winter
Park, Florida, and an email address for the main No Labels office,
which is in Washington, DC. 

Two of the three officers of the No Labels Party of Florida have
extensive GOP connections. Its chair is Kathleen Shanahan, the CEO of
an electrical construction firm. She has a long history of working for
prominent Republicans. As her online biography
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it, “Her positions in federal and state public policy include
serving as Chief of Staff for Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Chief of
Staff to Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of the
California Trade and Commerce Agency, Special Assistant to then Vice
President George Bush, and Staff Assistant on President Reagan’s
National Security Council.”

Allan Keen, a real estate developer, is the party’s treasurer and
secretary. He donated $135,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign efforts in
2020. In the 2022 election, Keen contributed $140,000 to Republican
outfits looking to elect GOP Senators. Previously, he financially
backed the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush,
Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. He also made contributions to
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat-turned-independent, and Sen.
Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who No Labels supporters have
mentioned as the group’s possible 2024 candidate. Manchin, who has
refused to say whether he would accept a No Labels nomination, was
scheduled to co-host with former GOP Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman a No
Labels event on Monday in New Hampshire to unveil the group’s new
policy platform. 

The other officer of the No Labels Party of Florida is Harold Mills,
the CEO of a firm that invests in the technology and services
industries. He donated several thousand dollars to Joe Biden in 2020.

Mills tells _Mother Jones _that he is currently “evaluating my
role” with the No Labels Party of Florida. He notes that he signed
up as vice-chair 18 months ago because “as a political moderate”
he had been a supporter of No Labels’ efforts to encourage
bipartisan legislation. But now, he adds, he wants to “understand
their current process…as we get into the other part of the
strategy”—that is, the 2024 campaign. 

Mills says that it may well seem that the leadership of No Labels
Party of Florida is weighted toward Republicans but that his fellow
officers tend to be “moderate” in their policy positions.

Shanahan and Keen did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

The incorporation paperwork the party submitted to the Florida
division of elections cites Nick Connors, the director of ballot
access for No Labels, as a point of contact. His email address is an
account at No Labels.

Connors has a lengthy pedigree in Republican politics. According to
his LinkedIn profile
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director of ballot access and delegate operations for Sen. Lindsey
Graham’s doomed presidential bid in 2016, operations manager at the
GOP convention that year, and associate director of Trump’s
inauguration. In 2018, he was communications director for Greg Orman,
who unsuccessfully ran as an independent for Kansas governor. 

Connors is no longer a pro-Trump Republican. In 2020, he wrote
an article
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the _xxxxxx _slamming Graham for becoming “one of the most
fawning Trump sycophants in the entire GOP herd.” In 2021, during
the second Trump impeachment, he penned a piece
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criticized Senate Republicans for failing to “put their country
before their own political aspirations and vote to convict the former
president.” In 2022, Connors ran for the Republican senatorial
nomination in Connecticut but didn’t make it on the ballot. 

On a candidate’s survey
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described himself as a strong fiscal conservative and noted, “In
2017, Mr. Connors stopped working for Washington insiders to focus on
helping conservative independent candidates and political reform
organizations. One major factor for breaking with the elitists in
Washington was his experience seeing how the US political system has
been manipulated by career-politicians and lobbyists to reward
Washington insiders while marginalizing and ignoring the American
people.” Connors’ championing of conservative candidates is out of
sync with No Labels’ assertion that it promotes moderate candidates,
not conservatives or liberals. 

Connors is listed as the chair
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Labels Party of Alaska, the principle organizer
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the No Labels Party of Oregon, and the “proponent”
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the No Labels Party of Colorado, which is co-chaired by two
Republicans. No Labels has also been recognized as a party in Arizona
and has qualified as a party in Maine. It is also registered as a
party in North Carolina. The statement of organization the North
Carolina party filed last year with the state’s board of elections
lists as its phone number one used by Connors. 

Connors did not return multiple requests for comment. Maryanne
Martini, the communications deputy for No Labels, also did not reply
to a request for comment. 

Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, recently insisted
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No Labels is not a political party. And as the _New Yorker_ reported
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month, No Labels “maintains that it is a nonprofit social-welfare
organization, not a political party.” Yet the group’s outposts in
states explicitly identify as political parties. 

This month, former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, who is now a
lobbyist, created
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organization to oppose No Labels’ third-party presidential
effort. According to the _Washington Post_
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polling conducted by this new outfit matches what polling for No
Labels has shown: a third-party candidate would pull more from Biden
than Trump.

No Labels officials argue, though, that once a third-party candidate
is named, that person’s support would likely grow and allow him or
her to be competitive with the Democratic and Republican nominees.
Democratic strategists scoff at that analysis. No Labels’ leaders
repeatedly say that they won’t mount an effort that will tilt the
election toward Trump and that they will only proceed with a
bipartisan ticket if polling indicates it can actually win. But with
No Labels hiding its donors and denying it is a political party as it
sets up state parties, its detractors certainly have reason to be wary
of such pronouncements.

_David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief and an on-air
analyst for MSNBC. He is the co-author (with Michael Isikoff)
of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and
the Election of Donald Trump. He is the author of three New York Times
bestsellers, Showdown, Hubris (with Isikoff), and The Lies of
George W. Bush, as well as the e-book, 47 Percent: Uncovering the
Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. For more of his
stories, click here [[link removed]].
He's also on Twitter
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* No Labels
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* Dark Money
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* Republican Party
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