It’s the year before a presidential election, which means it’s once again time for a group to call for a unity ticket of a Democratic and a Republican for president and vice president or for an independent candidate to avoid the dysfunction of the parties entirely.
This happens just about every four years. There are lessons to learn from past seasons, especially in these extremely polarized times.
The current effort by the No Labels group to get a presidential ballot line in all 50 states for 2024 is being treated as something of a novelty, but we’ve seen something like this in most modern presidential elections. Just four years ago Unite America was proposing a bipartisan unity ticket for 2020, pushing the major parties to commit to having a vice presidential candidate of a party different from their own. (They even floated the idea of a John Kasich/John Hickenlooper ticket.)
