HOW TO BAMBOOZLE A CREDULOUS COLUMNIST (AND HIS CREDULOUS READERS)

There was a glaring error in yesterday's David Brooks column, although if you didn't read it at the Times site until today, you won't know about it. In the column, Brooks does PR for No Labels, which says it's preparing to run a candidate for president in the event that Republicans nominate Donald Trump and -- more horrifying to both No Labels and Brooks -- "Democrats nominate some progressive," perhaps history's greatest monster, Bernie Sanders. Brooks imagines the fresh, vital ticket No Labels might put together:

The big question is: Is this a good idea? To think this through I’ve imagined a 2024 campaign in which the Republicans nominate Trump, Biden retires and the Democrats nominate some progressive and the No Labels group nominates retired Adm. William McRaven and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. (I’m just grabbing these latter two names off the top of my head as the sort of people who might be ideal for the No Labels ticket).

I realize that the Times is a small, struggling newspaper that can't afford to pay anyone to fact-check its opinion pieces, but you might think Brooks himself would take the trouble to confirm that Nooyi is eligible to be on a presidential ticket. (She isn't -- she was born in Chennai, India.) The paragraph has been corrected at the Times site -- it now ends

... and the No Labels group nominates retired Adm. William McRaven. (I’m just grabbing his name off the top of my head as the sort of person who might be ideal for the No Labels ticket.)

However, there's no acknowledgment of the error, either on the page where the column appears or on the paper's corrections page. Where's the transparency?

(The Baltimore Sun has the column in its original form.)

But there's so much wrong with this column -- the bashing of progressivism, the tired suggestion of a general and a CEO as ideal candidates. (A few decades ago, the names might have been Norman Schwarzkopf and Lee Iacocca.) And then there's Brooks's uncritical acceptance of data that readers never get to see, and that he probably never saw either. He tells us that No Labels plans

to create a database on those Americans who would support a unity ticket. The group’s research suggests there are 64.5 million voters who would support such an effort, including roughly a third of the people who supported Donald Trump in 2020 and 20 percent of the Democrats who supported Joe Biden in that year, as well as a slew of independents.

The group has identified 23 states where they believe a unity ticket could win a plurality of the vote, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Minnesota and Colorado. If the ticket gained a plurality in those 23 states, that would give its standard-bearer 279 electoral votes and the presidency.

Brooks provides these numbers with no links. If No Labels has ever published any of this data, I can't find it at the group's website, on its Facebook page, or in its Twitter feed.

And the bamboozlement doesn't even work on its own terms. No Labels says it could win enough states to get 279 electoral votes, 9 more than it would need to elect a president.

I think the 279 number is 279 more than a No Labels ticket is likely to get -- no third-party candidate has won even a single electoral vote since George Wallace in 1968, and no non-segregationist third-party candidate has won an electoral vote in nearly a century. (Strom Thurmond won four states in 1948; before that, you have to look to the progressive Robert La Follette, who won his home state of Wisconsin in 1924.)

But let's take No Labels claim seriously. The group is claiming this as the upper bound -- the most electoral votes it could possibly get. That's meant to impress the gullible Brooks and his gullible readers -- ooh, more than the magic number 270!. But if you're saying that 279 is the best you can possibly do, you're also saying you'd have to run the table, winning every state you could possibly win, in order to elect a president.

The two major parties don't set upper bounds that low, except in years when they're clearly favored to lose. The 2016 Republican ticket won 306 electoral votes, and the Democratic ticket won the same number in 2020; in addition, Republicans in 2016 lost New Hamphire by less than a point and Minnesota by less than two points, while Democrats in 2020 lost North Carolina by less than two points. A winning ticket can't just be competitive in a bare minimum of states.

And what are the No Labels numbers based on? The major parties know they can win certain states because they've won them in the past, or at least come close. No Labels has no data of this kind backing its numbers. It's all speculation.

I think a third-party candidate who is a celebrity or has the potential to become one could make inroads in 2024, particularly if both major-party candidates are polling poorly. But I'm talking about The Rock or Mark Cuban or Matthew McConnaughey, not someone who's well known to regular attendees of the Aspen Ideas Festival but unknown to the average voter. And even a celebrity candidate would probably just muddy the waters enough to throw the election into chaos. But if you want to believe, the Brooks column is there for you.