The bipartisan centrist political group No Labels announced on Thursday it would decline to field a presidential candidate in the 2024 election, saying it had failed to find a "hero" candidate who could take on both President Biden and former President Trump.
Republican and Democratic strategists celebrated the group's failure to secure an acceptable challenger while on CNN Friday morning.
"It was silly from the beginning. It was poorly run, poorly executed," Republican strategist Sarah Longwell remarked.
However, Democratic strategist Karen Finney argued No Labels had presented a "dangerous" threat to Biden's re-election chances that Democrats, including her, actively worked to undermine.
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"They were very dangerous because they had over $70 million to get on the ballot," Finney recalled.
"And what they were promising…They were promising that they could win states like Texas. And again, it was totally illogical, but it was a very real threat that myself and others worked very hard to not just undermine, but to make sure that the people they were talking to understood, that their rhetoric just did not work, and their math did not work," she added.
No Labels National Political Director Joe Cunningham told Fox News on Thursday that the decision to abandon their efforts to find a third-party candidate for the presidential race was not made lightly.
"Let me say, it's not for lack of trying," Cunningham said on "Your World." "The short answer is that to field this ticket, No Labels was looking for a hero, and a hero never emerged."
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Democrat strategists and Biden allies have warned about a third-party candidate threatening Biden's campaign with increasing panic as the November election draws near.
MSNBC host and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki called third-party presidential candidates like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the "biggest challenge" to Biden’s re-election chances on the network last month.
Psaki noted that the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were focusing their efforts on taking on this threat.
"There is an aggressive effort that the campaign has been working with the Democratic National Committee on to run on this, but it needs to be broad, people need to be shouting it from the rooftops because this is one of the biggest threats to Joe Biden being re-elected — is these third-party candidates," the former White House official said.
Several Democratic strategists recently sounded the alarm to NBC News about the threat a third-party candidate poses, with one senior Democrat telling the outlet they were "freaked out" about how close the race could be.
Fox News' Charles Creitz and Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
