Just because they say they're a "national grassroots movement" doesn't make it so
After I wrote up Mark Schmitt's look at No Labels and other pretending-to-be-independent third party efforts, I was curious to find out just how much actual support No Labels was getting. So I did some digging around.
Their web traffic? Inconsequential. Their traffic is so irrelevant that Quantcast
can't even hazard a guess.
So I decided to sign up at the No Labels site to see if I could glean any information, and I hit the mother lode—the site tells me exactly how many people have joined in each state. The results? Hilarious. Here's their total membership, by state:
Alaska (7), Alabama (12), Arizona (16), Arkansas (9), California (38), Colorado (11), Connecticut (8), Delaware (2), DC (12), Florida (30), Georgia (17), Hawaii (2), Idaho (3), Illinois (17), Indiana (11), Iowa (6), Kansas (7), Kentucky (10), Louisiana (6), Maine (10), Maryland (13), Massachusetts (10), Michigan (10), Minnesota (6), Mississippi (3), Missouri (9), Montana (2), Nebraska (4), Nevada (9), New Hampshire (5), New Jersey (16), New Mexico (3), New York (16), North Carolina (14), North Dakota (3), Ohio (13), Oklahoma (5), Oregon (12), Pennsylvania (10), Rhode Island (6), South Carolina (6), South Dakota (4), Tennessee (5), Texas (17), Utah (6), Vermont (4), Virginia (22), Washington (15), West Virginia (2), Wisconsin (4) and Wyoming (3).
That makes for a grand total of 491 individuals, despite massive political media coverage for almost a full year.
Wow. The bar to call yourself a "nationwide grassroots movement" sure is low these days!
While those numbers might best fellow no-party efforts like Nathan (son of Tom) Daschle's pathetic Ruck.us (especially in the consultant demographic!), they obviously prove that there's zero genuine grassroots appetite for a consultant-driven Beltway creation that seeks to promote the likes of Joe Lieberman and budget austerity.
Anyone that associates with them is, by definition, a loser.