No Labels boosters say 2025 will be the year of bipartisan cooperation, with resurgent energy and support from high-profile politicians. It’s just that after a year in which their own attempts at political nirvana fell flat, they don’t have the answers for what exactly bipartisan success will look like.
At the centrist group’s Power to the Middle conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Republicans and Democrats repeatedly referred to some of the contentious things to come — a one-seat GOP majority in the House and Democrats vowing to turn rightward on immigration, among others — as an opportunity for unprecedented bipartisan collaboration.
“I’m optimistic. I see in this administration an opportunity to pass a lot of policy proposals that we couldn’t get under a Democratic administration,” Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez said.
Their optimism was underscored by plenty of symbols of bipartisanship — there were No Labels staff in purple shirts and speakers in purple ties, an on-the-nose playlist (featuring Zedd’s “The Middle” and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You”) and lighthearted rapport between lawmakers (“I work out with this guy every morning,” Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer said of Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin).
The key to furthering all of this successful bipartisanship, according to lawmakers? “Doing our damn job,” California Democratic Rep. Jimmy Panetta said.
Panetta’s declaration was a theme that continually came up Thursday among those involved with No Labels, the group that sparked the creation of the House Problem Solvers Caucus in 2017 and has since unsuccessfully attempted to gain ballot access to run a third-party presidential candidate. In panels and speeches, Democrats and Republicans implored their colleagues to put aside partisan fighting and uncompromising extremes and focus instead on advancing legislation on energy, infrastructure, reducing the national deficit and strengthening border security.
But despite urging each other to just get to work, many of the No Labels speakers simply talked about opportunities for collaboration, stopping short of disclosing any concrete plans.
Lawmakers see their chances. There was Gonzalez’s assessment of the second Trump administration as an opportunity to pass stricter border policy. Rep. Mike Lawler said that “there should be real opportunity here to find common ground to build consensus on critical issues from the economy to taxes to the border to housing.” And Sen. Lisa Murkowski said that “we’re going to have to read the early signs from the Trump administration to see if there’s an opportunity” to make bipartisan headway on legal immigration.
Some politicians said they don’t know how exactly they’ll capitalize on these opportunities or make all their bipartisan dreams happen.
“How do we deal with that? I’m not sure that I have the solution,” Sen. Thom Tillis said while discussing how members of Congress should resist the constant partisan pressure that’s come to define this day and age.
Sure, several lawmakers cited the bipartisan policy wins of their past as evidence that working across the aisle is achievable. Republican Sen.-elect John Curtis, who currently represents Utah’s 3rd Congressional District, highlighted his founding of the Conservative Climate Caucus in the House. Murkowski patted herself on the back for helping negotiate a bipartisan COVID-19 relief package and the bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021. Sen. Susan Collins explained how she worked closely with Democratic colleague Sen. Jeanne Shaheen to strike up a bipartisan agreement for the broadband section of the infrastructure law.
But when it comes to the future, what some lawmakers hailed as avenues for cooperation, others dismissed as pipe dreams that wouldn’t actually tackle everyday issues. Collins, for instance, said she’s “impressed” by Elon Musk’s cabinet aspirations, and Rep. Dan Meuser called the Department of Government Efficiency a “terrific” idea. Others weren’t so sure.
“DOGE can make these cuts, which is fine, but they sure as hell ain’t going to solve the state of our fiscal health unless we do something seriously,” Panetta said.
Some of Thursday’s speakers were still less fixed on winning the future than explaining the past. Rep. Ritchie Torres, for one, participated in his fair share of election postmortems.
“The reason we lost the election was not white supremacy. It was not misogyny. It was incompetence,” the New York Democrat said.
And while even the No Labels theme song (which was recorded by Akon for the group’s launch in 2010 and played at least three times over the course of the day on Thursday) urged Americans to reach across party lines — “See a man with a blue tie, see a man with a red tie, so how about we tie ourselves together and get it done” — there was still some palpable partisan tension in the air.
After Tillis called on lawmakers to hold people accountable, Rep. Seth Moulton responded with, “Well, I hope you’ll hold Pete Hegseth accountable. We’ll see.”
And Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said there are some things he just won’t welcome bipartisan compromise on, citing Trump’s recent promises about prosecuting members of the House Jan. 6 committee.
“There’s some things where you can’t split the middle, split the difference between good and bad, truth and fiction. So every day, I think, in the Senate, we’re going to be walking in like, ‘Where can we advance today and what do we have to stand up against?’”
Of course, there were some digs at Democrats from No Labels staff themselves — yet another reference to the legal battles the group has been engaged in as part of its quest to turn from a Problem Solvers Caucus backer into something of a political party.
In January, the group asked the Department of Justice to investigate its allegations that Democratic groups carried out “highly coordinated, conspiratorial, partisan and often unlawful conspiracy” to derail No Labels’ quest for ballot access across the nation. No Labels had gained ballot access in more than a dozen states at that point and had not named a candidate for its ballot line.
Documents from an ongoing lawsuit suggest that Democratic operatives and other nonpartisan groups, like Third Way, were part of plans to publicly paint No Labels as a Trump ally.
“When we were going through two years of the ballot access project, the unity ticket, we knew we had a lot of opposition, but we did not know the extent and nature of how low they would go to attack us,” Dan Webb, who serves on No Labels’ governing board, said Thursday.
Outside of No Labels-affiliated lawmakers and operatives, it remains to be seen how many people will back the bipartisan message that some are trying to put at the center of the 119th Congress and the second Trump administration.
Republican Rep.-elect Brandon Gill told NOTUS last week that he doesn’t “believe in bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship.”
“I’m totally open to working with Democrats, but I’m not going to back down from my principles in the things that my district sent me to D.C. to do,” he said.
Others, though, have suggested they’re all in on bipartisanship. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a co-chair of the moderate Blue Dog Democrat coalition who’s touted her bipartisan record during her tenure in the House, said Thursday that she’s “willing to work with anyone.”
“It’s just about having a lens that is relevant, and a willingness … to just tell the truth as you see it,” she said.
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Riley Rogerson contributed reporting.