No Labels = No Supporters

I predicted back in November that No Labels would fizzle, but it's remarkable to see the lack of interest. Despite widespread media coverage and a December launch event that drew numerous high-profile politicians, the group has only managed to attract 18,697 signatures for its No Labels Declaration ("We are not labels -- we are people"). It's the same tepid response we saw to Unity '08 (124,000 members in twenty months) and Draft Bloomberg (11,600 signatures in six weeks) during the 2006-2008 period.

To put these results in perspective, here's how the No Labels, Unity '08, and Draft Bloomberg efforts compare to a petition asking the videogame company Blizzard Entertainment to include a LAN option in Starcraft 2, which reached 250,000 signatures in a little over a year*:

As you can see, No Labels is barely outpacing Draft Bloomberg, though it is doing better than Unity '08. All three, however, are dwarfed by the Starcraft 2 petition, which just underscores a point I've made many times before -- despite all the media hype, these groups have little popular support and almost no chance of changing the system.

* I constructed these lines using time-stamped blog posts by myself and others noting the number of signatures on each petition.

Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster.

Cross-posted to brendan-nyhan.com.