Third parties in America sound good until you try to stand one up
Former failed Democratic presidential candidate and failed NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang and two retired Republican elected officials, Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and David Jolly, a former congressman from Florida, have announced that they are launching a new political party, the Forward Party, in the hopes of saving America from “divisiveness and extremism” and giving a new home to the “moderate, common-sense majority.” It’s almost certainly not going to work.
Here’s why. It’s one thing to cite polls showing that a majority of Americans want a new major political party. That’s been true since the 1990s. It’s another thing to actually build one that can attract and hold a meaningful base and not get sidelined by our winner-take-all electoral process or marginalized by the media.
I’ve been tracking and writing about third parties in America for decades. In all that time, I’ve seen only two kinds. The first are narrow, ideological parties like the Libertarians or the Greens. While they have had success electing a handful of people to office, those are largely for local positions (mayor, city council) where elections are held without party labels. At the national level, the best they’ve done is get about 3% of the vote, which is what Ralph Nader garnered as a Green in 2000 and what Gary Johnson drew as a Libertarian in 2016. In a winner-take-all system, voters are understandably wary of voting for their first choice if that means it will help their least favorite choice win.
People tend to vote for these kinds of third-party candidates when they are really dissatisfied with the major party choices on the ballot, and occasionally those votes cause one or both of the major parties to shift in response. In 1997, Carol Miller, a Green candidate for Congress in northern New Mexico, got 17% of the vote in a special election, tilting the normally Democratic district into Republican hands. The next election, Democrats nominated a more liberal candidate, Tom Udall, for the seat and he won it back. Miller’s share of the three-way race dropped to 3.5%.
But most of the time, ideologically coherent third parties like the Greens or the Libertarians don’t play such pivotal roles and only manage to attract and hold onto people with very strong political beliefs. These parties’ devoted members tend to spend more time on internal debates than efforts to persuade less ideological voters to join them. As a result, their impact is limited and often more meaningful in the cultural rather than political arena.
The second kind of third-party effort is the one-and-done. Typically these are centered on a single charismatic leader or an established political official who breaks away from one of the major parties and takes voters with him. In the first category we’ve had people like Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who ran a quirky outsider campaign for president in 1992 and got 20% of the vote after doing well in the national debates; Minnesota’s Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler and talk radio host who built on Perot’s base and got elected governor there in 1998; and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who went from narrowly winning election as mayor of Burlington in 1980 to decades in Congress as an independent socialist.
In the second category we’ve had people like Connecticut’s independent governor Lowell Weicker, who quit the Republican party when he ran successfully for that office in 1990; and Angus King of Maine, who left the Democratic party before his successful bid to be that state’s governor in 1994. (He’s now an independent Senator who, like Sanders, caucuses with the Democrats.) None of these examples of successful individual runs for office have been translated into lasting success for third parties; Perot’s Reform Party only garnered 6% of the national vote in 1996 and essentially died after 2000. Sanders never invested any of his political capital building Vermont’s third-party, the Progressive Party, and indeed he has heightened his influence over national politics precisely by running as a Democrat for president in recent years, not by risking a marginal outcome like Nader’s. Weicker’s “A Connecticut Party” is a historical footnote.
Only third parties taking advantage of the few states where cross-endorsement, or fusion, is legal (or was never outlawed, like New York state), have managed to square the circle and build ongoing power on top of loyal voter support. That’s why the Working Families Party is such an interesting corrective to the claim that third parties can never succeed in the American system. That’s not true when the rules of the electoral process don’t force minor parties into a spoiler role.
Yang, Whitman and Jolly think this time will be different. They think there’s a silent majority of Americans who are equally unhappy with both parties and hungry for an alternative. Well, what people say to pollsters has only a distant relationship to how they translate those opinions into reality. If polls meant something tangible, then we’d be living in a country with strong gun control, a much higher minimum wage, universal access to legal abortions, and universal health care.
That said, if the 2024 presidential election is a repeat match-up of President Joe Biden versus former President Donald Trump, efforts like the Forward Party will get a good deal of media attention. That alone may sink Yang’s hopes. The cause he built his 2020 run on, universal basic income, has dropped from sight, and the one he’s been hyping more recently, the crypto/blockchain economy, is in free fall. (While I respect the fact that Yang built a devoted donor base in 2000, one that could very well help the Forward Party, I do wonder how many of those folks now rue the day they invested in things like bitcoin.) And the Forward Party won’t be the only new centrist third-party trying to catch the public’s eye. No Labels, another self-styled centrist group, is quietly trying to raise $50 million to get on the ballot in all fifty states. And there’s also a new Moderate Party trying to win changes in state election laws that would allow it to fuse with or cross-endorse major party candidates. All of these efforts may prove confusing to voters.
But the main reason why a pox-on-both-houses effort like the Forward Party is unlikely to make headway in 2024 is the glaring difference between the Trump Republican Party and the Biden Democratic Party today. One is deeply invested in denying the basic facts of American democracy and the other is, for all its other flaws, deeply invested in protecting democracy. If the choice comes back to a Trump-Biden rematch, I think few voters will be open to risking their vote on a third choice.