Three's a Crowd

Flickr/Gage Skidmore


It’s not going to happen.


As Brendan Nyhan documents, we've heard all of this before (and Fournier is a specialist). I won't say it's impossible that we'll get a "serious" third-party candidate in one of the next few presidential cycles, but it's not likely, and to the larger point, the parties are most certainly not cracking up. To the contrary: The Democratic and Republican Parties are unusually strong right now, which is why politics is so polarized.

If anything, significant third-party runs, in which a candidate seemed to have at least a solid chance at either winning electoral votes or getting at least 10 percent of the national vote, appear to be ebbing. They showed up in 1948, 1968, 1980, 1992, and 1996, but not since then.

Third-party runs are usually an effect of an unpopular president running for re-election; that accounts more or less for each of those postwar cases, although the incumbent in 1968 dropped out and the incumbent in 1996 wound up much more popular by election day than he had been earlier in the cycle. By that pattern, we could easily have had significant third-party runs in 2004 and especially 2012 (since Barack Obama entered his re-election year with approval ratings under 50 percent), but it didn't happen.

The logic behind the timing of third-party runs is pretty straightforward. When an incumbent president is popular and running for another term—think Ronald Reagan in 1984—most loosely attached voters will vote for the incumbent; the hard-core opposition, naturally, votes for its candidate. If, however, the incumbent is unpopular, then those loosely attached voters are up for grabs. Think about 1992, when George H.W. Bush was unpopular. Most swing voters had supported him over a Democrat in 1988 (since, after all, he won solidly in that year) so switching to the Democrats would be, in a sense, admitting they made a mistake. Voting for Ross Perot (or, early in the cycle, planning to vote for Perot) might be more like switching to something newly available.

Nor can disgruntled voters do much in the presidential primaries. Even if the incumbent president is challenged, as George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were, he’s unlikely to lose or to give significant policy concessions to the faction supporting the challenger. After the primaries are over, those who supported the primary challenge may for a time be open to a third party. They’ll usually wind up switching back to the party they are normally attached to, and third-party candidates fade, but in the meantime it’s a source of at least ephemeral third-party support.

In 2016, however, with no incumbent on the ballot, that logic doesn’t hold. Both parties appear to be on equal footing, and usually put up reasonably strong candidates—and the nomination process tends to work out whatever divisions exist within the parties.

More generally, the GOP and Democratic parties appear to be quite healthy. It's worth noting at the local level, even a successful independent run usually only demonstrates how strong the parties really are. That certainly seems to be the story with Angus King's independent run for the Senate from Maine in 2012. King, as he began his independent run, appeared to be wildly popular and a real threat to win. So the party closest to his positions—the Democrats—essentially absorbed him, abandoning their own candidate. When he arrived in the Senate, he wound up caucusing with the Democrats. Odds are he’ll wind up being hard to distinguish from the rest of the Democratic caucus as long as he remains in the Senate, just like independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sure, he may have more room to take idiosyncratic positions on some policy issues, but that’s about it.

At any rate, while rogue candidates remain possible, the parties as a whole are strong; in fact, over the last 30 or so years the parties have expanded to fill up more and more of the political space of the nation—not less. The partisan press now competes and sometimes eclipses the old neutral press; partisan think tanks and other party-oriented policy makers are far more prominent now than in the midcentury era in which neutral expertise was valued by both parties; and of course in Congress partisan polarization is at record highs. Voters still report hating the parties, but they vote more like partisans now than they did in the 1960s and 1970s. Those are not signs of a coming party crack-up.

Certainly, the parties have their problems, and individual decisions matter quite a bit when it comes to third party runs, and are inherently difficult or impossible to predict. Yes, a zillionaire could always jump in; yes, it’s always possible that a losing faction in one of the parties could run a spoiler campaign, despite all the incentives not to that usually hold. Overall, however, there’s really no reason to believe that third parties are going to be any more successful in the next decade than they have been for the last two. Even if pundits and even some practitioners always see it coming.


I'm inclined to believe the two-party *system* is not going to be replaced, but history shows us that at times of severe stress on the political system, political parties with no solutions to current problems *can* be displaced. (See 1859-60.) When neither political party is capable of governance, the *system* is wide open.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and yet, here we are. When both Republicans and Democrats have failed, a political party that asserts real leadership can make inroads into displacing one of the entrenched parties.

I suppose everyone has forgotten when the Republican Party had 1/2 the registration of the Democratic Party, more than half of the Republicans were "Rockerfeller Republicans", and they won lots of elections. That was a mere 50 years ago. I don't think they are going the way of the dinosaur -- yet. A lot of hubris, a lot of humbling, and -- They'll Be Back!

I'm not sure why this subject keeps coming up this way, as if the failure of 3rd parties in America reflects some kind of political failure, or lack of will. It has nothing to do with the weakness of our politics and politicians, nor does it reflect some sort of corruption.

As long as elections are structured in a winner take all, first person to get 51% wins, there is a natural tendency to produce a duopoly sort of structure. 3rd parties can't really break this down from a practical 'game theory' view.

There will be no success for 3rd parties in America unless the structure of the elections is changed to a proportional representation system of some sort. And even then, things like the congress committees are also structured in a winner-take-all kind of fashion.

It's just a deeply structural aspect of the whole system.

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