History says no to the first question and quite possibly yes to the second.
History says no to the first question and quite possibly yes to the second.
E very four years as a presidential election looms, more and more Americans talk about the chance that third-party or independent candidate will win the White House. With the conventional wisdom pointing to another matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a June Quinnipiac poll found that 47 percent of registered voters would consider an alternative to them.
Dissatisfaction is high enough that a bipartisan group called No Labels is planning to spend $70 million to get ballot status in all 50 states and run an independent “unity” ticket should the choice indeed be Trump vs. Biden. The decision on whether to run such a ticket and who would be on it would be made at a national nominating convention in Dallas next April.
No Labels recently held an event in New Hampshire featuring Democrat Joe Manchin, the senior senator from West Virginia, and Republican John Huntsman, a former governor of Utah.
Both men hinted they’d be available to run under a No Labels banner. Both said they want to offer Americans an alternative that would seek “solutions” to problems rather than “gridlock.” And Huntsman clearly believes that many people want an alternative. “I mean if we ended up in 2024 with the same set of nominees that we did 2020 . . . is that insanity?” he asked. “Is that the definition of insanity or what?”
No Labels released a set of principles at the meeting that reflected a sort of gauzy, vague centrism that appeared designed to appeal to as many people as possible by offering few specific policy proposals.
That kind of approach gradually loses altitude when the rough-and-tumble of the actual campaign begins and voters demand more specifics. Already, a Monmouth poll this month found that only 2 percent of voters would definitely vote for, say, a Manchin-Huntsman ticket, and just 14 percent said they would probably vote for them. Political columnist Ed Kilgore points out that “traditionally support for third-party or independent candidacies begins to fade as actual voting grows nigh amid fears of ‘wasted votes.’”
Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News and the country’s leading expert on third-party and independent efforts to secure ballot status, is also skeptical that a third-party candidate could capture a majority of the Electoral College and be elected president. He notes that the high-water mark for independent candidates in the past 100 years was Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Perot won 20 million votes, or 19 percent, but didn’t capture a single state. “Perot was a true outsider and had heroically risked his life to go to Iran and rescue his employees after they were trapped there by the Islamic Revolution,” Winger says. “I don’t see anyone running next year who could surpass his appeal.”
Nonetheless, Winger believes that the stage is set for a third-party candidate to make a real difference in determining which major-party candidate will win.
An Economist/YouGov poll in June found that 59 percent of voters are thumbs down on the idea of Biden running again, and 56 percent are against Trump seeking another term. “When you zoom in on those unfavorably inclined toward Trump and Biden, 22 percent of adults had an unfavorable view of both men,” GOP pollster David Winston says.
That represents a degree of alienation seldom if ever seen in modern presidential polling. “Usually, most Americans like at least one of the candidates running for president. That has been the norm for most of polling history,” says Harry Enten, the senior data reporter for CNN. “Just 5% of voters said they had an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump in the final 2020 CNN poll.”
Third-party candidates nonetheless did play a role in determining the close elections in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, a historically high number of voters picked third-party candidates. Libertarian Gary Johnson won 3 percent of the national vote, and Jill Stein of the Green Party won more than 1 percent. But in the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, fewer voters hated both candidates, and only 2 percent plumped for third-party choices.
That made a huge difference. Take Pennsylvania. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by 48.2 percent to 47.5 percent. In 2020, Trump’s share of the vote grew to 48.7 percent. But a decline in third-party voting allowed Biden to win the key state by 49.9 percent to Trump’s 48.7 percent.
Wisconsin provides another example. Trump won it in 2016, by 47.2 percent to 46.5 percent. But in 2020, Biden got 49.5 percent and Trump 48.8 percent.
Exit polls show that among voters who disliked both candidates, Trump won by 19 points in 2016. But in 2020, Biden defeated Trump with those voters by more than two to one.
Democrats fear that their chances of keeping the White House will go down if No Labels runs a candidate and provides a vehicle for protest votes. Indeed, a June NBC News poll reported that, “among Democrats, 45% say they’d consider backing a third-party or independent presidential candidate, compared to 52% that wouldn’t. By comparison, 34% of Republicans would consider backing another candidate while 63% wouldn’t.”
That explains why Democrats are desperately trying to stop No Labels. They’re trashing any thought that a third party can win, and they’re even filing lawsuits to keep No Labels off the ballot in Arizona.
“No third-party candidate has ever come remotely close to winning, including Theodore Roosevelt, running on a Progressive Party ticket just four years after leaving office as an enormously popular Republican president,” said a recent joint statement from the leaders of a coalition of Democratic groups that range from the centrist Third Way to the left-wing MoveOn.
But Republicans have their own agita about possible third-party politics in 2024. What if a vengeful Donald Trump fails to win the GOP nomination and launches his own independent candidacy?
Trump has often talked about just that possibility. But a new study in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy throws cold water on the idea. “Sore loser” laws in many states ban a candidate from running as an independent or third-party candidate if the candidate has previously run in the same race under a different banner. Trump couldn’t mount such a campaign because, given these sore-loser laws, he would be denied ballot access in 28 states, totaling 290 electoral votes.
If both the No Labels push and a potential Trump third-party “spoiler” effort ended up not materializing, would that mean that third parties played no role in the 2024 election? Not at all.
Winger believes that the Libertarian Party will once again be on the ballot in all 50 states, and that the candidacy of left-wing activist Cornel West will allow the Green Party to appear on at least the 44 state ballots that 2016 nominee Jill Stein was on.
Expect Democrats to be especially active in trying to stop Cornel West’s Green Party candidacy. In 2020, they succeeded in denying Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins a spot on the Pennsylvania ballot because he had faxed in his documentation papers rather than hand-delivered them.
Running as a truly competitive third-party presidential candidate is as challenging as, say, climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. But increasing political polarization combined with the fact that Right and lLeft are so evenly divided in voting strength means that even the small number of voters who gravitate toward third parties can have an outsized effect on the results.
The continued failure of the two major parties to back candidates who can appeal across ideological lines means that there will always be a group of voters who reject “the lesser of two evils” binary choice served up by Democrats and Republicans alike.