2024 would seem to be ripe for a third-party candidate. The likely nominees of both major parties are deeply unpopular. Prominent independent contenders, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, have already announced bids. And the deep-pocketed group No Labels is eyeing its own potential yet-to-be named ticket.
“There is a huge opening for third parties,” said Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University who studies third party movements in the United States and is the author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties.”
They almost certainly won’t win the White House. But in a close race between presumptive nominees Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a third-party candidate could easily siphon off enough votes in one state or another to tip the election. They could absolutely play “spoiler.”
Unlike today, however, third parties of the past were more deliberate about “spoiling with a purpose,” Tamas said.
Successful third parties rallied voters around an issue or a policy agenda that was being ignored by the major parties. Victory was claimed not by winning an election but when one or both of the parties engaged on the issue, and effectively co-opted it as their own. Think of Ross Perot’s obsession with the deficit — an issue he forced onto the national agenda in 1992 while snagging nearly 20 percent of the popular vote.
The third-party contenders now reaching for the White House don’t have a galvanizing issue behind them — and that’s one reason why, despite polling that suggests an unprecedented appetite for third party candidates, Tamas thinks the independent candidates are likely to fade come November.
Still, in an uncertain political environment, they can’t be counted out.
“Successful third parties are like tidal waves,” he said. “You don’t really know that they’re here until they’re coming at you.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Third parties are not as powerful as they were about 100 years ago, but they’ve been growing in popularity in recent decades. How do you see their role in 2024?
I think that there is a huge opening for third parties, especially a moderate conservative party, one that actually would be a more traditional conservative party now that the Republicans have shifted so far to the right and in the MAGA direction.
There is this giant gaping hole. I would think the Libertarians would be the perfect group to step into this, but the Libertarians don’t seem interested in that. They seem very stuck on the issues that they’ve always been stuck on since the 1970s.
So there would be a real possibility for third parties to actually take a shot at making a significant change in American politics. But that’s not really what we’re seeing.
What we’re seeing is the third parties — the established ones, the Greens and the Libertarians — basically sticking to where they’ve always been strategically. And then there are these other groups coming in that seem to be doing nothing more than promoting candidates at the presidential level.
I do think that they have a real chance of producing a spoiler effect on the presidential level. But other than that, I’m not sure that they will have much impact.
Explain the difference between when you have a third party that aims to push for change in the political conversation and runs candidates at all levels of the ballot, versus just at the presidential level.
The traditional third-party strategy is referred to as “sting like a bee.” What third parties do is they come in and they present a new galvanizing issue, something that the major parties have been ignoring, and present it in a way that forces the major parties to respond.
This is why they have a quick rise: They’re suddenly presenting something that the public has been wanting to hear — often more at the moderate end, not the extremes.
Then the usual reaction is the major parties turn around and co-opt the rhetoric and the issues. Once they do that, the third party gets what it wants policy-wise, but they also no longer have a constituency. So they disappear.
Now to make that work, the [third] parties can’t just run a presidential candidate, they really have to be pushing at all levels at the same time. Because that’s the only way to create that kind of threat.
The spoiler effects that you see potentially playing out in 2024, walk me through what could happen there.
I think the way to understand what’s going on right now is that American voters aren’t just polarized, they’re also calcified. Meaning that there are very, very few voters that are going to shift as far as we can tell.
A few decades ago, the presidential vote could rise and fall by huge percentages. And these days, elections are won by a few percentage points, and they’re always very, very close. What that means is that a third-party candidate doesn’t have to take that many votes in order to shift the election from one candidate to another.
If Donald Trump doesn’t even need to get more votes than Joe Biden to win because of the Electoral College, all these candidates would have to do is pull maybe 1 percent, 2 percent of the vote from Biden compared to Trump and that would flip the election over to the Republicans, for example.
I struggle with when do I call someone a “spoiler” and when do I not. What is spoiling an election, especially for the third-party candidates who are just trying to push the conversation or push certain policies, even if they don’t win?
I think a successful third party is spoiling with a purpose. They’re at least threatening with a purpose. And what I’m not seeing, in most of these cases, is the policy goal. Maybe with the exception of the Greens and on the left, most of the policy goals aren’t very clear to me.
Take No Labels, for example. They’re saying, “We need a moderate opposition” and “We should neither be left or right.” But the reasons for running are that nobody’s happy with the two major candidates and Joe Biden is very old, and these are not galvanizing issues. They’re not the type of thing that could really pull voters and it’s not the type of thing that would have an impact on the major parties.
You have to look at what exactly, for example, the No Labels party is actually trying to achieve — other than what they’re being accused of, which is that they’re actually trying to spoil the election in favor of Donald Trump.
I think third parties are gaining a lot more attention this time because of the stakes of the election and because the assumption is that the election is going to be so close. I think Democrats are particularly concerned about this. Whether they are accurately reading that it’s going to hurt them more is unclear. But it’s a giant open question whether this is going to help the Democrats or the Republicans more. The Democratic strategists think it’ll help the Republicans more, but nobody knows that for sure.
What I tell people is all I know for sure is it’s going to be interesting this year.
If it’s anything like almost every election since 2000, it will be a nail biter. It’s probably going to be extremely close. And so this is really what’s making the third party candidates at the presidential level so much more important.
Here’s another thing: A lot of people are looking at polls right now and saying there’s so many people who want the third-party candidates. And there’s many who are arguing that they would vote for third parties — a third party candidate at the presidential level — but those polls are really not very predictive. Because most people, in the end, no matter what they say, wind up voting for either the Democratic or Republican candidate.
I think Americans in general like the idea of having more political parties and more choices, but at the end of the day, there always seems to be this shift back to the major parties.
What signs would you look for, especially as we get closer to November, for a Ross Perot-type candidate with someone gaining significant support?
Successful third-party candidates or successful third parties are like tidal waves. You don’t really know that they’re here until they’re coming at you. They rise very fast, and they just kind of emerge, and it’s always somewhat unexpected.
The reason I don’t think it’s likely now is because to the degree that there are galvanizing issues, there’s nothing that neither party is not owning. Abortion right now is a major galvanizing issue. But the Democrats basically own that one right now. And so if somebody is pro-choice and concerned about changes in the law, they’re not going to go for a third party candidate. They’re going to vote against the Republican Party effectively and vote for the Democrats.
The other thing is that if third parties and third-party candidates really want to be successful, they have to innovate. They can’t run a standard campaign and somehow hope that people will just vote for them.
Unless you see this kind of action, I’m finding it unlikely that this will be a year of a major third-party breakthrough.
Let’s also talk about other obstacles for third parties. You’ve explained before that increased requirements for ballot access actually don’t have a connection to a decrease in third parties in the U.S. I think a lot of people would be surprised by that.
We can start with ballot access laws, which are determined state by state: how many signatures or other requirements to get candidates onto the ballot so you don’t have to write their name in but can just select them. And those laws have gotten very hard in many states over the last 100 years.
In the early part of the 20th century, it used to be really easy. And then the states just kept making requirements bigger and bigger and bigger, and there was an assumption that this is what is killing third parties.
Well, it turned out after looking at the data that this had practically nothing to do with third parties running into problems, because if it’s an actual third-party organization, that’s something they can do. They can go out and get signatures.
And the Libertarians and the Greens are getting on the ballot all over the country. The ballot access laws are not stopping them; they’re annoying them. They’re a real problem for people like Cornel West, who doesn’t have an organization. For him, it’s a real problem.
Let’s talk about money. Whether you’re a little more established like the Greens or the Libertarians, or a group like No Labels which supposedly has a lot of money, or total upstarts like Kennedy or West, how do you see that obstacle playing out in this race?
I think that money is the number one problem facing third parties today. This is the big difference between us and other political systems that run elections like us, like the United Kingdom or Canada — where compared to us, it’s relatively cheap to run candidates. Third parties do quite well there.
Here, on the one hand, there’s no public funding at all. And on the other hand, it requires an enormous amount of money to run a campaign, and this is at all levels. And so it will be very, very hard for the candidates to gain the kind of attention, the kind of exposure that they want, in order to have a significant impact.
Third parties have to look at themselves more as guerrilla campaigns. You have to look at it almost like you’re a startup and you’re fighting against Microsoft and Google. That requires some sort of a strategy that isn’t copying the way the major parties run campaigns. Because if you do it the way they do it, they’re going to clobber you.
To make an impact as a third party, you do not need 30 percent of the vote or 40 percent of the vote. You need 10 percent, you need 12 percent, you need something so that the major parties are scared of you.
You do not need to win. There’s all kinds of reports out on how it’s ridiculous to run a third party candidate because you will never win the election. That’s not the point of third-party candidates in the United States. The point of third-party candidates in the United States is to push some significant issues that are not being addressed and to scare the major parties into taking those issues seriously.
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