Can a Third-Party Candidate Succeed?

February 14, 2024

A political scientist and Wall Street Journal columnist join the governors to discuss our two-party system and if a third-party candidate could be successful.

America’s process for electing our president involves a series of “winner take all” primaries across the country. The process makes it very difficult for a candidate from a third party to break through and receive any electoral votes, and has, for all practical purposes, created a two-party system. Has this system effectively served as a source of moderation, as intended? Is that the case today? And could a third-party candidate be successful in 2024?  In this episode, our hosts, former Tennessee Governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, and their guests, discuss the pros and cons of the two-party system and what it would take for our next elected president to represent neither one.

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“A powerful incentive”

Dan DiSalvo, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, kicked off his conversation with the governors by explaining that the United States is in effect a two-party country because of the structure of our winner-take-all election system.

“The result of that is to strongly encourage a two-party system simply because if you have three candidates in a race, and even if two of them get 30% each and that’s 60% of the vote and one candidate gets 40%, that candidate with 40%, even though its less than a majority of the vote, wins all the votes,” he said. “So that gives a powerful incentive, you could say, for the other two candidates to combine in the future.”

He added that this system is unlikely what the Founders had in mind at the Constitutional Convention. “Most of our Founding Fathers were, like many Americans today, quite skeptical of political parties,” he said. “You could look back at many statements by Thomas Jefferson, who wouldn’t go to heaven if he had to go there with a political party, John Adams’ great fear of two parties dividing the country, Washington’s farewell address…So, in that sense, I doubt they conceived of it this way.”

“Unrealistic at best, and dangerous at worst”

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and Wall Street Journal columnist, helped found No Labels, a centrist political organization with a mission to support bipartisanship, but withdrew from the group last spring over his concerns about its “unrealistic at best, and dangerous at worst” plans to run a third-party candidate for president.

There is “really almost no room for a third party” in the United States, he told the governors. “If you’re not part of the two-party system, you get ahead in American politics in one of two ways. Either you take over one of the two existing parties, or you form a party that displaces one of the two existing parties, the way the Republicans ended up displacing the Whigs.”

Galston acknowledged that while electoral victory is unrealistic, there is one way that third parties can still have influence and advocate for change: convincing one of the two major parties to pay more attention to issues or constituencies they may have otherwise overlooked. He pointed to an example from his time working in the White House during the Clinton Administration. “Bill Clinton had to make a choice between a relatively fiscally responsible, interest-rate oriented approach to his first couple of budgets on the one hand, and on the other hand, a more expansive, stimulus-oriented, more traditional democratic budget,” Galston said. “And he opted for the former, I am convinced in part because Ross Perot garnered 19% of the popular vote, which was a very strong showing for a third-party candidate.”

“Not about any particular candidate or any particular party”

Both DiSalvo and Galston noted that while polling and survey data shows a growing interest in a third party, the situation is more nuanced than the numbers may indicate.

“The expression of support for a third-party is also expression of support for a general idea, not about any particular candidate or any particular party,” DiSalvo said. “One could imagine that once a particular party emerged or a particular candidate emerged, the support might well fall.”

Galston pointed out that the people who are most dissatisfied with our current two-party system are not just in the middle of the political spectrum. “It’s much more complicated than that. In fact, they’re all over the map,” he said. “There are lots of people who want a party left of the existing Democratic party. There are a lot of people, not as many, but still a lot, who’d like a party that’s more purely conservative in one sense or another than the existing Republican party. And yes, then there are those people in the middle,” he said. “So, if you open the door to a multi-party system, the evidence suggests that you wouldn’t get three, you’d get more like six.”

“A refocus on American civics”

What can be done to address the high levels of dissatisfaction with our two-party system? DiSalvo pointed to education initiatives and in particular, “a refocus on American civics,” as a potential first step.

“I think there’s mounting evidence to suggest that while Americans are turning out to vote more – adult Americans – they’re less well informed than in the past about the basic features of our constitutional system,” he said. “A stunning number in some recent polls, as much as 20% of adults, couldn’t name one branch of the national government. That’s deeply problematic.”

Education and civics initiatives like University of Tennessee’s Institute of American Civics could help, he told the governors, in part by improving the way that citizens evaluate how the government is working. “People have to understand that our system is designed in some ways to generate conflict between the Legislative and the Executive, and that’s natural and a normal part of the system, and it’s also designed to be slow and, in a sense, require a pretty broad national consensus before you legislate on matters of major public concern,” DiSalvo said. “So, if the country’s very divided and the national government isn’t acting with great alacrity, the system’s actually working the way it’s supposed to be designed to work, but that’s not appreciated if you don’t understand that kind of gritty quotidian reality of how the institutions are structured.”