Two things are true of third party presidential candidates. They never win elections.1 And most of them go unnoticed.
It’s impossible to be a third party candidate in a winner-take-all electoral system where the major parties get to write the rules. That’s why they all follow the same downward trajectory in public support, doing their best in spring and summer when people aren’t taking the election seriously, then cratering as November approaches and people decide they don’t want to waste their votes on a sure loser.
If you’re interested, I wrote a long post back in September about why third parties generally fail, where I predicted the No Labels organization would struggle to mount a third party effort this year.
That’s not to say third party candidates don’t have constituencies. There will always be people who can’t find what they’re looking for with Republicans or Democrats. I mean, almost two million people voted for the Libertarian ticket of Jo Jorgensen and Spike Cohen in 2020.
You probably never heard of the Jorgensen-Cohen ticket. That’s because very few third party candidates break through nationally. But the ones that do worry the major parties because they can make a mark on an election even in defeat.
Teddy Roosevelt was one of them. Running as a Bull Moose progressive in 1912 in an attempt to get his old job back, Roosevelt claimed 88 electoral votes and a second-place finish. That was enough to knock off incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and put Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House.
In 1968, George Wallace—running as a segregationist on the American Independent line—swept five states in the deep south that had long been essential to the Democratic party’s electoral coalition, denying them to Hubert Humphrey.
In 1980, moderate Republican congressman John Anderson attracted almost seven percent of voters who were disenchanted with incumbent Jimmy Carter but weren’t sold on challenger Ronald Reagan, permitting Reagan to claim an electoral vote landslide with just half the popular vote.
In 1992, businessman Ross Perot ran a populist independent campaign that attracted one in five voters, but he was shut out of the Electoral College because his support was evenly distributed across the country. Still, he was able to undercut incumbent George H. W. Bush and help elect Bill Clinton with only 43% of the vote.
What distinguishes these consequential third party candidates from their niche cousins is widespread grassroots support. Roosevelt had it. Wallace had it. So did Anderson and Perot.
Which brings us to today.
We have seen an unusually large number of third party candidates vie for attention this cycle. But none of them are riding a wave of popular support.
What we’re seeing instead is a top-down initiative funded by interests friendly to Donald Trump to field spoiler candidates to siphon votes away from Joe Biden. Those efforts are struggling because despite the widespread dissatisfaction with a Trump-Biden rematch, the public has shown no appetite for a third choice like they did in 1980 and 1992.
The failure of No Labels to attract a candidate to their deep-pocketed effort is illustrative.
An advocacy organization rather than a formal political party, No Labels was founded over a decade ago in the misguided belief that there was a political center at a time when people were sorting into red and blue camps. Their mission was to promote bipartisan solutions that would bridge the right and left, but their approach was top-down rather than bottom-up. In other words, no one was clamoring for what they were selling.
It’s true that people longed for bipartisanship in theory, but that broke down quickly when No Labels started talking about specifics. As I mentioned last September, I invited a No Labels representative to speak to my Washington Minimester program in 2012, during the Obama-Romney election. Obamacare had just been established and Romney was running against it, so we asked the No Labels official whether his organization viewed healthcare as a privilege (like Romney) or a right (like Obama). He said he couldn’t answer that question because No Labels hadn’t taken a position on it.
They couldn’t take a position on the most important issue in the election.
That’s the problem with bipartisanship in a hyper-partisan era.
This year, No Labels was determined to use the same top-down approach to wedge their way into the presidential race under the guise of fielding a compromise ticket that would attract the millions of people who professed their theoretical dissatisfaction with the major party options.
Only this time they operated in the shadows, refusing to reveal their donors in the wake of investigative reports claiming they were supported by a small number of wealthy individuals with ties to the financial world, including Clarence Thomas’ favorite benefactor Harlan Crow.
Their candidate selection process was as opaque as their funding. They planned—then ditched—the idea of holding a national convention in Dallas, turning instead to a secretive search committee to find a candidate. That committee considered just about everyone imaginable, from defeated Republican presidential candidates Chris Christie and Nikki Haley to Chris Sununu (the Republican governor of a New England state) and Andy Beshear (the Democratic governor of a border state).
There were no takers. Because there was no public interest in the No Labels effort. And No Labels had no way to win.
No Labels could only mount a spoiler campaign to help Trump. Which is what it looked like it was doing all along.
The demise of No Labels leaves three more-or-less prominent third party candidates in the mix. Perpetual Green Party candidate Jill Stein is likely to reprise the role she played in 2016, when she won about one percent of the vote. Activist and public intellectual Cornel West is running as an independent. Both are likely to appeal to left-leaning voters who do not feel represented by the Democratic party and would be unlikely to support any Democratic nominee.
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is also running as an independent and, like the No Labels operation, is being funded by right-leaning interests—and for the same reason. Kennedy is a novel candidate because his famous name gives him instant credibility, but his ideas—which tend toward the conspiratorial—are far removed from the Camelot legacy. His entire family has come out against him.
We have seen an unusually large number of third party candidates vie for attention this cycle. But none of them are riding a wave of popular support.
Kennedy is registering in polls at this point because he provides a place for unhappy voters to park before they get down to the serious business of looking at what’s at stake in this election. Like every other third party candidate, his support will start evaporating once things get real.
But Democrats are nervous that he will have enough funding, name recognition, and media attention to be the Ralph Nader of 2024. Nader, you may recall, was the progressive Green Party nominee in 2000 whose 97,000 votes in Florida far exceeded Al Gore’s margin of defeat in that decisive state.
With democracy on the line, these fears are entirely understandable. But three important caveats are in order.
First, Nader’s overall 2.7% of the vote only mattered because the 2000 election was essentially a tie. Joe Biden has plenty of time to unite his base and a rare opportunity to broaden his coalition. If he does, the combined third party vote will not be large enough to make a difference.
Second, it’s not at all clear whether the Kennedy name will draw more votes from Biden than Kennedy’s ideas will draw from Trump. Once they start paying attention, how many would-be Biden voters are going to support an anti-vax candidate who says antidepressants are responsible for school shootings?
Third, Kennedy has no grassroots support. Like No Labels, he is a top-down creation. He is not in the mold of those rare independents who upended elections on a wave of popular passion.
Even Nader was a well-established public figure—people knew what he stood for. They don’t know anything about Kennedy, but Biden has the money and motivation to make sure they find out. And when they do, there is a good chance his campaign will meet the same fate as No Labels in a year when dissatisfaction with the major party candidates has not been met with a groundswell of support for an alternative.
With the exception of 1860, when the major parties and the country were collapsing.
How many PhDs will be earned on some variation of a thesis that examines the media fallacy that all viewpoints are equally important and that balanced reporting no matter how ridiculous the alternative positions are is, a priori, the most critical element of fair journalism?
LOL! In some ways, Kennedy is scarier than Trump -- b/c Kennedy actually believes a lot of what he (Kennedy) says!
Sociopathic liar versus crazy man -- tough choice!