A recent Quinnipiac University poll found only 47% of registered voters in America would even consider voting for a third-party candidate for president. That percentage quickly gets worse when you put a name on that third party or candidate.
In the 57 presidential elections since the election of President George Washington (who ran as an independent, but became the figurehead of the Federalist Party), third-party candidates have garnered 5% or more of the vote on only 12 occasions.
Only once has a third party supplanted either of the two primary parties at the time of an election. The 1912 election saw “bull moose” Progressive Party nominee and former president, Teddy Roosevelt, win 88 votes in the Electoral College, surpassing his own hand-picked successor and the GOP nominee, but still losing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
In most presidential elections where third parties, fourth or fifth have even been a factor, they have played the role of spoiler, drawing votes largely from the party they dropped away from, typically handing victory to the opposition. Think H.
Ross Perot’s knockdown of a second term for President George H.W. Bush against Bill Clinton or Ralph Nader’s 2000 White House run as the Green Party nominee, peeling away just enough votes from then-VP Al Gore in Florida to give then-Texas Governor George Bush the popular and electoral votes of Florida, which (along with a favorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling), gave Bush the White House in January 2001.
This brings me to West Virginia U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, an independent-minded Democrat in an increasingly GOP-leaning state. When West Virginia Governor Jim Justice won his office in 2016 (while campaigning as a Democrat), he almost immediately switched parties to the GOP, where he subsequently won re-election. Justice is term-limited and now running as a Republican for Manchin’s seat in the U.S. Senate in 2024.
Manchin recently traveled to New Hampshire to speak to a huge crowd about the possibility of him running for president, as the lead of a new party called “The No Names,” sort of the political equivalent of generics, with a platform more focused on finding solutions than party seniority or pork.
Sounds like a great concept, except the premise is more fantasy than reality. Joining Manchin onstage were former Connecticut senator and Democratic V.P. nominee Joe Lieberman, and Jon Huntsman, a former GOP governor of Utah.
Lieberman, a longtime centrist, is credited with a lousy debate performance giving a much-needed “win” for GOP VP nominee Dick Cheney in 2000. Huntsman was an early casualty of the 2012 GOP White House field, won by Mitt Romney, also of Utah. And though Manchin is incredibly popular with D.C. media and the Sunday shows for his occasional “Maverick” status –somewhat similar to Arizona’s late senator, John McCain – recent polling for his senate seat shows re-election there is far from certain.
The two parties control Congress and state legislatures, which write the laws that control ballot access. Even the Libertarian Party did not secure ballot access in all 50 states until the 2020 election, and those ballot access procedures and thresholds vary between states and voter petitions, percentage of raw votes in the prior contests, etc.
Third parties do not have critical financial or people infrastructure on the ground, nor coverage of their primary process, which focuses attention and media coverage on their candidates, nor the national conventions which appear every four years for nights of fawning attention, offering days of airtime and millions of eyeballs and associated credibility to the Democratic and GOP nominees and platforms.
In 2016, two former GOP blue-state governors left their party and formed a strong ticket for the Libertarian Party. New Mexico’s former governor Gary Johnson was joined by former Massachusetts governor William Weld to form a ticket with very impressive resumes. The Johnson/Weld Libertarian Party ticket received 4,489,221 votes in the general election that year (including mine), representing just 3.28% of the popular vote.
Still, Johnson had nearly tripled the votes he received as the Libertarian nominee in 2012 when 1,275,971 votes (nearly 1%) were cast his way.
Granted, it appears the competition may be even weaker come the fall of 2024, but the last third-party candidate who made a credible enough run to win individual states was the American Independent Party candidacy of Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968. Wallace ran as an ardent segregationist, carrying five states of the Old South, and peeling enough votes off of a fellow Democrat, Senator Hubert Humphrey, to propel Richard Nixon into the White House.
Personally, I’d like to see Joe Manchin remain a U.S. senator, but The No Name Party? No chance.