Is there an opening for a third party? Elon Musk seems to think so, as he announced a new America Party this weekend.
My recent newsletter on this question elicited a lot of feedback. The replies were mostly about the obstacles facing a third party, and they are indeed quite formidable. They’re so formidable that they will probably prevent the emergence of one, even if conditions are favorable.
The same must be said for Mr. Musk’s new party. This article won’t focus on his effort, which so far consists of a social media post. The conditions for a “neoliberal” third party like Mr. Musk’s may be in place, but the single likeliest outcome is that it fails to win anything at all.
As I put it, the conditions for pandas to breed may be in place when you put two pandas in a room, but it doesn’t mean breeding is likely. Add Mr. Musk’s unique political liabilities and the path only gets harder.
Still, many readers wanted to know more about how a third party — again, this isn’t about the America Party — could actually succeed in the face of so many clear obstacles.
Here are a few possible paths:
Wasting votes
The American electoral system tends to favor a two-party system, and one of the most important reasons is that it’s winner-take-all.
It doesn’t have proportional representation, which might allow a third party to gain a modest number of seats with a modest share of the vote. Most states don’t employ ranked choice voting, which could hypothetically allow a third party’s voters to eventually transfer their support to a major party. And unlike a parliamentary system, the presidency doesn’t lend itself to coalition government.
With third parties unlikely to obtain power, people often see a vote for a third party as a wasted vote that might be better spent ensuring their preferred major party prevails. This is a serious problem, as a reader, David Rea, noted:
I’m glad you decided to write about 3rd parties, but I was surprised (and disappointed) that you didn’t address the game theoretic elephant in the room: A plurality voting system creates a nearly insurmountable psychological barrier to entry for 3rd parties, one that limits voters’ willingness to risk “wasting their vote” on a candidate who is not perceived as having a chance.
The “wasted vote” problem is clearly a very significant issue for third parties, and probably a prohibitive one. But there are paths to overcoming it.
The simplest path is if a third party polls so well that it seems viable against the major parties. This is not without precedent. In presidential politics, Ross Perot briefly led polls in 1992. Similarly, independent candidates have led polls for governor, Senate and House and ultimately won, like Angus King (governor and senator) in Maine and Jesse Ventura (governor) in Minnesota.
A more clever path: Exploit America’s predictable and polarized political geography. In the 80 percent of states and districts that aren’t competitive between the major parties, a third party could flip the script and argue that the usually doomed minority party is the possible spoiler, not the new third party. The usual minority party may as well drop out and give the third party a shot.
This path to competitiveness isn’t without precedent. Over the last decade, three independent candidates in otherwise noncompetitive races for U.S. Senate (Kansas in 2014, Utah in 2022 and Nebraska in 2024) wound up losing but succeeded in setting up a one-on-one matchup against Republicans, as Democrats concluded the independent had a better chance to win.
This trick is harder to pull off in a presidential election, as the House decides the winner if no candidate receives 270 electoral votes. For this reason, a third party would have a lot of advantages over an independent candidate for president.
With only a handful of seats, a third party could represent the balance of power in Congress, as Mr. Musk mentioned this weekend, whether for determining control or electing a president in the House if no candidate amasses 270 electoral votes.
Ballot access
Another elephant in the room!
I don’t like this article, though, because I think you are downplaying the elephant in the room. As you noted in passing, the two current parties have a lock on the structure of elections, from debates to ballot access, and almost everywhere in between. I don’t think this was true during the emergence of third parties in the 1800s. — Bob Lieberman
I don’t mean to downplay these issues. This is yet another serious obstacle. Still, it probably isn’t truly insurmountable. In 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s one-cycle independent bid managed to obtain ballot access in 46 states. It may not be necessary to be on the ballot in every state to get started, either.
If a third party were strong enough, the debate issue would solve itself — whether by clearing the usual polling threshold (15 percent) or because attempting to exclude a candidate would wind up discrediting the debate at a certain point. Mr. Perot participated in 1992 debates.
A Populist Party
Maybe the most common genre of reply argued that the stronger third party would be populist, not “neoliberal” or “globalist.”
I think you missed the real third party. Working folks who can’t make ends meet. 65% of the country. Some temporarily with Trump, but will realize they have been conned. Huge deficits and increasing debts can’t be met with tax cuts (Trump and Musk proved). Answer is tax increases on corporations and wealthy, especially $100 trillion held by top 10% that will be inherited over next 30 years, and now zero tax will be paid on thanks to tax shelters, tax havens and shell corps. — John Talbott
There’s a lot about this case that makes sense, at least at first blush. The electorate has been in a populist mood for at least a decade. And as a historical aside, there was a highly successful Populist Party in the 1890s, which won several states in the 1892 presidential election before essentially merging with the Democrats.
Of all the comments in this bucket, I chose Mr. Talbott’s because he put a number on it: 65 percent. I’m not saying he’s right that so many Americans would support a populist party, but let’s suppose that it’s true. That would actually be a very good reason to be skeptical of a populist third party today.
With third parties facing so many obstacles, they emerge only under a very narrow set of conditions. A large constituency — large enough to power a party — needs to make demands that the major parties simply can’t accept. If the parties can accept it, it’s almost always easier to get the parties to do so rather than to start a third party. Or put differently, if a constituency’s demands are too appealing, a major party will swallow it up; not appealing enough and it won’t win anything anywhere.
This is a tight needle to thread, and a populist third party would have a very hard time threading it. Many populist ideas are simply too popular, including within the major parties. The Democrats, to take an example from the comment, will be sympathetic to raising taxes on the rich.
Or put differently, the “neoliberal” third party is the relatively likely one precisely because it’s relatively unpopular. It’s a lot closer to threading the needle: Reining in the national debt, for instance, is unpopular enough that it won’t be easy for the major parties to accept it, yet there’s a large enough group behind it that it could plausibly compete to win elections.
A Progressive Party
Another common reply was that the real third-party opportunity was on the left. One of those was from Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for president in 2020, whose reply was published in The Times. He concludes:
Polling consistently shows majority support for progressive reforms that the major parties won’t support, including Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, free public child care and education through college, and taxing the rich to fund such reforms.
The opening is for a progressive third party.
In general, third-party movements to the ideological left or right of the two major parties are quite challenging, as the Green Party can attest. In most respects, it makes more sense for these movements to try to advance their demands through the major parties.
First, the major parties tend to find it relatively easy to accommodate their demands. Progressives may not get every single policy they want, but Democrats could do a lot: They could support trillion-dollar investments in renewables, even if not a Green New Deal; they could support higher taxes for the rich, even if not at Mr. Hawkins’s preferred levels.
Many progressives and conservatives, of course, still won’t be satisfied with the major parties. But if they became so large that they could win as a third party, they could also win Democratic or Republican primaries, obviating the need for a new third party. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral Democratic primary is an excellent example.
And finally, these more ideological third parties would be especially vulnerable to the “wasted vote” problem, as almost everyone so progressive (or conservative) undoubtedly loathes the major party that is at its ideological pole. The Green Party has essentially never recovered from Ralph Nader’s role as a spoiler in 2000.
Could anything yield a successful far left or right party? Yes, probably. But it would require a movement with truly uncompromising demands — demands so important that people are willing to waste their votes — that the major parties simply couldn’t meaningfully accommodate.
Imagine, for instance, a world where there were no promising renewable energy technologies, and consequently the only option to fight climate change was deindustrialization. Imagine further that major parts of the Democratic Party could never support slower growth, let alone anything like what mainstream scientists and environmentalists deemed necessary. Now you can imagine the conditions for a progressive third party. The abolitionist and antislavery movements yielded third parties under similarly stark circumstances.
Mr. Musk’s third-party dream is emerging under a somewhat similar set of conditions. He says the national debt is a threat to the future of the country, and it doesn’t seem likely that either party can accommodate his demand. Alone, this doesn’t come close to guaranteeing a meaningful third-party movement. It does mean that the essential prerequisite has been met.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling.
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