In the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary Andrew Yang had a moment. He was a fresh face to the Democratic party with a background in business instead of politics, and he differentiated himself by strongly advocating for universal basic income. He eventually dropped out of the presidential primary and a year later he tried to capitalize on his political momentum by running for Mayor of New York. Again, he did not make it out of the primary. Fast forward another year and Yang is back in the headlines, this time announcing that he is launching a new third party, the Forward Party.
When explaining his reasoning for starting a third-party, Yang loves to throw around data; the percentage of Americans that identify as independents, and the number of Americans that want a third-party, and the number of Americans that want their elected leaders to compromise. The problem is, Yang’s understanding and analysis seems to begin and end here. He is right, to some extent, about the polling; and I will dig into that more a bit later. But a major third-party does not exist in America for of a lack of third-parties. There is no reason to believe that Yang’s Forward Party will fare any differently than any of the other 80+ third-parties in the country. The problem is structural and without addressing the structural issues a legitimate third-party will be dead on arrival. However, it is much easier to create a party to make it appear as though you are solving a problem than it is to actually reform a system. This is particularly true when to reform the system you need those with power in the system to change the system that they derive their power from.
The thing is, I do not disagree with Yang’s assessment, though I think either ignores or omits key information to fit his narrative, and where we diverge is in his proposed solution. So, lets start to break his argument down.
To start us off, lets look at some polling from Gallup on party identification. It is true that most Americans identify as independents, and that has been the case since 2009 according to Gallup’s polling. However, as I will examine more later, most Americans are casting their ballots for either of the two major parties.
While Americans that identify as independents is a plurality, this may be a bit misleading. First, I guess it needs to be stated, while there is an Independent Party that is not what this poll is identifying. This poll is identifying “independents”, as in those Americans that do not identify as either a Democrat or a Repbulican. In the 2020 election there were more than 80 named third-parties included on ballots across the country. Some, like the Libertarian and Green parties, will have more support than others, but spread that 41% across those 80+ parties and Democrats or Republicans are going to have the plurality.
Second, Michigan State University political scientist Corwin Smidt found in his paper, Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter, that between 2000 and 2004 voters who identified as independents voted more consistently for a single party than those who identified as strong partisans from 1972 to 1976. This, Smidt argues, is due to parties that are more ideologically sorted now than they were fifty years ago, which means that voters could not use party identification as a heuristic when casting their ballots in the same way they can today. In turn, this has resulted in increased partisanship and voter calcification. That explains the voting behavior, but not the self-identification. That likely has to do with the general dissatisfaction with the two major parties and Congress, as we will examine later.
So, despite the lack of a clear conclusion that can be drawn from Americans’ self-identification as independents, we did have two other data points to look at that might offer some clarity. If we again turn to Gallup polling, we will see that a clear majority of Americans favor the introduction of a major third-party.
Despite this expressed preference, Americans continue to elect Democrats and Republicans. As discussed above, this is due to increasing partisanship—which extends to independent voters as well—and voter calcification as voters become less likely to switch their votes between the parties, and negative partisanship as each side increasingly sees the other as an existential threat. This is not to say that the respondents to the poll lied, or the poll was fundamentally flawed. The dissatisfaction with the two parties is real and is reinforced by congressional approval ratings that remain in the 20% - 30% range, but something is preventing Americans from acting on their preference for a third-party alternative. Before we get into those factors lets look at the last data point as I think it is essential to understand the forces at work in our current system.
Lastly, turning again to Gallup, a majority of Americans believe that it is more important for leaders in Washington to compromise than it is to stick to their beliefs.
However, these results are immediately recontextualized if we take this analysis just one step further. Turning to Pew, they too find that a majority of Americans want elected officials who will compromise with the other party. The important difference in the the Pew survey is they followed the initial question by asking partisans if elected officials of their party should compromise with the opposition party. Support for compromise in this context fell precipitously.
Partisanship, particularly negative partisanship, is the likely culprit for this seeming hypocrisy. But I would argue that this desire for the opposition to compromise is the manifestation of a symptom—i.e. negative partisanship—not the underlying ailment. Negative partisanship is the result of a zero-sum system we have created where you either win an election or you lose an election. Those in the minority have found ways to frustrate the majority to prevent them from fully enacting their policy agenda; but for the most part if you win then you get to govern and if you lose, well, win the next one. And this is where the problem lies. Our election system incentivizes two parties because (1) you can win with only a plurality of the vote, (2) if you do not win an election, you do not have a part in governing, and (3) structures within our electoral and legislative systems incentivize the party in the minority to be nothing more than an opposition party.
I think it is worth lingering on this last point for a while longer. We should assume that parties are rational actors within a system and the parties have two primary objectives within that system; to win elections and to wield power. When making their electoral case, parties can either make an affirmative case for themselves or a negative case for their opponents. Assuming majority control is realistically realizable for the minority party, they are going to behave in a way to maximize their electoral performance. The minority party understands that the majority party will get credit for legislative accomplishments, whether those accomplishments are bipartisan or not. However, the minority party understands the inverse is true too; the majority party will also get the blame for partisan gridlock. While a minority party may not be able to easily make an affirmative case for themselves, they are able to take away the majority party's ability to make their affirmative case. In the process, the minority party is making a negative case against the majority party—"what have they done to fix the problems of the nation when they held the majority?"
This is the argument Frances Lee makes in her book, Insecure Majorities, though she takes it a step further. Lee compiled the share of the national two-party presidential votes, share of House seats, and share of Senate seats of each party in the chart below. It shows that the relatively small and short-lived majorities in the period since 1980 is relatively unique in the post-Civil War era. As stated above, the parties have two primary objectives. But as Lee illustrates in the chart below, there were extended periods where achieving the first objective of winning a governing majority was out of reach for the minority. That left wielding power as the only achievable objective, and the only way to exercise what little power the minority party did have was to compromise and work with the majority party.
There is a thread through these three data sets that Smidt and Lee can help us follow. As Smidt argues, in the second half of the twentieth century parties realigned themselves, sorting along ideological lines. This resulted in more polarized parties, and allowed voters that were likely always ideological partisans to more easily and consistently identify the candidate that they align with. Shortly after, the Democratic majority that had held throughout most of the century broke down, but instead of being replaced by a large and enduring Republican majority, the majorities were small and shifting. Lee posits that as long as majority control was attainable within an election cycle or two the party was incentivized not to compromised in order to win the next election. This created a feedback loop where increasing partisanship lead to decreasing compromise which fed frustration with the opposing party among voters, which led to increasing partisanship. While this loop continued to spiral, voters became increasingly disillusioned with Congress and the two major parties. So, voters increasingly identified as independents, and say they want compromise and a third-party option.
To this point I have just stated that our system does not benefit third-parties, despite the polling that would suggest it otherwise should. We can look at the current composition of the Congress to see the practical, real-world results of our current political system. Currently there are three independent members in the US Senate; Angus King from Maine, Bernie Sanders from Vermont, and Kirsten Sinema from Arizona—only Senators King and Sanders were elected as independents, Sinema left the Democratic Party at the end of 2022. On the other side of the Capitol there are no independent members of the House of Representatives. Most recently, Justin Amash, Representative from Michigan, was elected as a Republican but left the party in 2020 to join the Libertarian party. He did not seek reelection. We should be seeing a trend here—though a very small sample size, which is indicative of the systemic advantage to the two parties in itself, half of the independent representatives to serve in Congress since 2016 were elected as members of one of the two major parties and not as independents.
We can look at the highest office in the nation as well. Since the Civil War the Presidency has been held by either a Democrat or a Republican. Even in 1912, when former President Theodor Roosevelt ran as a Progressive after not receiving the Republican nomination, the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won the Presidency. In that election, Roosevelt was only able to garner 28% of the vote. This is impressive considering that he received more votes than the incumbent Presidential candidate William Howard Taft.
It is the case that Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican base, and had one not been in the race the other would have likely defeated Wilson. This highlights one of the arguments against third-party candidates, they are viewed as spoilers to one of the two major candidates—because it’s a zero-sum contest. Ross Perot in 1992 spoiled George H. W. Bush’s reelection; Ralph Nader spoiled Al Gore’s election in 2000; Jill Stein spoiled Hillary Clinton’s election in 2016; and Gary Johnson spoiled Donald Trump’s popular vote victory in 2016.
There is another way to look at Teddy’s Progressive presidential campaign though; whether it had an effect beyond his own election. The 62nd Congress (1911-1913), had one Progressive member of Congress. After the 1912 election the number of Progressives in Congress waxed to 10 members. This was the high-water mark for Progressives however, within three election cycles there would be none remaining. This is, again, an impressive legacy of a third-party candidacy for President, though it was short lived. But that is kind of the point here. Either the Progressive party was going to flair up and perform well in an election cycle or two before fading away again, or it would have grown and eventually supplanted one of the two major parties, likely the Republican party.
With Teddy’s third-party candidacy as a standard lets look again at those modern examples of spoilers. Ross Perot, running as an Independent in 1992, won 19% of the popular vote. Not quite Teddy’s 28%, but still a significant portion of the electorate, and well above any other third-party candidate since. Perot ran again in 1996, this time running as a candidate of the Reform Party. He was unable to build on his momentum from the 1992 election and only received 8% of the popular vote. In 2000, Ralph Nader, running as the Green Party candidate, received 3% of the popular vote. And in 2016 Gary Johnson, running as the Libertarian Party candidate, and Jill Stein, running as the Green Party candidate, received 3% and 1% of the popular vote, respectively. As one might be able to infer from the discussion of independents currently in Congress, none of these third-party candidacies were able to produce broader electoral gains for their parties.
What, then, is the solution here if not to try and create a major third-party? As I have argued throughout, because our system is zero-sum there is not room for a major third-party. That is not to say that the Democratic and Republican parties are interminable or immutable; throughout our history we have had parties rise and fall—the Federalists, the Democratic-Republicans, the Whigs—but one party was always supplanted by another. Furthermore, there has never truly been a period of multi-polar governance in this country; the Presidency has always been held by one of two major parties and though there have been more third parties in Congress at various points, they never wielded significant power and eventually faded away. See Figure 1 below for additional detail.
The solution is to remove the mechanisms that are currently in place in our electoral system that creates a zero-sum contest. Some argue that the Electoral College should be removed in favor the more direct popular vote; but this only addresses Presidential elections and still allows candidates to win with only a plurality, not a majority of the electorate. A more comprehensive set of solutions is needed to address all elections—whether that is the adoption of ranked choice voting or a proportional system. These alternate mechanisms for electing governing officials allows voters to cast ballots for third-party candidates with less worry that they will be “spoiling” the election for their preferred candidate of the major parties or throwing their vote away on a candidate that does not have a chance of winning. This would allow Americans to act on their expressed preference for a major third-party and for them to be able to vote in a way that aligns with their ideological identification—i.e. independent.
Further, if truly multi-polar governance was achieved elected officials would be able to compromise with members from parties outside of their own party without having to negotiate with someone that holds diametrically different views, as is the case in the current system. This would functionally make Pew’s survey cited above moot as elected officials could compromise to achieve policy goals without undermining their beliefs. However, if multi-polar governance was achieved further reforms would be needed to facilitate effective governance—thinking specifically about the filibuster in the Senate and the 60-vote threshold to functionally pass any legislation.
I recognize that this sort of reform is not likely to be enacted since reform would have to come from the very people benefiting from the current systems. This is the conversation we should be having though, not whether a new third-party with substantial resources is going to upset the status quo. It very well may be a disrupter in the political system, but if history is any indicator this new third party will either fade away in a few election cycles or take the place of one of the two major parties. Either way, in the long-term, equilibrium returns to a two-party system.
