Remember back to a time when you were a third wheel in your life. What were you thinking and feeling at the time?
This is assuming you were a third wheel at some point. If you haven’t been, then good for you.
But for me, who has been a third wheel many times, it’s a feeling of being on the outside looking in. An unwanted, unimportant, or ignored aspect of whatever dynamic the situation is.
Now, politics might not be the dynamic most people think of when talking about this, but being a third wheel is a familiar feeling for independents and third parties.
With the duopoly the two major political parties create in our political system, these aren’t just feelings but hurdles to climb as you try to impact the political culture.
Despite this, many people, even those who support one of the two major political parties, feel we need a third party and want to find a realistic way to make that happen.
But how would it happen? Could it happen? And what would need to change for a third party to impact our politics?
In this article, we’ll discuss the current nature of third parties in our politics and what fundamental changes need to happen for a third party to have a legitimate impact in the future.
Third Wheel or Tricycle
While there have been many attempts within the twentieth century to have a third-party or third-party candidate, two instances stick out and are extremely relevant to a potential third-party run.
The first is the election of 1912, which had its roots in the 1908 election.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the presidency after President William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and then won the election of 1904, decided not to run for a third term in 1908 as the Republican candidate.
Instead, he chose William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War, with whom he had a close relationship, as his heir apparent.
Roosevelt felt he would leave the country in a good place with Taft, and with Roosevelt’s popularity carrying over for the Republicans, Taft won the 1908 election.
However, Taft was very different from Roosevelt.
At the time, the Republican Party had a conservative and progressive wing, the latter of which Roosevelt headed.
Taft was much more conservative and appealed to the party’s conservative wing more than Roosevelt did during his presidency.
Roosevelt, to say the least, didn’t like this and decided to seek the Republican nomination again in 1912. This was before the 22nd Amendment was ratified, limiting presidents to only two terms.
The conservative wing of the Republican Party, however, felt Roosevelt had become too progressive and rallied around Taft, who won the Republican nomination.
In response, Roosevelt formed a third party called the Progressive Party, informally the Bull Moose Party, with his Republican progressives and supporters.
This created three major candidates: Roosevelt under the Progressive Party, Taft under the Republican Party, and Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic Party nominee.
In the end, Woodrow Wilson won with only about 42 percent of the vote because of this split in the Republican Party.
However, Theodore Roosevelt came in second with about 27 percent of the vote, the most ever for a third party and third-party candidate.
The second impactful run by a third-party candidate was that of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996.
Ross Perot was a businessman who ran as an independent in 1992, and as a third-party candidate in 1996 for the Reform Party he founded.
In the 1992 presidential election, Perot carried almost 19 percent of the vote, the most since 1912. At one point, he led Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush in the polls and participated in all three presidential debates.
Despite this, however, he ultimately finished third behind Clinton and Bush.
He tried again in 1996 but only got over 8 percent of the vote.
So, what does all this mean for a current third-party or third-party candidate?
First, we must consider who could be a potential third-party candidate and why.
In both previous instances, the candidate had the ability to run a third-party or independent campaign because of their circumstances.
Theodore Roosevelt was already President, and a very good one at that, and therefore had the status, political reputation, name recognition, and support to form a third party.
On the other hand, Ross Perot was a billionaire who was outspoken about politics and thus had the money and status to run a campaign independent of the political parties and gain support.
With the current structure of our system, any third party or independent candidate would have to follow a similar approach, and we’ve seen examples of this recently.
No Labels, a bipartisan political organization, had floated the possibility of running a reputable third-party candidate in the presidential election with what they called a unity ticket, meaning they would have a Democrat and a Republican as running mates.
No Labels’ founding co-chairman was Joe Lieberman. Lieberman was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut and the vice-presidential nominee for the Democratic ticket in the 2000 election.
In 2006, while running for re-election for his Senate seat in Connecticut, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont. Lieberman then decided to run in the general election for that Senate seat as an independent versus both Lamont and Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger, and Lieberman won.
This is one of the best examples of how established status, political reputation, and name recognition can propel someone to a successful third-party candidate.
The No Labels unity ticket seemed to potentially follow this mold as Joe Manchin, the Democratic U.S. senator from West Virginia, and Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, had been mentioned as possible candidates for that ticket, but nothing ever materialized.
Then there was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy ran as an independent candidate, although he initially tried to oppose Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. With obvious name recognition as a member of the Kennedy family, he was able to initially run a viable independent campaign.
However, this really was because people were increasingly apathetic to a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch, especially as the problems with Joe Biden’s age became a factor. But after Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, Kennedy’s campaign fell off a cliff, and he dropped out.
Both show that while it’s still possible to run a third-party or independent candidacy, the prospect of winning is low, the uphill climb is steep, and mostly likely, the best possible outcome is usually to play spoiler for one of the parties.
This also connects to what we discussed with the 1912 election and Ross Perot’s candidacy.
Again, in 1912, Woodrow Wilson won only about 42 percent of the vote, and Theodore Roosevelt won about 27 percent. William Howard Taft, however, also won a decent percentage, about 23 percent.
If the Republican Party had not been split and either Roosevelt or Taft had competed against Woodrow Wilson alone, there is a good chance they would have won.
However, since Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, Wilson won most of the states in the Electoral College and the presidency.
Many also feel Ross Perot took votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992 and that Bush may have won if Perot had not been in the race, although some challenge this, as Clinton had a significant lead in the polls late in the race.
Regardless, this is the fear of both Democrats and Republicans when it comes to a third party, and they both work very hard to try to prevent it.
If a third-party candidate gets into the race and their views are skewed more toward one of the major parties, that party could lose votes and, therefore, the election.
The Democrats feared that a No Labels ticket would take votes from Joe Biden and give the election to Donald Trump. However, depending on the candidate, some felt the No Labels ticket would have taken from Trump instead.
Republicans had similar fears about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy held views similar to those of Trump and attracted similar supporters. Republicans feared he could take a small but significant number of those supporters from Trump, enough to give the election to the Democrats.
However, all these concepts get to the heart of why a third-party candidate has trouble gaining traction and what really needs to change for it to lose its third-wheel status.
From Third Wheel to Three’s Company?
While many people like the idea of a third party or multiple parties, they usually don’t want to vote for them because they feel they are wasting their votes.
On the one hand, they know the third party won’t win even if they vote for it; again, the second-strongest showing by a third-party candidate was Ross Perot, at about 18 percent.
On the other hand, even if the third-party candidate is a loved former president like Theodore Roosevelt, their votes could take away support from a major party candidate and potentially give the election to their least-liked candidate.
This is not just the case for many people in presidential elections but also for the election of members of Congress and state politicians.
So, is there any hope for a third party one day?
Yes, but it would require a change in our electoral system.
In the United States, we use a single-member district plurality system.
This means that one representative represents a certain number of people in a defined district. For example, you have one congressman who represents the congressional district you live in.
However, the more important aspect is the plurality system used to elect those officials.
Plurality means the representative only needs the most votes to win an election.
For example, let’s say candidates A, B, and C are vying to win an election. And let’s say their district has a total of 14 people who vote.
If candidate A gets 6 votes, candidate B receives 5 votes, and candidate C gets 3 votes, candidate A wins in a plurality system because they got the most votes.
So even though 8 people didn’t vote for candidate A, they still won the election.
However, if there were only two candidates in the race, let’s say candidates A and B this time, and candidate A still gets 6 votes, but this time candidate B receives 8 votes, including the 3 that would have gone to candidate C, candidate B wins.
This is why many people feel their votes would be wasted, and they don’t vote for third-party candidates because of how our system is currently constructed.
Continuing with the example, if candidate B is the most popular but the inclusion of candidate C will take votes from candidate B, it could give the election to the less popular candidate A.
By voting for candidate C, they take votes from candidate B, who might be their second choice. And many people feel it’s pointless to vote for them anyway because they won’t win.
This attitude snowballs for the third-party candidate because many people won’t vote for them just because of that reason, even if they like them best.
However, a change in the electoral system could dispel these concerns.
That change would be switching from a single-member plurality electoral system to a single-member majority electoral system with a runoff election.
This means that the winning candidate must get a majority of votes to win the election.
Let’s return to our first example where candidate A got 6 votes, candidate B got 5, and candidate C got 3. No candidate would win in a majority electoral system because no candidate got the majority of votes.
Because of this, they would then go to a runoff election. This means that the candidate with the lowest number of votes would be taken off the ballot, and another round of voting would take place with the top two candidates.
In our example, no candidate got a majority, so candidate C would be taken off the ballot, and a second-round election would occur with candidates A and B.
The winner of that election who gets the majority or meets another criterion, like maybe a plurality this time in the runoff election, wins the election. In the case of a tie, there would be a criterion as well.
This would eliminate the major concerns many have about third parties and give a third-party or independent candidate a real chance to win elections.
People would not have to worry about wasting their votes on a third-party candidate or about those votes taking votes away from a particular candidate.
There are many ways to implement this system to accommodate other concerns as well, like requiring a second runoff election regardless of the majority.
There is also a preferential or instant runoff system where voters rank their candidates from first to last, but those can be much more complicated.
Three states, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, already hold runoff elections in their general elections, and nine states use it in their primary elections.
If the 47 other states implement this type of system in their general elections, it could seriously impact the viability of third-party and multiple-party candidates.
But what about the presidential election, where the winner must already have a majority of electoral college votes to win?
If no presidential candidate gets the majority of electoral college votes, at least 270, it goes to the House of Representatives to pick the President, as laid out in the 12th Amendment.
With a strong third party, this is more likely to happen because there is a better chance of no one hitting the 270 criteria. However, the House of Representatives would never pick the third-party candidate because it would either be under a Democrat or Republican-controlled majority and that majority would choose its party’s candidate.
I almost never advocate for amending long-standing amendments in the Constitution, but in this case, the simple change of making it a runoff election instead of having the House of Representatives pick the President would be more democratic and far less partisan.
However, getting all this to happen at the state and national levels is a steep climb.
This is mainly because the two major parties are not in the business of surrendering their duopoly by implementing these changes; that’s one thing they do agree on.
However, the more polarized the parties become, the more citizens need to call for these types of changes.
These changes could bring down the combativeness of our extreme party politics by infusing new parties and new voices while keeping our structure of government.
And as I said, it’s already implemented in three states, so other states could be pressured into putting a referendum on the ballot to change this in their state.
There could also be another Theodore Roosevelt type that creates their own third party that can rival the major parties or call for the implantation of these electoral changes.
Whatever the best solution may be, third parties face an uphill battle, and although there is potential hope for a change, they will probably have to remain the third wheel of politics for the foreseeable future.
A campaign by Kennedy will put more pressure on the Biden vote . The Kennedy name is still prominent in Democrat areas. I’m sure Trump will lose some but not to degree of the Biden camp. I wonder if Kennedy is just waiting for Biden to Drop out and provide a opening in the slate.