Third-Party Presidential Candidates: A Captivating and Catastrophic ’24 Illusion
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STEPHEN BLINDER: According to a recent NBC News poll, nearly 15% of registered voters would support a third-party candidate next year over President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump. The allure of third-party presidential candidates is a familiar tale. The problem? Their potential is a captivating and catastrophic illusion – it was in 1992 and even more so in 2000. In 2024, it would be the most tragic yet.
The list of potential 2024 third-party presidential candidates keeps growing, from the unity ticket sought by centrist organization No Labels to the impending announcement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party candidacy to that of academic and activist Cornel West, among others and ‘very likely’ more to come. Of course, this situation has not come out of the blue. The perceived woes of Biden and Trump’s candidacies are a well-documented story. But does this situation not sound familiar?
The facts speak for themselves. Third-party candidates have not won any state’s electoral votes for nearly 55 years. Since 1924, the Democratic and Republican presidential tickets together have failed in only four elections to earn at least 94.1% of the vote. The truth is, statistical analysis is not required to show the seemingly insurmountable obstacle facing third-party presidential candidates. In fact, almost any high school civics class will likely cover how entrenched the two-party system has become, for good or bad, in the United States. But if third-party presidential candidates cannot feasibly win, what can they do? Three elections from the past three decades make the impact abundantly clear and, to put it bluntly, it behooves us to recall their lessons in advance of next year.
In the 1992 election, political outsider Ross Perot, a billionaire businessman from Texas with a distinctly populist message, garnered nearly 19% of the vote. In conjunction with incumbent President George H.W. Bush’s 37% and Bill Clinton’s 43%, it is possible that Perot cost Bush re-election. Eight years later, in the hotly contested 2000 election ultimately decided by Florida, Ralph Nader’s Green Party ticket more than likely pushed the election in favor of George W. Bush over then Vice President Al Gore. Bush won Florida, but Nader received 97,488 votes and Bush won by a mere 537. The key takeaway: in presidential elections decided by fine margins, third-party candidates have made the difference, impacting Republicans (in H.W. Bush) and Democrats (in Gore) alike.
However, we need not look as far back as 1992 or 2000 to see third-party presidential candidates’ spoiler potential, particularly within the context of next year’s election. In the 2016 election, Trump won three critical states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, by 10,704, 44,292, and 22,748 votes, respectively. In other words, they were very close races. Critically, Jill Stein’s Green Party ticket garnered more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in each, perhaps drawing enough would-be Clinton supporters to effectively hand Trump those states and, ultimately, the Electoral College. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Yet, it is exactly because of this history that Americans must resist the temptation to vote for third-party presidential candidates next year. As the past makes clear, it is an illusion at best and a dangerous one at worst. Next year, the stakes arguably have never been higher. In a recent NBC News poll, the introduction of a third-party candidate tilts the election in favor of Trump, garnering 39% of the vote relative to Biden’s 36%. While public polls are undoubtedly an imperfect indicator of voting patterns, as has been brought into stark relief in recent cycles, it would be a catastrophic lapse in judgment to simply cast such patterns aside, particularly given what we know from history.
What else do we know? Trump received over 11 million votes more in the 2020 election than in the 2016 election. Another difference: between 2016 and 2020, almost half as many people voted for third-party options. Indeed, “exit poll data from 2020 indicates that those who voted third-party in 2016 did support Biden in 2020 by a whopping 35-point margin,” according to Third Way. Embracing diverse political opinions is a critical function of democracy, one from which we cannot shy away. It is because we hold this ideal true that we cannot afford to place its future in the hands of third-party presidential candidates who may as well hand next year’s election to an individual committed to narrowing and eventually eliminating open dialogue once and for all.
In 2002, then President George W. Bush famously misstated the age-old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” replacing the all-important second half with “[f]ool me -- you can’t get fooled again.” In 2024, the American public cannot afford to make the same mistake in the face of prospective third-party presidential candidates. The cost of doing so will be more than a gaff or a failure to learn from the past. It will be the fate of our democracy.
Stephen Blinder is a staff writer for On the Record. He is a junior studying government in the College of Arts & Sciences.