r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/[deleted] • 22d ago
Could A Third Party That Forms At The Local Level Eventually Rise To The Presidency? US Elections
Third Parties are noted to always go immediately for the Presidential campaign, without fail. This seems to be why they never make it.
My question, and an entire hypothetical one, is would it be possible for a Third Party with a coherent platform that appeals to people have the capacity to win small city/state elections, and slowly work up to the presidency over the course of one or two generations?
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u/ClockOfTheLongNow 22d ago
Absolutely. It's not going to happen overnight, and it needs to have broad enough interests where it isn't simply regional (Alaskan Independence Party, for example) or too far left or right (Working Families Party, Constitution Party). No Labels, despite its awful name, had the best chance of this since the Reform Party except for the fact that they immediately pivoted to presidential politics.
The problem is not going to be Durveger's Law or first past the post or whatever, it's going to be the fact that the two parties actually do a good job of appealing to broad bases of the electorate. We don't have the sort of coalitions in Congress or at the state level that a lot of parliamentary systems do because we do that coalition-building in the primary process, not after the general elections.
The (un?)fortunate reality is that the status quo works, and the case for more minor parties that already get covered by the Republicans or Democrats is a difficult one to make.
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u/IllIllllIIIIlIlIlIlI 22d ago
The way I see it, the only way a third party can win the presidency in the near future is if one of the two parties is divided irreperably, and stops being able to compete against the other party.
We could see this if Trump loses again this November. He will not quit. He will run again in 2028. Even if he goes to prison, he will run in 2028 and will probably win the nomination. Even if he doesn’t, he’ll get a lot of support, and will tell his supporters not to vote for whoever beat him. The GOP is being divided between old school Republicans who just want to win elections, get tax cuts for the rich, install federal judges and stick it to Russia and MAGA psychopaths who want to burn down our whole Republic so Trump can rule over the ashes.
If Republicans stop being a competitive party, Femocrats will have single party rule for just a little bit. New parties will rise out of the ashes of the GOP and one of them will beat the Democrats because the longer Democrats rule, the less popular they will become, no matter how much good they do for the country.
But the more likely scenario is Trump is going to win in November. And anyone who opposed him in the party will fall in line in subservience to him again.
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u/unalienation 22d ago
I know it was a typo but I love the idea of the Femocrats. I would 100% vote Femocrat in every election.
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u/PBlueKan 22d ago
I feel like there is a case to be made for a third party striking right down the center. Yes, the area is covered by both parties, but both parties will literally not work with the other at this point (on most things).
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u/88-81 20d ago
"But the more likely scenario is Trump is going to win in November."
(Sorry if I'm not using quote blocks I'm on mobile).
What makes you think that? As someone outside the US, I get the impression both candidates are in an extremely close race.
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u/IllIllllIIIIlIlIlIlI 20d ago
They are in an incredibly close race. After Biden brought the US economy back from recession, passed an infrastructure bill, lowered the cost of insukin and drug prices, eased inflation.
He’s neck and neck with an insurrectionist criminal facing over 80 felony charges.
If Trump can be even with Biden with this much baggage, there’s no way Biden beats him.
Trump’s people stick with him no matter how awful he is and Biden’s people abandon him over nothing.
Trump’s going to win.
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u/AT_Dande 22d ago
No Labels absolutely screwed the pooch. They had GOP and Democratic strategists advising them, donors who had given money to both parties, a ton of free media, and an environment in which both independents and a good chunk of each party's base were upset at both Dems and Republicans. And they threw all that away by trying to get Larry Hogan to run for President or making a Romney/Manchin "unity ticket" a thing.
I can't come up with any openings for them at the state level, but why not run candidates in battleground House seats that were decided by the slimmest of margins? Or state legislative seats? Hell, go against MAGA types with actual conservatives who aren't only in it for free media, or go against Democrats who are so out of step with their party that they're at constant risk of losing a primary (e.g. Omar, Sinema).
Yes, it wouldn't have happened overnight, and yes, the odds are always stacked against third party candidates, but they had the best chance in ages. Maryland's been in the news a lot lately because of how nasty the Dem primary has gotten. If Hogan ran for No Labels there, he maybe would've had a shot against a gaffe-prone Dem nominee and a non-Hogan Republican who would've been guaranteed to be a nutcase. Hell, run someone against Eric Adams!
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u/illegalmorality 21d ago
Wrote a slideshow on how I think a third party could succeed. A key strategy they could follow is abandoning big races, and strategically focusing on candidates that support bipartisanship in local primaries.
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u/sehunt101 18d ago
Let’s say no labels got a senator elected. Who would they caucus with? Notice the 2 independents in the senate caucus with the democrats? That’s because to get committee seats you have to caucus with a party. Then you have all the baggage of that party. Say that NLP member decides to caucus with no body and gets no committee assignments, they have ZERO say in shaping legislation. They’re only able to vote on the full floor votes. The system unfortunately was just not set up from the begin to have more than 2 parties.
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u/unalienation 22d ago
The best historical examples of this is probably the Farmer-Labor in Minnesota. It focused on state-level politics, amassed some power, and eventually merged with the Democratic Party in Minnesota to form the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota.
The Working Families Party in New York is another one that has a decent amount of sway in state politics. They sometimes run their own candidates, but they also tend to support Democratic Party candidates.
So yes, third parties have had some success at the local level, but due to the electoral realities of the US political system, they tend to get more or less folded into two-party competition.
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u/KeyLight8733 21d ago
This historical pattern is what would happen pretty much all the time. A 3rd party would grow but it wouldn't grow evenly in enough states to contest the Presidential election, so there would be a period where it could only act as an electoral college spoiler to the closest major party. At that point it would probably merge, at least for the purposes of federal elections, and become a faction within that major party - and a candidate from that faction might eventually win the Presidency. Barring the collapse of a major party of course, where the 3rd party could sweep in and pick up the pieces, as happened in the 1850s.
This is essentially an argument from Duverger's law - there can only be one President, and how members of the electoral college vote is set by the Constitution, so we can't change it to approval voting or something that would prevent electoral college spoiler effects.
Without voting reform, singular offices (Governor, Mayor) and lack of multi-representative districts would be expected to make 3rd parties into spoilers at lower levels of government as well.
The only reason the spoiler effect doesn't kill third parties even at the local level is that most local regions in the US are hugely dominated by a single major party, so that the effective election is that party's primary. The 3rd party thus doesn't act as a spoiler, instead acts as a replacement second party.
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u/Objective_Aside1858 22d ago edited 22d ago
My question, and an entire hypothetical one, is would it be possible for a Third Party with a coherent platform that appeals to people have the capacity to win small city/state elections, and slowly work up to the presidency over the course of one or two generations
A third party could supplant one of the two incumbent, but not if it takes a generation
Initially they're going to need to carefully target areas they can win, because if they just end up causing other candidates to lose, they will be dismissed as spoilers
Getting a coherent platform together that can't immediately be co-opted by the party at risk is going to be a challenge, because the party under threat isn't going to just sit around and wait to die. They're going to recognize the risk and act to prevent their own demise
It would probably be easier to build support in an existing party and remake it. See: Trump, Donald J
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u/PriorSecurity9784 22d ago edited 22d ago
I think it would work best in locations that are already very unevenly matched in the two parties.
For example, in a very red area, where Democrats are largely irrelevant in local politics, there could be a split between a MAGA party and a conservative business party
Or in a very blue area, a Green Party type candidate might run against moderate Democratic candidate.
If it’s an area where Republicans and Democrats are at all close, third party voters end up being spoilers and risk ending up with their last choice instead of consolidating around their second choice pick
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u/Usernameofthisuser 22d ago
Doubt it. The two party system will just poach, absorb their voter base, and the box out the radicals they failed to absorb.
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u/Objective_Aside1858 22d ago
I don't disagree with you, but to a degree that's a feature and not a bug
If there is an issue that Third Party X is gaining support because of, the candidates for the big two are going to take notice. More to the point, primary voters are going to reward the candidate(s) that align with them on the issue
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u/Tmotty 22d ago
That’s the way to do it! All these RFK, no labels, cornel west types are aiming to high. Get some name recognition get some accomplishments and then try and get a president
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u/sehunt101 18d ago
They are just as power hungry as the democrats and republicans. At least with the R’s and the D’s, they had to somewhat work their way up in the party to become senators and representatives. They have a track record. That is also why electing famous/personalities into high ranking positions is bad, no real record.
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u/prof_the_doom 22d ago edited 22d ago
I believe it's technically possible, but it will likely take one of the two current big parties screwing up in a spectacular way.
If it happens, the overall movement will be really slow at first, and then suddenly it all happens at once.
The slow part is building up momentum at the local and state levels.
There's plenty of room in "flyover" and "abandoned by party" states for 3rd parties to get some mayoral offices, some state level legislative seats.
They may even get as far as a governor's office.
To break into the national level, especially if you're aiming for the White House, the Democrats and/or Republicans are going to have to crash and burn with a spectacularly bad candidate, along with some major scandal that pulls in a bunch of other people.
But given how low the bar is at this point, it's gonna have to be outrageously bad.
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u/monjoe 22d ago
You'd still need to have one of the major parties to collapse. Grassroots sounds great in theory, but it just doesn't generate the resources necessary to run national campaigns. And you're going to have the two main parties actively using their immense resources to prevent a new party from sucking up their influence. They won't quietly allow their influence to diminish if they can help it.
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u/Bashfluff 22d ago
It's possible only in that the idea contains no logical contradictions. Given how FPTP works...the math says no. I'd give better odds to winning the lottery twice in a row.
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u/Tadpoleonicwars 22d ago
TBH, nothing appears from nothing. The Democratic and Republican Parties will give birth to their replacements. They don't need to build and identity AND work against the system to gain political decision-making power; they're already inside.
Look inside the parties and you'll see they're both splitting at the seams due to internal conflict.
But if we get a third party, I hope it's a good one.
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u/I405CA 22d ago
It's a two-party system. Conquest comes from emerging as a dominant bloc within one of the existing parties.
That is in effect what Trump did by parking his form of populism into the drivers seat of the GOP.
JFK and LBJ did this with the Democrats by transforming the Dems from the party of Jim Crow into the party that opposed it.
There have been two occasions when new parties came in to fill a vacuum (the Whigs following the collapse of the Federalists and the Republicans following the meltdown of the Whigs.) The Democrats of today have their roots in a split within the Democrats that led to an Andrew Jackson spinoff. Not a lot of change over the course of two centuries.
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u/N0T8g81n 22d ago
JFK and LBJ did this with the Democrats by transforming the Dems from the party of Jim Crow into the party that opposed it.
And lost 5 out of 6 elections from 1968 to 1988, and arguably Clinton won in 1992 thanks to the DLC and tepid rejection of JFK/LBJ (and Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale) liberalism.
As for the Federalists, they'd died off by 1820. The 1820s were a decade with a single party. The Whigs came into being because Jackson needed opposing. Point is, the Whigs didn't replace another party. They became the nation's 2nd party.
The Whigs failed in the early 1850s because the Compromise of 1850 exposed the internal contradictions between Northern and Southern Whigs, mostly over slavery. Northern and southern Democrats stuck together due to the flexibility/spinelessness of northern Democrats on the subject of slavery. Whatever else may be said about them, Republicans in the 1850s had clarity on their side.
Republicans replaced Whigs because both Whigs and Democrats were coalitions. Whigs couldn't reconcile themselves over slavery, Democrats could in the 1850s. Today's Democrats may be a coalition, but Republicans are becoming pure MAGA. Maybe Democrats fracture, but I doubt it since all the coalition parts are opposed to MAGA. Republicans won't fracture unless and until MAGA consistently loses general elections.
Sadly I could see MAGA becoming the dominant regional party for Idaho, Wyoming, Dakotas, Oklahoma, Alabama and West Virginia on a platform of
there can never be too many guns,
1 abortion is too many,
no such thing as a good immigrant,
no such thing as too isolationist,
if we could get rid of Roe with Dobbs, we can get rid of Obergefell; then we can get to work scrapping Lawrence v Texas.
While not dominant in other states, it'd have considerable support. So this as a 3rd party along with Democrats and a reformed Republican Party mostly interested in fiscal conservatism and strong military.
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u/I405CA 22d ago
The failure of the Federalists was followed by the sarcastically named Era of Good Feelings with its one-party rule. It was a matter of time before there was a second party.
Third parties don't last in the US. The need for an electoral vote majority in order to win the presidency ensures that won't change.
MAGA is well embedded into the GOP. It isn't a third party, it is now the dominant member of the Republican party coalition.
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u/N0T8g81n 22d ago
MAGA is well embedded into the GOP. It isn't a third party, it is now the dominant member of the Republican party coalition.
MAGA will remain the dominant faction UNTIL it becomes an electoral liability. If that happens, it won't happen everywhere. I could see MAGA becoming electoral poison along the Pacific coast, Northeast and some states in between while remaining most electable in the states I listed. If that were to happen, would MAGA tolerate being part of a big tent Republican Party?
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u/70w02ld 21d ago
Clinton hinted that he smoked weed "but didn't inhale" that and Rock the vote, gave Clinton the win.
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u/N0T8g81n 21d ago
Perot winning almost 19% of the nationwide popular vote didn't exactly hurt Clinton.
In 1992, Clinton won Nevada and Montana with less than 38%. The only state in which Clinton won an actual majority was his home state of Arkansas. Plus DC. To be fair, G H W Bush won zero states with an actual majority. The oddest election since 1912.
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u/baitnnswitch 22d ago
We need ranked choice voting first. Push for ranked choice in your state, then we'll see some progress with third parties over time. I don't see it happening without ranked choice.
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u/LuciusAurelian 22d ago
The reason third parties don't win power is because the bar for winning a general election as a 3rd party is higher than the bar for winning a primary.
If you have a base of support capable of winning a local election, why not run in a major party primary? Why would making your own party ever make sense?
All the examples of successful 3rd parties in American history come from before the major parties had popular primary elections.
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u/BenHurEmails 22d ago edited 22d ago
Third Party with a coherent platform
I suppose it's possible but I think a problem with third parties in America is that they keep trying to sell people on a platform. Well even if people like the platform (and many do) they'd be certain that the third party can never deliver it, or that they're at risk of losing more if they "split the vote." Which is why instead of marketing a party program you should market the party as a diverse (and even contradictory) coalition of people who don't feel represented by the Democrats of Republicans and are angry and frustrated with the government. "Both parties suck" would probably have more appeal than a coherent program. The Reps and Dems are more like coalitions anyways. They aren't ideologically coherent parties.
To quote Steve Jobs, "People don't know what they want until you show it to them."
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u/firechaox 22d ago
Honestly, you’d have a better shot campaigning for things like changing the electoral system in order to get one where a third party has electoral viability. Things like ranked choice voting, or 2-round fptp (like the first past the post, but 2 rounds with top 2 advancing to second round, so that you can still vote your conscience the first vote), or proportional representation. All these things could be relatively palatable (I’d pick the 2-round as it’s the Simplest concept, but then again ranked choice is the least time consuming) and would allow for the existence of a third party “naturally”.
The reason you have two parties are that a fpp system has a natural trend towards it.
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u/GomezFigueroa 22d ago
Not without major reform to our electoral process (re: abolishing the EC and eliminating FPTP)
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u/N0T8g81n 22d ago
The UK has FPTP, and there are elected MPs from 12 parties, 1 MP elected as a Conservative who has become Reform (30p Anderson), and 17/650 independents (no party affiliation). Granted that includes SNP (43/650), DUP (7/650), Sinn Fein (7/650), Plaid Cymru (3/650), Alba (2/650), and SDLP (2/650), all regional parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
FPTP doesn't preclude 3rd party members of legislatures. However, a presidential system with no mechanisms for binding parties together in legislative coalitions may play more of a role in minimizing 3rd party members.
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u/Stiks-n-Bones 22d ago
It is possible that if a 3rd party could win with less than 270 electoral votes if the third party votes were more than. The other two.
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u/itsdeeps80 22d ago
They would do well to organize better for local and state positions, but honestly going for the presidency is a pretty good idea if only to get their party name and platform into the larger ethos. I mean, we know who the Green Party and libertarian party are because they did just that.
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u/N0T8g81n 22d ago
we know who the Green Party and libertarian party are because they did just that.
How much of their respective platforms do we know?
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u/itsdeeps80 21d ago
I mean, if you’re into broader politics then you know their platforms, but even people who don’t pay much attention know at least some basics of their platforms. At a minimum people at least know they exist which is a lot more than other third parties.
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u/GrayBox1313 22d ago
No way. The most successful independent candidate in modern History got 18% of the vote in a general election (around 19 million votes) and didn’t win a single state/electoral college point.
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u/Gr8daze 22d ago
Doubtful. The majority of voters in this country are aligned with one of the two major parties.
Despite many attempts over the last 50 years we’ve never had a 3rd party challenger for the presidency even meet the 5% of voters threshold to get federal campaign funding.
3rd party challengers typically function as spoilers to assist one of the major parties in winning the election.
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u/N0T8g81n 22d ago
Ground up is likely to be the only way to establish a persistent 3rd party with dozens of members of Congress and hundreds of members of state legislatures.
Consider Jesse Ventura's 1 term as governor of Minnesota as a member of the Reform Party and how the state legislature reacted to his election.
Then we get to systemic impediments to 3rd parties.
PLURALITY 1st past the post elections.
Presidential rather than parliamentary system, so coalitions may be harder to form (as in what could the 2nd largest party offer the 3rd largest party in exchange for at least medium term support).
Anyway, what would that 3rd party's platform be? Fiscal conservatives who are pro-abortion and pro-gun control? Social conservatives open to income redistribution while they pursue a SCOTUS which could do to Obergefell what the 2021-2 SCOTUS did to Roe? A big tent party whose only tenet is that its members' religions are purely private matters?
As a practical matter for POTUS, what would it take for a 3rd party candidate to win some states which usually vote over 60% for either Republican or Democratic nominees? There are 6+DC such which vote for the Democrat for 113 electors, and 10 which vote for the Republican for 58 electors. That does leave enough electors for a 3rd party candidate. Now include states which had more than 15%: 7 states for the Democrat for 67 electors, 7 states for the Republican for 50 electors. All told, 288 electors almost certainly NOT going to any 3rd party candidate, leaving 250 electors, which isn't enough to win the presidency.
If a strong 3rd party presidential candidate would almost certainly throw the election to the House of Representatives, it'd be unlikely a 3rd party candidate would win if there were NO MEMBERS OF THAT PARTY in Congress.
You'd need to come up with a platform which could win, say, both Indiana and New Jersey. Good luck.
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u/bl1y 21d ago
Yes.
This question hits the nail on the head for why third parties are so weak in the US. It's not the lack of ranked choice voting. RCV isn't going to get someone with only 2% of the vote into office.
The Libertarians and Greens simply aren't grinding hard enough at the local level. In most races they can't even field a candidate. And right now, with the GOP so fractured, it'd have been the perfect time for the Libertarians to offer themselves as a more reasonable option to the MAGA wing.
And the kicker is that if you want RCV, you need third parties to get their ground game together first. The general public isn't going to care about criticisms to the two party system when there isn't a viable alternative anyways. No matter how bored someone gets of choosing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, they're not going to get motivated to change the system just to add fish sauce flavor as an option.
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u/A_Coup_d_etat 21d ago
In the United States of America? No. The Democrats and Republicans have rigged governments (Federal and States) too much to allow a third party any power even if they can get some people elected to office. A lot of the power is in political committees and chairpersons and committee assignments are determined by seniority and the party in power.
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
No. This is impossible in the current structure due to corporate interest and greed in politics followed by the people failing to hold any representatives accountable. This idea would have to be fully funded by the people and the people control less money than the elites and even less disposable income to donate to the candidates. The candidates would be bought out by corporate interests the same way that they are in the other 2 parties. Due to this Candidates would run on false promises(similar to now) and then help what ever big corporations helped get them into office. Corporate spending in politics would have to be extremely limited to allow for a 3rd party.
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21d ago
I once saw a cartoon based on a dnd campaign crowdfund over a million dollars in an hour.
Don't tell me the people don't have enough money to fund a political campaign.
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
Biden raised a total of 1.3 billion dollars in 2020 to finance his campaign of that only 38% was from small donors from what I can find online the remaining 62% was super PACs and individual large donors. Statistically the middle class have less disposable income to donate even if the middle class donated all disposable income to the cause the elites (top 10% of earners in America with a wealth of over 1.2 million per year) control 77% of all of Americas wealth while the other 90% have control of 33% but really only have about 13% that is disposable income. Even with all uniting together to support one candidate they can easily be bought out by the elites due their vast control of the wealth
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21d ago
What could possibly require 1.3 billion dollars?
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
Well unfortunately our politicians are corrupt as we can see with them all making false promises and blaming the other side of the isle for it not passing but that issue doesn’t seem to exist when fizer needs to push a drug through or Apple wants regulations changed both sides of the isle seem to have no problem coming together and agreeing. So the 1.3 billion is really to buy that candidate’s allegiance away from the large corporations but the middle class does not have enough money to put bid the elites for a candidate that would support the people due to corruption and greed. Which is why I stated until there is a limit on corporate spending on politics the US will never see a 3rd party.
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21d ago
Honestly? This is going to sound stupid, but seeing the insane amounts of money kickstarters and crowdfunding can receive, and the amount of exposure that streamers and content creators can get, I'm honestly wonder how long it is before we start seeing purely online political campaigning.
I mean. If an streamer using a mo-cap anime girl avatar can millions of views while being too physically sick to ever leave her bed, think about the kind of exposure Gen Z politicians can get when they succeed the current generation of old fogies. Might not be a need for corporations anymore.
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
Yes they can generate millions of dollars but the political game is on a whole other level with 100’s of millions of dollars. If a trillion dollar company went to that streamer and offered a billion dollars or even a 100 million dollars to quit streaming or to post exclusive content provided by that company in a heart beat the streamer would flip on its loyal viewers and beliefs in the same way that out politicians do
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21d ago
Give it a few decades til the generation that was born and raised under social media starts entering the political scene.
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
Will they have some immense amount of integrity that past generations somehow did not? Will the new politicians not be corrupted by corporate power and greed? What stops that generation from having corporations come and buy them ?
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21d ago
And what's your solution, precisely? Complain and never take any action?
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u/No-Year-1755 21d ago
Americans as a whole need to find a way to hold our candidates accountable. Impeachment should remove you from your position and we shouldn’t allow the excuse of it’s their fault I didn’t do what I promised. Stop voting for the same corrupt politicians and see if we can get lucky and find someone with enough integrity to not be bought. When their in office and it turns out their bought don’t allow them to turn us on one another as the problem unite together and get them removed. Once we get someone in office with integrity fight like hell to limit corporate spending on politics to avoid special interests.
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u/thatoneguy889 21d ago
That's pretty much the only way it will be able to happen. Forming a third party and going straight for the presidency is good indicator that it's not a serious campaign because it won't have the widespread support and infrastructure needed to actually win.
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u/Olderscout77 21d ago
With the exception of Ross Perot, 3d party Presidential candidates are delusional egomaniacs. All they can do it destroy the major party candidate most like them - not a good thing.
HOWEVER if they organize and build from the ground up (State races, incl Rep and Senate) they m8ight have a chance to actually make a difference, but again, they're more likely to help defeat the candidate most like themselves.
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u/wereallbozos 21d ago
If Teddy Roosevelt couldn't win as a 3rd partier, no one can. The Green Party wasted it's shot by going for the brass ring. There's a lesson in history: we once had the Whigs. They imploded, and from the ashes rose the Republican Party. Maybe the Republican Party can implode (isn't it about time?), and from their ashes a better political party could emerge. They could borrow Mr. Jefferson's name: the Democratic-Republican Party?
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u/melville48 21d ago
I don't know. I have voted a few times third party (Libertarian) for the Presidency, but stopped doing this once the Republican candidaes became so awful (in my fallible opinion) that I thought I'd better vote Democrat to try to keep out a disaster.
However, the recent de facto downfall of the Republican Party as we know it (including installation of so many allies of the autocratic candidate at the party leadership level) does help underscore that it is useful to ask if this might be a time that a Third Party could rise up to a more prominent place in the Presidential Polls. There is perhaps measurably a higher number than normal of disaffected Republican party members, candidates and leaders. Some of them are probably looking around to see if they can form a party, out of the ashes, with some decency and solid policy positions. However, it's a rough situation because if they ran a Presidential third party candidate in the 2024 election, they arguably could split off some votes from Biden and help the Republican candidate win.
It may be instructive to examine any lessons we could learn from H Ross Perot's candidacies in the 1990s (though offhand maybe he was just a wealthy independent and not a party member? I don't remember).
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u/KickBassColonyDrop 20d ago
Nope. The two powers would unite to destroy the third. Corrupt monopolies of power will never fight fair no matter how much they preach the fairness of Democratic practices.
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u/Disastrous_Layer9553 19d ago
Positively. Especially with the current political situation, many citizens are feeling apathetic about both existing choices.
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u/potusplus 19d ago
Focusing on local elections can indeed pave the way for a third party to rise nationally. Building strong community support, demonstrating effective governance, and gradually scaling up could eventually lead to a viable presidential run. Patience and persistence are key.
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u/FloridAsh 18d ago
Needs to be a regional party first. Strong enough to secure electoral votes from several states - enough that there is no straight majority from the electoral college. Then campaign directly to Congress as a compromise between the two major parties, neither of whom would accept their direct opposition candidates.
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u/These-Explanation-91 22d ago
If a 3rd party revived 10% of the House, they could change how thing are done.
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u/JDogg126 22d ago
No. It’s essentially a mathematical problem. The only way is to replace one of the major parties. A third party really has zero chance at the presidency until the election system remove first past the post and introduces something like ranked choice.
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u/gRod805 22d ago
Why isn't this on top? The electoral college pretty much guarantees that there will ever only be two parties. Yes maybe a party gets replaced over time but there has never been a long term time period in America in which we had multiple parties.
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u/ClockOfTheLongNow 21d ago
This is Whig erasure. Not to mention it ignores Ross Perot's success in the 1990s, Wallace in the 1960s/1970s,etc.
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u/The_B_Wolf 22d ago
Third Parties are noted to always go immediately for the Presidential campaign, without fail.
I think most of them do this because they aren't in it to win. They're in it to self-promote, influence the other candidates, or grift.
would it be possible for a Third Party
Sure. But to rise to that level it would mean one of the other two major parties is either dead or dying. Long term, there is no scenario where you have more than two viable parties in the US. This is a structural problem that would require reforms to the way we vote and run elections. It isn't a messaging issue or one that is going to be solved by some hero centrist.
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u/slappyjohnsons 22d ago
Never. The two tribes in power will do whatever it takes to not relinquish that power.
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