Why Not A Third Party Candidate?

Explaining why, in an election between an atrocious incumbent and an even worse challenger, third party presidential candidates are not the answer.

A few people have asked me to explain why, when I’m talking about the upcoming presidential election, I don’t consider advocating for third party candidates.

It’s not the two-party system is either preferable or inevitable. It is neither, but there are other reasons why I don’t consider a third-party candidate a viable choice in either this election or any presidential in the near future. As you’ll see, I do think there is a path to a future where we can move past the ineffectual and phony Democrats and the fascist and insane Republicans.

First, some background.

The 2024 presidential election in the United States puts people like me in an ever-deepening quandary. Anyone who follows my work knows that I have an exceedingly low opinion of Joe Biden. It’s not only his foreign policy, but also his domestic policies—which, as president has been mostly talk and excuse-making mixed with a few grudging concessions to progressive politics that had to be fought for fiercely long after the arduous work of getting Biden elected was over—that I find objectionable and have found them so for decades.

Since Biden made it clear that he was going to pursue another term, I have been doing all I could to try to agitate Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters to publicly press for a real primary, to force the party to hold debates, to raise money for other candidates, and to give voters the voice we all deserve. Few cared that, despite the fact that most Democrats preferred that Biden step aside, we were being denied the opportunity to exercise our right to vote. That is an incredibly sad commentary on the true value most liberals and centrists place on real democracy.

But now it is, for all intents and purposes, a fait accompli. There is no way to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee. He has essentially won the nomination uncontested (and, no, I cannot take Marianne Williamson seriously). This presents a grave danger, because few Democrats are as poorly positioned to beat Donald Trump this time around as Biden.

Contrary to myth, Biden was the wrong candidate in 2020. He was running against an incumbent whose idiocy had directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who need not have died from COVID and had bungled the economic impact of the pandemic terribly. Yet he still won the swing states by thin margins.

In 2024, he’s an even worse candidate. Biden is now running against that same screw-up, but this time we can add that the man is an obvious felon and tried to overthrow the government just three years ago. And Biden still trails Trump in the polls.

The problem now, though, is that replacing Biden with another candidate—Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, or any other Democrat—is not likely to help. At this late stage, they’d be starting from an extreme disadvantage on many levels, and many of the Democrats who wouldn’t be tarred by the same brush that turns people off to Biden are progressives who certainly would not be supported by the mainstream of the party.

Obviously, it’s tempting to punish Biden for his full partnership in genocide in Gaza. Indeed, beyond punishing him, one just wants a president to whom genocide is at least distasteful. But the simple reality is that doing so beyond the primaries means bringing back Trump.

Biden has been so monstrous in his policy toward Palestine that it is fair to say that he is just as bad in this regard as Trump, but it’s tough to make the case that he’s worse on this issue. It is unlikely in the extreme that Trump would have restrained Israel after October 7, and very possibly would have cheered the Israelis on even more than Biden has, his recent call to “finish it up quickly” notwithstanding. And from a progressive or centrist point of view, it’s impossible to find another issue on which Trump is not much worse than Biden.

So, Democrats are stuck with Biden, and people like me are stuck with having to choose between the atrocious incumbent or the considerably worse Orange Mussolini alternative.

I have therefore chosen to advocate that people in solid Blue states vote for no one or for a write-in or third party candidate just as a sign of displeasure, while those in swing states would be advised to vote for Biden if there’s any way they can. In this regard, I exclude people with relatives and friends in Palestine; while the strategy from an American point of view is the same for everyone, I cannot, in good conscience, expect, much less urge, Palestinian-Americans or those who have Palestinian family to vote for a man who has done all he can to wipe their families from the face of the Earth in an appalling act of genocide.

This has led some to ask me why I won’t advocate for voting for a third-party candidate, whether as a protest vote (which is fine in a state that is solid Blue or Red) or as a way to build an alternative to the two-party system.

The latter reason doesn’t actually make any sense, and, in fact, it reinforces the two-party system, which is why I won’t advocate such a strategy.

Third Party presidential candidates are self-defeating stunts

Any third party that is fielding a candidate in a presidential election at this stage is not a party to take seriously. Nor, incidentally, are Independents running on their own, but I’ll get to that a bit later.

When a third party candidate runs in this system there is simply no way for them to win. Most third party candidates can’t even get on the ballot in all fifty states, or even close to that number. On the rare occasions that they do, their candidate only serves the greater of the two evils that are running from their voters’ perspectives.

In most cases, it really doesn’t matter much. Democrats—who always blame anyone but themselves for their consistent failures—flailed about in 2016, blaming anyone they could think of, be it Russia, Bernie Sanders supporters, James Comey, Wikileaks, or the Green Party led by Dr. Jill Stein. The reality is Hillary Clinton lost because she was absolutely the wrong candidate at the time, the party ran a terrible campaign where they were more concerned with marginalizing their own progressive wing than with defeating Donald Trump, and they ended up being hoisted on the petard of their own hubris.

Stein wasn’t the reason Clinton lost. But in 2000, Ralph Nader gave the Republicans and the Supreme Court the opportunity to steal that election in Florida. In 1992, Ross Perot probably cost George H.W. Bush the election. Although many studies have shown that votes for Perot did not, of themselves, cause Bush to lose, it’s probable that his campaign cast the incumbent in a more negative light than Clinton could have by himself.

That debate aside, running for president outside of the two major parties is an exercise in futility that displays an ignorance of politics that should be disqualifying for any party or candidate.

There is a way to bring third parties into play, but it’s not by running for president. It’s much more boring, much more laborious, and much slower, but it has the benefit of holding the possibility of actually working, unlike the presidential strategy.

It’s done by running for school boards, for city and county councils, for local superintendents or municipal judge positions. In those campaigns, you build support for your party’s agenda on the local level, bringing in a gradually growing base of support.

That base of support can then start putting candidates into higher profile positions such as mayoral positions, sate assemblies, and other statewide positions. At that point, it gets difficult, because the major parties will notice and will go on the attack. That’s the stage at which third parties are usually assassinated, co-opted, or wither and die because their support is not sufficient to withstand the attacks.

This is where good fundraising and messaging come in because the party would need to move beyond just neighborhood, grassroots outreach and comradely goodwill. But if the party has a solid plan, an appealing ideology and message, and good leadership (a combination that is possible but that few third parties have), they can overcome it. The trick is to continue to forge partnerships with fellow progressives in a spirit that strengthens everyone, rather than the competitive approach which so often breeds resentment and rivalry.

If that comes together, you’ve got a pathway to win congressional elections, and then it’s a matter of building the party enough to be a major player. That’s when you can field presidential candidates. But that point isn’t reached in a matter of months or even years. It takes decades, and rushing it, as third parties have tended to do for many years, spells doom.

There really isn’t any other way. The alternative is what we have: ineffectual small parties whose political acumen is, to put it kindly, questionable. Listening to Dr. Jill Stein or other third party candidates does not inspire. They know how to chant and quip, but there’s little policy and substance there, little sense of what it would really mean to govern and grapple with the real world problems of translating an idealistic ideology—which we desperately need—into functional policy.

Qualifications for the job

And that’s the same problem I have with independent presidential candidates. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Dr. Cornel West, and I think he’s brilliant. Unlike Dr. Stein and most other third party candidates, Dr. West does have a grasp of politics and of many issues. But he is not a politician.

Politician is a dirty word to most people. Of course, we all want to eliminate the “Beltway Insider” game that opens the door to corruption, or just to too much pursuit of personal gain. We want to see a government that has a range of opinions and ideologies but that also has a fervent desire to bring those differences together to find optimal solutions.

That’s not an easy thing to do, and I don’t pretend to have an answer as to how to do it (I’m unaware of any large government structures, beyond some small, egalitarian communities, that have ever found a way to significantly transcend political corruption, ambition, and self-interest).

But here, I suppose, is where my thinking is guided by my education. Having a master’s degree in public policy, with a focus on public management (and international security) gives me an appreciation for the complexities of governance. A lot of it is mundane and boring. But it has to be managed, and an incompetent president (see: Trump, Donald J.) leads to a dysfunctional government.

Knowing how to govern actually matters, and knowing how politics are done matters at least as much. The President of the United States is many things, but one of them is the chief executive of the biggest, most sprawling bureaucracy (there’s another dirty word, and another one you’d hate to have to live without in reality) ever known. They have to have some clue how to manage it.

Moreover, in our system, the president is the most powerful person, but their role is limited by the Constitution. They have to be able to work with Congress, and they have to be familiar with how to do that. Someone with no experience in governing on any level, no matter how brilliant they may be, simply doesn’t have the requisite experience.

To top it off, an independent or third party president would have no support in Congress. On the contrary, Democrats and Republicans would all see that person as an unprecedented and enormous threat. They would not be able to get anything done.

These are the reasons I am uninterested in third party presidential candidates, or even outsiders within their own parties such as Marianne Williamson (whose policies I generally like, but have other reservations about). I would have loved to see a Bernie Sanders presidency and he would have been supported, at least rhetorically, by Democrats out of necessity, but that support would have been weak due to his not being a member of their party, and, in many cases, his being a threat to many of the perks that come with being a member of Congress. But at least Bernie would have known what it took to do the job, after decades in government.

There are no short cuts here. A smarter and more stable person than Trump would still have to contend with the fact that they have no idea how to do the job they were elected to do. As in any other field, professionals need to do their jobs. You bring your car to a trained and experienced mechanic when it needs to be fixed. You go to a doctor when you are sick or injured, you go to a lawyer when need legal help. You need to be a politician to be president. That doesn’t have to mean being corrupt, being authoritarian, being manipulative, or generally being an asshole.

The problem in Washington is not that we have politicians there. It’s that we have terrible people there. We need politicians. We just need to find a way to attract more decent people to the profession.

The two-party system is absolutely dysfunctional. But we need to fix it by either radically changing the existing parties or building new ones from the ground up. Running vanity campaigns for president, even with smart and noble people, is never going to change a thing, and is likely to only makes things worse.

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