In the United States, every presidential election cycle inevitably includes a set of independent/third-party candidates poised to “shake up the race”.
Some years, there is a just single upstart seeking to upend the status quo, such as Ross Perot in 1992. In others, we see a plethora of people running outside of the two big parties. The 2024 race appears to fall into the latter category. Indeed, this year, we have a very large set ranging from true independents like Professor Cornel West to established minor party candidates like Green Party stalwart Jill Stein to people on the periphery of the major parties such as former Democrat Robert Kennedy Jr.
A third party or independent candidate has never won the presidential election in the US. Throughout US history, even the most popular of third-party presidential bids achieved little other than creating a few headlines and siphoning off votes from one major party for the benefit of the other- like Nader did in 2000 or Stein in 2016.
And yet, every four years people from across the political spectrum put themselves forward as third party/independent candidates, and a considerable number of Americans vote for them. And many others say they too would vote for third party/ independent candidates, if these candidates had any real chance of winning.
Clearly, there is an untapped demand in America for leadership options beyond those offered by the Democrats and the Republicans.
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The two-party system in the US is almost as old as the country itself. For more than 200 years, every single American president belonged to one of the two major political groupings in the country at the time of his election – either the Federalists or the Democratic Republicans, the Democrats or the Whigs, and since the days of Abraham Lincoln, the Democrats or the Republicans.
In this strictly two-party system, independent/third party candidates are often seen as novelty acts – they add colour to election coverage, entertain the public with their radical plans and proposals, create the fodder for late-night monologues and Saturday Night Live sketches, and little else.
The two-party binary is such a fundamental part of the American political system that during the 1996 elections, the Simpsons famously suggested Americans would vote for an alien from space rather than a third-party candidate, spawning the “don’t blame me; I voted for Kodos” meme.
The main factor that ensures the endurance of the two-party binary in the US, even in moments when voters appear to be disillusioned with both parties, is the “first-past-the-post” voting system used in the country.
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“First past the post” means the candidate/party who wins the most votes (whether that’s a majority or not) wins the election. As established by French social scientist Maurice Duverger, this electoral arrangement promotes two-party binaries like the one we see today in America for two main reasons.
First, this system in which only one candidate wins by merely having one more vote than the next highest vote-getter disincentivises minor parties from contesting elections. When three or more parties are in a race in such a system, they have a clear incentive to team up, combine their voting bases, and thereby beat their shared opponent. This logic, which generally plays out before voters ever get to cast a vote, rapidly whittles down a long list of potential parties into two blocks competing with one another election after election. Second, in first-past-the-post systems, people often hesitate to cast their vote for a minor party that chooses to contest the election alone. Even if they like a minor party’s policy proposals the best, in fear of “wasting” their vote on a party that has no chance of winning the election, they vote for the major party candidate who is most acceptable to them instead.
This logic holds up with such consistency that it’s often referred to in political science as “Duverger’s Law”. There are, however, very few universal “laws” in political science, as human beings are messy, and their behaviour is far less predictable than that of atoms or genes. Indeed, recent research has challenged the validity of Duverger’s Law in certain contexts like India or even the United Kingdom.
And even in the US, there are, of course, exceptions: a maverick who self-funds a race or two, a disillusioned party member who breaks off and has a go at it alone, or a candidate or party who cares more about bringing attention to their pet issues than winning the vote. There have even been a few instances in history in which newfound groupings managed to take advantage of extraordinary political turmoil to gain widespread support. But even in these cases, the newcomers never remained a third party and always ended up replacing one of the two major political parties of the time.—Al Jazeera
