The United States has two structural characteristics which discourage third parties (and another which rewards third parties with certain kind of concerns). Only once has a third party elected a president, and that party was a contender almost immediately after its founding. The two restrictive characteristics are:
- American elections are (almost always) “first past the post.” There is one winner in almost every race. Thus a party can receive 25% of the votes for a state legislative body with 118 seats – as the IL house has – and receive no seats. Those nations which give proportionate representation are obviously more welcoming to minor parties.
- The US is not parliamentary. A minor party with legislative seats in a parliamentary system can always hope that no party will get a majority of the seats. In that case, the minor party might extract some rewards for entering into a coalition, perhaps even seats in the cabinet.
The US structure relegates third parties to protest votes. In the few cases where the party can mobilize enough voters in one congressional district to win, the victor immediately caucuses with one of the major parties if they will have him.
Generally, the voter is conscious of expressing blackmail: “If you go too moderate (or, occasionally, too extreme) I will vote X instead of for your party.” Occasionally, this blackmail works.
The history of national parties in the USA in brief would run like this: The Founding Fathers were opposed to parties, and the Constitution does not mention them. Washington gathered the best minds of the Revolutionary period into his cabinet. Hamilton managed to persuade him of his domestic agenda, and Jefferson—although secretary of state – found himself leader of the anti-administration forces. Hamilton’s group became the Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s party had many names but is remembered as the Democratic-Republican Party. This won seven presidential elections in a row while the Federalists dwindled. Then Jefferson’s party split into the Democrats and the Whigs in 1828. Both were represented throughout the country, which prevented them from taking a party position on slavery.
After several attempts to launch antislavery parties, the Republican Party was formed. In 1856, the first presidential election of its existence, its candidate, Fremont came in second. The Whig Party disappeared. In 1860, the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln won. From 1857 to 2019, the Democratic and the Republican parties have been first and second in the partisan membership of each branch of Congress; they have been first and second in every presidential election but two. In 1864, the Republicans tried to merge with the War Democrats as the Union Party; in 1912, the Progressive Party ran second with a candidate who was a former Republican president.
When it was founded, the Republican Party found little favor with the radicals on its issue. The Abolitionist proposed eradication of slavery, or -- at minimum – splitting the country so that Massachusetts was no longer part of a country in which slavery was legal. The Republicans advocated merely the prohibition of the extension of slavery into the territories. This appealed to the people who didn’t want Negro neighbors and to the people who were disgusted with the Southern slogan of “our way or we leave.” The abolitionists decided that the Republican vote was the best option that they had. It was the only party which proposed any limit on slavery, and they could see – as could the plantation owners – that states would be added and if they were free states, this would make the Abolitionist cause easier.
Thus, the chances of third parties don’t have much historical support. This is especially true of parties which are further on some spectrum than either of the two parties when those parties show clear distinctions. The only successful third party emphasized an issue on which the two existing major parties could not take a party stand. List the five issues which most excite voters today; which side of them is the Democratic side? which is the Republican side? It’s easy to say that Democrats are not serious enough about climate change, gun control, or the influence of money in politics. It is either blindness or delusion to say that there is not a wide divide between the parties.
One party debates whether Obamacare should be extended into Medicare for All; the other has some state legislatures which will accept the federal subsidies to expand Medicaid and some governors who will not.
Then, too, since primaries became prevalent, the belief that a huge fraction of the electorate really believes like you do but does not get the candidates to support to show that belief looks less and less plausible. If you can’t get enough turnout in a Democratic primary to nominate your candidate, the claim that you could get enough votes in a general to elect him against a Democrat and a Republican look delusional.
It’s a platitude that since the Dixiecrats moved to the Republican Party, the parties have been sorting themselves out as more ideological than ever before. Even so, there are divides in each party.
The characterization of the Democratic divide as between the moderates and the radicals disguises the amount of disagreement about where we should go fast. Sanders is not the Marxist-Leninist of Republican parody, but he is Marxian in the sense of seeing all problems as rooted in economics. The real conflict of 2016 was that Clinton saw progress as meaning more women (and POC) on boards of directors. Sanders saw corporate boards of directors as the enemy. We all agree that we should go forward on each other’s issue; we may disagree on which issue is dealt with first.
The Republican Party voters are divided in at least 3 major factions. One is Libertarian; they pretend to have their own organization, but they support Republicans when push comes to shove. That results in agreement about small government regulation of business but not of individual morality, much less subsidy of business. The second is the standard (or business) Republican Party; promote and subsidize, but don’t regulate business firms. This has been fed with massive tax cuts for the rich to bribe them to continue to support a Party which delivers little else in their agenda. The third is the Party of Hate, or the Trumpians.
If either party splits to the point of running opposing slates which have the support of a significant fraction of their recent voters, the other party will gain a huge majority. Logically, you have to give higher odds of the Republicans splitting. Asking small-government enthusiasts to swallow billions for part of a wall which would cost a trillion to complete is asking one hell of a lot.
Parties came into being in this country as parties of congressmen. (They all agreed that Washington should be president.) Then, too, “Anti-Nebraska” politicians were elected to Congress before the “Republican Party” label was decided on nationally, and they had a Speaker of the house before they ran a presidential candidate. In contrast, recent third parties have concentrated on the presidential election, though they have concentrated their platform on things only Congress can perform. When TR ran for president on the Progressive ticket, there was a huge progressive movement within both parties; he was probably expecting support from Republican progressives, at least.
The national weakness of third parties is relieved in several cases by local success. Probably the greatest success was the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota. As long as your goals are local, this is a goal that is – if difficult – still a reasonable one.
If your priorities are national issues, then you are left with the same choices. You back the candidate in the Democratic primary who is either the most progressive or the one who is the more progressive of the two contender likelier to win. Then, as often as not, you support the lesser of two evils in the general election. When one becomes more active in politics, you work to recruit more progressive candidates, but even voting in the primary for a candidate who is more – if however little – progressive increases the vote which can be used to encourage another progressive to run.
New York, and almost no other state, adds the votes of a candidate together if he is running on the tickets of several parties. That changes the possibilities for third parties, and they behave – and even form – according to those possibilities. If the Working Families Party usually gets 10% of the vote in state-wide elections, then the Democrats have slighter chance at winning a post if they do not nominate someone acceptable to the Working Families Party.
There has recently been a new poll released which found a higher than historically normal percentage of yes answers to the question, “should there be a third party besides the Republicans and the Democrats?” The high response isn’t very significant because the question is absolutely idiotic.
Aside from (as comments on the first mention of the poll in dKos pointed out) Democrats who were saying, “The Republican Party should split in two,” the people who were saying that they would support a third party were not saying that they would all support the same third party. For that matter, IIRC, there were seven parties with presidential candidates on the IL ballot; what we are missing is not a third choice, but another choice that a decent share will support.