These ought to be the best of times for third parties in American presidential politics. In one corner, Joe Biden’s job approval is below 40 percent, it’s been double digits underwater continuously for eleven months, north of 80 percent of the public thinks he’s too old to do the job for another four years, and polls regularly show that majorities of his own party didn’t want him to run again. He currently polls at 45.8 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Donald Trump — a fatal showing for an incumbent in normal conditions — and that’s the highest point he’s been at since 2022. He drops into the 30s if other candidates are included. Voters tell pollsters by a landslide 67 to 23 percent margin that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Biden’s party is down 2.4 points and at just under 43 percent in the generic ballot. Biden is, by any ordinary accounting, politically dead.
In the other corner, Donald Trump lost the last election by 7 million votes and 84 electoral votes. In his two runs, he’s never hit 47 percent of the vote, and that was before January 6 and his second impeachment, which drew a record number of votes to convict from within his own party; he was toxic with voters in the 2022 midterms. He’ll be 78 years old in June, and he’s currently under indictment for 91 felonies in four different jurisdictions and appealing verdicts saying that he committed business fraud and sexual assault. His own favorability rating with the public is 42.5 percent and has been double digits underwater almost continuously for more than eight years. Not since his current spate of legal woes began in August 2022 has less than 53 percent of the public viewed him unfavorably. Trump leads Biden in the head-to-head polls because they can’t both be losing at the same time, but he also sags below 40 percent in a three-way race with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump looks every bit as unelectable as Biden looks dead.
For all the opportunity the Trump era has presented in unpopular candidates on both sides, however, the two existing third parties (the Libertarians and the Greens) have repeatedly proven themselves too dysfunctional, marginal, and self-marginalizing to get very far, with 3.3 percent of the vote for the 2016 Libertarian ticket of former governors Gary Johnson and Bill Weld being the high-water mark even as Weld himself ended the race effectively campaigning for Hillary Clinton against his own ticket. Evan McMullin, whose nonpartisan campaign drew 21 percent of the vote in Utah, turned out to be essentially a scam and ended up becoming a Democrat and junking the things he stood for in 2016. This time around, left-wing law professor Cornel West is jockeying against perennial Green Party nominee Jill Stein for the voters too far left to support Biden. The high-profile alternative is RFK Jr., a 70-year-old lifelong Democrat and all-purpose crackpot and conspiracy theorist who may well be a worse person and even more unfit for office than Trump or Biden.
You’d think this creates the perfect lane for recruiting a serious person to run a real campaign that’s independent of the two parties and not just a single-faction protest. That sort of thing is how Emmanuel Macron broke the hold of the existing parties to become president of France in 2017. And yet, as the No Labels organization met Friday to plan its presidential campaign, it is still conspicuously missing a candidate: “An official with the group acknowledged during the gathering, a recording of which was shared with POLITICO, that they currently do not have a candidate and may not find one.” Nikki Haley has said she won’t leave the Republicans to run, and neither will retiring Democratic senator Joe Manchin leave his party. Larry Hogan, considered with Manchin to be a potential top recruit for a No Labels unity ticket of moderate-to-liberal Republicans and moderate-to-conservative Democrats, has decided to run for the Senate in Maryland instead. There’s not a deep pool of people who could plausibly step in.
Americans have long been hesitant to cast their lot in a presidential race with a third party. Only two candidates have broken 20 percent of the popular vote outside the two major parties in existence at that time, and both of them (Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and Millard Fillmore in 1856) were former presidents, plus Fillmore was running against the first-ever Republican ticket after the Whigs collapsed. Recall, however, that the Whigs didn’t die because a third party split their vote, but because they ceased to be an effective vehicle to stop the Democratic agenda, requiring a new party to form. Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968 both won multiple states, but only because they ran narrowly regional campaigns. No single region is alienated enough from both parties simultaneously to support that now. McMullin’s one-state rebellion in 2016, like Robert LaFollette’s in 1924, was about the closest we are likely to see.
Trump, of course, ran what was effectively a hostile takeover of the Republican Party from the outside in 2016, and Bernie Sanders has attempted something similar, although Sanders has caucused with Democrats in Congress for decades. So did Mike Bloomberg in 2020.
Who could run for No Labels, and for which voters? The traditional problem for third parties in terms of their appeal is that the people who are open to one are a very mixed bag. Media coverage focuses on Bloomberg types who are upscale, lean to the right on issues such as crime and taxes, but are socially liberal. The No Labels crowd seems to fit with that. Yet, the real voter base alienated by both parties is more heavily weighted to populists who are socially conservative, economically liberal, and skeptical of government and business alike. Those were more the voters that Ross Perot courted in 1992 and 1996. Trump and RFK Jr. are already both fishing in that pond from opposite directions, albeit hemmed in somewhat by their prior party ties.
No Labels may be tempted to recruit a self-funding business tycoon, but without the pre-existing celebrity of Trump or the energy of Perot, it will be very hard to break through. A Howard Schultz type won’t cut it. Former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura is still talking up other third-party candidates but doesn’t seem interested in a run, plus he’s also over 70. Other independents of recent vintage — former Alaska governor Bill Walker, former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chaffee, and repeat Kansas candidate Greg Orman all have records that inspire little confidence and too many ties to the Democrats. Many of the public officials who have become alienated from the major parties now work as lobbyists and would be blacklisted if they go this route.
We’re stuck with Biden and Trump because they have selfishly insisted on running again, Democratic officials couldn’t or wouldn’t give their voters another choice, and Republican voters rejected the strong choices they were offered. One by one, the existing third parties and the independent organizations have failed to step forward. Nobody’s coming to save us.