A recent Gallup poll indicates that 58% of Americans over the age of 18 want a third party. And it isn’t just Tea Party folks.
The desire for a third party is fairly similar across ideological groups, with 61% of liberals, 60% of moderates, and 54% of conservatives believing a third major party is needed.
Personally, I don’t find the poll results surprising. In the move towards the center, it is pretty easy to label many Democrats as DINOs and many Republicans as RINOs. Those folks who really are in the center – the so-called moderates – probably see the two parties as caricatures of what they really are. The media goes a long way in putting the public face on the Democrats as liberals – which they mostly aren’t – and the Republicans as conservatives – which they mostly aren’t, either.
Setting aside the logistics which make it very difficult for the creation of a third party, my question is: is it time for one? And if so, what would that third party look like?
Inquiring minds want to know 😉
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
You’ve essentially made the Jesse Ventura argument: that if a third party breaks through in the U.S., it will be in the center.
The biggest obstacle to any third party are the ballot access laws. Many states have their laws written in a manner intentionally meant to keep third parties off.
I disagree. The biggest obstacle is the winner-take-all election system. Go to proportional ballots, and you will see several small parties start getting seats in congress, and we will get coalition governments.
If the biggest obstacle is winner-take-all, why do Canada and Great Britain (for example) both have three or more parties regularly winning seats in their legislatures?
Regionalism and Quebecois nationalism. I’m not Canadian, but I seem to recall that each individual province has its own two-party system.
The US no longer has strong regional identities and separatist
issues ended in 1865.
My sneaking suspicion is that if a major third party ever appears in America, it will be similar to what happened in the UK. There, after World War I, the major party of the left, the Liberals, lost most of its base to a more radical organization, the Labour Party. What was left of the Liberals turned into a rump third party of the center, always much weaker than either the Tories or Labour. Even then, the UK continued to operate mainly as a two-party system, with neither Labour nor the Conservatives needing the Liberals (now Liberal Democrats, after merging with another left-center startup) to form a majority most of the time. It’s not exactly grounds for optimism among those who may want some kind of ruling center coalition.
We need about four parties.
True Liberals-Dennis Kucinich, etc.
Centrists- a combination of the surviving RINOs and big business Dems and the Blue Dogs.
Free Market Libertarians: the anti-tax, pro big business wing of the current GOP.
The Christian Crusade- Pat Robertson and his ilk.
I suspect the Centrists would usually win a plurality but have to cut deals with the True Liberals or the Free Market Libertarians to get things done.
But getting things done would be an improvement over what we have now.
Actually, I thought there was only one political party with two wings: The Democratic-Republicans.
I’m with Gerald Celente on this one. We need to get the Progressives, Populists, Civil Libertarians, and Austrian Economics Libertarians together. What would that merger look like? I’m hoping for a better whose platform focuses on small, limited government at the local, state, and federal level and that the power elite can’t use as a tool.
I’m also hoping to see as part of that platform the removal of the Federal Reserve, the end of corporations given legal protections of an individual, and the restoration of individual rights such as privacy, property, and the right to work without regulations and certifications that prevent the poor and middle class from entering an open market.
That’s the Libertarian Party that I believe can be a viable organization.
You have Noam Chomsky on your side, too, James. He was on NPR this morning referring to the two parties as “one party with two quarreling factions, controlled by the corporations”.
Noam Chomsky is a social Libertarian. We actually have a pretty diverse party.
The answer: no.
This isn’t new, folks. And the second that someone names a third party, a majority will throw stones at that one, too.
Constitutional Conservatives have no party right now. Religious conservatives have the GOP held hostage.
Vivian, to me, the poll above is more a reflection of a general frustration with political parties, lobbyist-driven-legislation and campaigning in general than it is a clear call for third or fourth parties.
It certainly is not an indication of how much better today’s citizenry is informed about civics than it was in past decades. So, people are sick of spin, even if they don’t know what’s going on.
I want a third party of leaders with common sense. The other two seem to have lost theirs.
One of the reasons Israel required more than 2 parties is to prevent the closed monopolization of power and to provide proportional representation. We have a winner take all electoral system designed by an establishment duopoly. An “open list” would allow individual voters to influence their candidate within a party. Australia has an interesting approach that borrows good ideas from other styles of elections http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above-the-line_voting
I don’t think it would produce a different result. Thus, seems like a lot of effort for naught.
What is interesting about the graph is that opinions converged until 2006. And then in 2007, the year oil and interest rates burst the bubble, the majority thought both parties did an adequate job. After the bubble burst, not so much. I suspect after people forget about the financial crisis that nearly toppled global capital markets, we’ll be back to thinking the two parties are just swell.
As a moderate, Blue Dog, who generally considers himself a Democrat I would say yes. The Dems are far to the left of where I am and the Republicans are far to the right.
I also thought the idea of a four party system as proposed by Steve Vaughn was interesting.
I doubt we’ll ever see a third party; judging from the political history of the United States, we’d be much more likely to see one of the two existing parties disintegrate, leading to the rise of a new second party. Shortly thereafter, the other major party will have to realign in reaction to the death of the first, and we’d end up with two largely-new political parties.
We started with Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists. Once the Federalists largely disappeared, the Democratic Republicans splintered into factions, leaving us with Jackson’s Democratic Party and the Whigs who formed to oppose them. The Whigs fell apart after they failed to renominate their own incumbent President Filmore over questions largely revolving around slavery; many abolitionist Whigs reemerged later as Republicans. Desegregation forced another realignment of the two parties as a bunch of southern Democrats who would have fit in well with Andrew Jackson decided that they’d rather be Republicans. This left us with the two parties we have today.
Will such a realignment happen now? I don’t know. I sort of doubt it at this point, but I think it will depend on the answer to two questions. First, how well will the Republicans incorporate tea baggers into the fold? I suspect the answer will be “not very well.” Most of us here remember how quickly the Republican establishment dismissed Ron Paul as a potential Presidential candidate in 2008. The GOP establishment wants nothing to do with most of these folks after election day is over.
The second question is, how will the tea-baggers respond when they realize that they’ve been hoodwinked by the Republicans? Which will be their inevitable conclusion, if the Republicans win; they haven’t committed to any meaningful spending cuts, and their alternative healthcare proposal is nearly identical to what they derisively call “Obamacare.” How will the tea baggers respond to this? Will they slink off into the mist and gnash their teeth about how they’ll never get involved in politics again? Or will they expand their list of Republicans to purge beyond the Mike Castles of the GOP?
Only time will tell.
Dogood,
I would agree with you on recent American history as it has become more difficult for 3rd Party candidates these past years because of structural and media changes in the process. However, the United States had a rich history of 3rd Party wins in the years between Reconstruction and World War II, and an even richer one before the Civil War (such as with the Liberty Party).
Anyway, here’s a wiki article that shows how well 3rd Parties used to do before the game was further rigged:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_officeholders_in_the_United_States
Another one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_United_States_House_of_Representatives