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Most Americans do not want either President Joe Biden, 80, or former President Donald Trump, 77, to be on the ballot in 2024. Almost 60% think Biden is doing a poor job; only Trump and Jimmy Carter had lower Gallup Poll ratings at this point in their presidencies. As for Trump, the twice-impeached, thrice-indicted Republican front-runner lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, and his political toxicity hurt down-ballot Republicans in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
Despite these political handicaps, barring some unforeseen event, Biden will be the Democratic nominee and, unless his support among GOP primary voters collapses, Trump will again be the Republican nominee.
The next president will be a Democrat or a Republican, even if both are unpopular, because the United States has a two-party system. There are structural and cultural explanations for why this is so. French political scientist Maurice Duverger observed decades ago that electoral systems with single-member districts and first-past-the-post plurality winners tend to produce two major political parties.
As political science majors could tell you, this is known as Duverger’s Law. Over time, the Democratic and Republican Parties have entrenched their structural control in all states, shaping ballot-access rules and running primary elections. Culturally, most Americans have been socialized into identifying with one of these two parties.
While on rare occasions, independent or third-party candidates win elections at the local or state levels or even in Congress, the “duopoly” is thoroughly entrenched at the presidential level.
The presidential election is not a single national election, but 50 separate state elections, with each state—save Maine and Nebraska—awarding all its electors to the winner of that state’s popular vote. In order to accumulate the most electoral votes, candidates need to run under the same party label in every state. These processes favor the two major parties.
No third-party candidate has won any electoral votes since the regional, white supremacist candidacies of Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 (who won four Southern states) and George Wallace in 1968 (winning five Southern states). In 1992, Ross Perot won the largest share of the popular vote of any third-party candidate in modern history (over 19%), but he did not receive a single electoral vote.
As long as we have an Electoral College with winner-take-all assignment of electors (in 48 states), I can confidently predict that a third-party candidate will never win the presidency. The Electoral College is Duverger’s Law on steroids.
In a solid red state like Indiana, or a solid blue state like Massachusetts, voting for a third-party presidential candidate is unlikely to influence the outcome. However, in key battleground states, an independent or third-party candidate could draw (possibly critical) votes away from one of the two major candidates. This happened to the detriment of the Democratic candidate in 2000 (with the Green Party’s Ralph Nader) and in 2016 (with Jill Stein), arguably tipping those elections to George W. Bush and Trump, respectively.
Some Americans regularly vote for third parties; the most well-known are the Libertarians. Those voters are not much concern to Democrats or Republicans. What is of concern is a candidate who might draw disgruntled or disillusioned votes away from a major party. Potential third-party candidacies of leftist African American scholar Cornel West or moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin make the Biden campaign nervous.
If you vote third party for president—which is of course every voter’s right—your candidate will not win. But that vote could tip the election in a particular and possibly unintended direction.•
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Atlas, a political scientist, is a senior lecturer at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Indiana University. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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