Seth Masket
It’s the year before a presidential election, which means it’s once again time for a group to call for a unity ticket of a Democratic and a Republican for president and vice president or for an independent candidate to avoid the dysfunction of the parties entirely.
The current effort by the No Labels group to get a presidential ballot line in all 50 states for 2024 is being treated as something of a novelty, but we’ve seen something like this in most modern presidential elections.
Needless to say, these efforts never get very far. It’s not for lack of resources or energy but, rather, because these efforts are founded on a substantial misreading of American politics.
Often, efforts begin with claims about Americans’ dissatisfaction with the two-party system and the choices they get in elections. In fairness, this view is supported by polling. But it’s also misleading.
The percentage of Americans satisfied with the direction of the country in general has been under 50 percent for two decades. And yet… party voting is as high as it’s ever been.
94 percent of Democrats voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The same percentage of Republicans voted for Donald Trump that year. Americans may say they want other options, but they don’t vote that way.
Groups like No Labels point to the growing number of “independent” voters — today about 45 percent of voters. This is true but, again, misleading.
Even if voters choose not to call themselves a Democrat or a Republican, we know that a great many of those lean toward one of those parties, and that they are as loyal to the party they lean toward as voters who embrace a party label.
The percent of Americans who are truly independent — actually jumping back and forth between the parties — is less than 10 percent.
We had a great test of this theory in 2016. That election was between the two least popular major party nominees in the history of polling, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Plus, there was a credible alternative on the ballot — the ticket of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
If ever there were a reason to not vote for a major party and a way out of it, it was then. And it didn’t happen — Johnson/Weld pulled 3 percent of the vote. 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans voted for their respective candidate.
There are many people who don’t like the major parties, so why do they vote with them anyway?
It has to do with a pattern that political scientists call Duverger’s Law. In election systems like ours — representation done by district, in which whoever wins even the narrowest plurality of votes wins the whole election — voters tend not to want to “waste” a vote, or to cast a vote that could make the party they like least more likely to win.
Adding to the situation is our intense level of polarization. There are very sharp ideological differences between the major parties today that didn’t exist a few decades ago. Even Republicans who dislike Donald Trump tend to stick with him in general elections, because having Democrats control the government just seems too horrible to them.
Joe Biden has plenty of detractors within the Democratic Party, but they nearly all vote with him for the same reason. In 1992, Ross Perot got one vote in five in the popular vote, but that happened in part because many voters didn’t see major differences between Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. This was a strikingly different world.
There’s another concern with groups like No Labels: It’s not clear what they stand for. Joe Lieberman, an advocate for No Labels, frequently touts the organization’s “common-sense, moderate, independent platform,” but their website mainly talks about giving people more choices, not having a Biden-Trump rematch, people voting for rather than against a candidate.
What is this platform they want candidates to adhere to? Is it just the midpoint between the Democrats and the Republicans? Where is that midpoint?
Maybe one would think this effort is worth the investment, if only to take a stance against polarization. But a third-party ticket probably wouldn’t pull from both major parties equally. Third party efforts may sound appealing, but they stand little chance of winning and could well scramble the results of the 2024 presidential election.
Seth Masket is a professor of political science and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. He is the co-author of “Political Parties.” Follow his Substack “Tusk.”
