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Doral, Florida — The American federal republic has a Constitution that separates the powers of government into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. It provides for no fourth branch called the administrative state. That tripartite design has been copied by all the other republics in the American hemisphere. It also provides for a unitary executive, modeled on George Washington and independent of the legislature.
Compare that independence with a European parliamentary system, in which the chief executive—the prime minister—is chosen by the legislature and therefore depends on it. In America, at both the federal and state levels, partisan coalitions in the legislature have no direct power to make or unmake the executive.
The only way for a party to win executive power here is to win the election held every four years: directly at the state level, and through the Electoral College at the federal level. The most effective way to win those elections is a two-party race. Strong third-party presidential candidates have often helped elect the policy opponents of the people who voted for them.
1. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, ran on the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) ticket, won 27.4 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes, and helped elect Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, with 41.8 percent of the popular vote.
2. In 1924, Robert La Follette, a progressive Republican senator from Wisconsin, ran on the Progressive Party ticket, won about 16.6 percent of the popular vote, and helped re-elect Calvin Coolidge, a conservative Republican.
3. In 1992, Ross Perot, an independent businessman, won 19.7 million votes—18.9 percent of the popular vote—and zero electoral votes. Bill Clinton, a Democrat from Arkansas, won the presidency with 43.0 percent of the popular vote.
They produced the opposite of what they intended.
The American Story
In America a third party can change the debate, but it almost never wins public office. That is not a moral verdict on its ideas. It is a description of how the American republic counts votes. Where one candidate wins a district by a plurality—first past the post—voters and donors migrate toward the two coalitions most likely to finish first. A third party that is “closer to your heart,” or less incompetent, cowardly or corrupt, becomes a conceit that you purchase along with the risk that your least-favorite major-party candidate wins.
The Electoral College multiplies the same logic. It is fifty-one separate contests (the states and the District of Columbia), almost all of them winner-take-all, not a national proportional pool. Twenty percent of the popular vote, spread thinly, can buy zero electors. Perot proved it. Roosevelt in 1912 remains the high-water mark for a third-party presidential run in the modern era: still a loss, and the Bull Moose Party did not become a durable major party. George Wallace in 1968 took five Deep South states and 46 electoral votes on a segregationist American Independent ticket. He punished a major party in a region. He did not replace it.
The Constitution does not mention Democrats or Republicans. It does mention single-member districts for the House, a separately elected president, and a Senate that, until 1913, was chosen by state legislatures already organized as factions. The party system that filled those boxes hardened after the Civil War. Since then the two major parties may have changed contents—the parties have swapped regions and parts of their coalitions—but the number of viable major parties has stayed at two. They function like two parallel tracks, used by runners with different ideas, policies and constituencies.
There is one famous exception, and it is the exception that proves the rule. The Republican Party of the 1850s was a third party only until it became one of the two major parties. It absorbed Whigs, Free Soilers and anti-slavery Democrats, nominated a former one-term congressman, and won the White House in 1860 because the old second party had already collapsed. President Lincoln did not prove that third parties can win. He proved that a new major party can replace a dying major party, if it captures a sectional plurality—and then wins a civil war. No later insurgency has repeated that feat.
1. The Populist Party of the 1890s folded into the Democrats and backed William Jennings Bryan for president, unsuccessfully, three times.
2. La Follette’s Progressive Party faded after the 1920s; its people and ideas were absorbed into Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition inside the Democrat Party.
3. Perot’s later Reform Party became a cautionary tale, which Donald Trump heeded in 2015 when he avoided the third-party route and ran inside the Republican Party.
4. Libertarian and Green presidential shares in this century have usually been between one and three percent. Jill Stein’s 2024 total was about 0.6 percent; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., running as an independent after withdrawing from an active campaign, about 0.5 percent.
If the object is to elect a president, a speaker, or a governor, the third-party line is a tool that almost never produces its object. It more often produces a spoiler. Ralph Nader’s 97,488 votes in Florida in 2000 sat next to an official margin of 537. Whether those voters “would have” gone to Al Gore is an unprovable counterfactual. The lesson the parties absorbed was simpler: a left-wing protest can help elect a Republican, and a right-wing protest can help elect a Democrat. After that, the incentive to stay in one of the two major parties and fight inside it grows. That is why ambitious politicians who begin as insurgents so often end as Democrats or Republicans.
Third parties still perform a service the major parties will not advertise. They test positions in public: balanced budgets, drug-law revision, opposition to overseas nation-building, ballot access itself, for example. Those positions have wandered from the fringe into major-party platforms after someone else paid the price for testing them.
1. The Socialist Party of the early twentieth century did not elect a president, but it helped make the minimum wage and Social Security thinkable inside a major coalition during the New Deal.
2. Ross Perot did not become president, but he made the federal budget deficit a television subject both parties had to answer. That is influence without office. In a presidential system with plurality rules, influence without office is what losing looks like when it is done with dignity.
3. Democratic Socialists of America have, for the most part, avoided the third-party route and have taken over the Democrat Party from the inside.
Reformers who want a different outcome should stop romanticizing about a third party and start arguing about rules: majority winners in primaries, limits on establishment interference in primaries, ballot access, election integrity and similar questions. Those changes will multiply viable options. Until they exist, lecturing Americans to “vote their conscience” on a third-party line is a request that they accept a high probability of wasting their vote and helping a policy opponent win.
In America, third parties are for people who would rather be right than elected, or who hope to move a major party by threatening to leave it. The first group loses elections. The second sometimes wins arguments and then watches someone else win the office. You may despise the two major parties, and you may be correct to despise them. If you want to beat them, the historical path is to capture one, or to replace one after it has already died. Founding a third party and expecting the presidency or a governorship is a way to keep your principles intact and your candidates out of public office.
RINOs on the Loose in Florida
Grassroots conservatives in Florida are exploring third-party options. The America First Party is one vehicle in that effort. A large part of the reason is that local Republicans keep handing them the argument.
1. In Broward County, the Republican nominee for State House District 102 is Mery Lopez-Palma, who defeated Cooper City Commissioner Jason Smith in the primary, 58 percent to 42 percent. Smith has since endorsed the Democrat in the general election, Mike Friend. With Republicans like these, what need is there for Democrats?
2. Bobby Williams, a candidate for governor in the Republican primary, won about 4 percent. He has now endorsed the Democrat ticket of David Jolly and Gwen Graham over Republicans Byron Donalds and Bryan Avila.
3. Rachel Rodriguez also ran in the Republican primary for governor and won about 1.6 percent. She has since joined the America First Party ticket as a candidate for lieutenant governor.
Other cases cut the same way. Ryan Elijah defeated incumbent Congressman Cory Mills in the Republican primary in Florida’s 7th District. Elijah had declared during the primary campaign that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, but for the general election, he has changed his tune. Campaigns by insurgents often begin by promising a harder line than the incumbent and then, once the nomination is won, move toward the general-election median. Also in Broward County there is a Muslim candidate running on the Republican ticket for State Representative.
With Republicans like these, it is no wonder that some grassroots conservatives are shopping for a third party. The American record still says the same thing it said in 1912, 1924, 1968, 1992, and 2000: protest can move an argument, but it rarely captures the office. If the goal is power rather than purity, the fight that matters is still inside one of the two major parties, or over the rules that govern those parties.
