What Would a Third Party Need to Succeed?
Third parties could make for healthier politics, but we'd need voting reform first — #BCB 156
Last week, Elon Musk floated a familiar idea: the creation of a new political party. This is an appealing thought, maybe even a way of our hyper-polarized two party gridlock. But history — and electoral math — suggest there are strong reasons to think that a third party won’t be successful unless we also have voting reform.
Musk says his “America Party” would challenge the entrenched “uniparty” and offer a real alternative. Many Americans feel politically homeless, alienated by parties that seem more interested in derailing each other than solving problems. And adding a third party is a basic conflict transformation strategy, because it can provide a catalyst that kicks the system out of an intractable two-sided fight. So from a conflict standpoint, a third party might be really positive.
But it’s not a new ambition. Andrew Yang launched the Forward Party. Ross Perot won 19% of the popular vote in 1992. Ralph Nader changed the outcome of the 2000 election. Neither broke through.
So what would it take to actually succeed? We think there’s no mystery here, it’s just hard to do. A third party would need 1) a strong candidate 2) voting reform and 3) a popular agenda.
Elon isn’t popular
The first problem with Elon’s party is Elon. Musk’s favorability sits at -18.4 as of this month, with low trust on both sides. He is underwater with Democrats after allying with Trump, yet he recently lost Republicans as well by antagonizing Trump. Another signal: Tesla sales in majority-Republican counties fell 14% year-over-year in Q12025, after a similar slide in blue counties the year before.
If Musk is serious about the America Party, someone else may need to carry its message. He would have to step back from center stage and invest in others: fund candidates with deep local ties, do the slow work of organizing, and let someone else be the public face. Otherwise, Musk’s own favorability will be the first hurdle before voters even ask the second question: Will my vote be wasted?
No one likes to throw away their vote
The U.S. fills most offices using first-past-the-post voting — each person casts one vote, and whoever gets the most votes wins. Unfortunately, this system reliably produces two dominant parties because voters abandon riskier options to avoid “spoiling” the race. This is such a classic phenomenon that it’s known as Duverger’s Law. The problem is that as much as you might prefer option C to A and B, you might really not want B to win, so you’ll vote for A.
While many Americans don’t want to be associated with a party, there’s usually still one party they dislike more — this is called negative partisanship. So, in effect, there aren’t many truly “independent” voters. As Nate Silver puts it:
It’s hard for independents to win elections when they start out with only about one‑third of the vote — especially when many of those ostensible supporters are IINOs: Independents In Name Only.
Ranked choice voting (RCV), which we’ve covered before, fixes this by letting voters rank their candidates in order of preference: if C doesn’t win, your vote is counted for A instead. This makes it safe to vote for an untested third party.
It also allows candidates to build real coalitions without punishing their supporters. New York City’s 2025 Democratic primary offered a glimpse of this with the cross-endorsement between progressive Assembly-member Zohran Mamdani and Comptroller Brad Lander. Lander gained crucial second-choice votes from younger progressives; Zohran picked up support from moderate voters who ranked him second or third. “It [RCV] could really help bring hope back to our politics,” Lander said.
This is the kind of electoral structure that third parties need. They don’t fail because their ideas are unpopular, or because there’s no demand for an alternative. They fail because our voting system makes them too risky to bet on. Unless that changes, even the most well-funded alternative risks becoming a spoiler.
If you want different outcomes, start with different rules.
A popular agenda requires realignment
A new party also needs to stand for more than just “not them.” As John Halpin puts it, success here means building an 80 Percent Party: a platform rooted in broadly popular ideas that cross party lines, but that get ignored by the current duopoly.
These are not radical departures from public consensus — they’re the consensus. And it’s no mystery what those ideas are. A recent chart from The Liberal Patriot shows where the vast majority of Americans agree: expanding vocational education, streamlining legal immigration, lowering healthcare costs, requiring background checks for firearm sales.
So if we know what policies are broadly popular, why doesn’t either party adopt them? One answer might be that the policies above cut sharply across partisan lines (Blue would have to accept restrictions on transwomen in sports, Red would have to accept universal background checks for gun sales.) Either party would have to abandon purity politics to adopt such a platform, and sacred values make that difficult.
Nate Silver suggests Musk might find more traction by spotlighting similarly neglected issues — areas like AI safety or America’s declining birthrate — where the parties are behind the curve and Musk has some credibility. But a broad coalition would require more than these two issues. Conflict-resolution expert William Ury puts it simply: the third side listens first. It reframes, bridges, and mediates, not by yelling louder but by broadening the existing conversation.
There’s no secret here
The impulse behind Musk’s idea isn’t wrong. Millions of Americans want a politics that solves problems, not one that deepens divides. But jumping into the ring without without understanding why past contenders have failed will almost certainly fail again.
A viable alternative would be more about strategy and structural reform than massive resources. This means building on shared ground, fixing a system that punishes outsiders, and finding a less toxic leader.
This is a longshot, but it’s not an impossible future. Ranked choice voting is increasingly used in local elections, and there’s already plenty of data on what issues are broadly popular. It won’t happen in the short term, but in the long term there’s a real opportunity to outbuild the system, break the two-party deadlock, and give people something to believe in — and vote for.
Quote of the Week
"Yup, there's your problem. You've mistaken arbitrary norms specific to your social group for sacred immutable truths and it has driven you insane."
I appreciate the intentions of the authors in offering solutions, but RCV is a flawed tactic for advancing third parties. It has advantages in letting people feel "heard" in casting their vote, but it will not make third parties viable.
Look at Maine, who has used RCV in their last four federal elections. With Maine residents free to cast their first round votes for third parties knowing that they won't "spoil" the election, what sort of results have been produced? In every single election, more than 93% of voters have cast their first round vote for the Republican or Democrat. (The sole exception is Independent Senator Rufus King.) Even with RCV, no serious third party challengers have emerged in the decade since it's adoption. And in Alaska, independent candidates who make it through the jungle primary into the Final Four general election frequently drop out - with good reason.
At the core of Duverger's law is that our elections are winner-take-all. The most efficient way for markets to allocate resources in a winner-take-all scenario is to have one winner, one loser. Campaigns are expensive, so sometimes you even see half of the duopoly concede a seat rather than waste resources on a losing campaign. A multiparty system would be even more wasteful - two losers, three losers, four losers - that's why competitive third parties never last. Once they burn through an initial investment of cash and energy, they get co-opted into one of the big tents... and the duopoly marches on.
A third party likely isn't the answer. Only a "movement" or grand coalition of people of various party affiliations (including independent, unafilliated, and even previously non-voting) would be inclusive enough to constitute a governing majority.
These Americans (in what I call The Big Middle, where you find 65% or more agreeing in polls) will need to come to consensus together, directly. And the means to do that today, in the digital era — to "meet people where they are" — is clearly online: An interactive platform enabling the building of a political platform that candidates and voters of all stripes can get behind and support.
We need to better leverage 21st century tools to solve our common problems. We need to use them as effectively to come together as those who are using them to tear us apart. Our politics and media are still stuck in outdated 20th century mode. The days of town halls, conferences, Oxford-style debates, newspaper editorials, opinion pieces, cable TV roundtables — even endless social feeds and 1:1 conversations that "help us understand where our neighbor is coming from" but do not lead to practical results — are over.
We must convene the community of citizens, at scale online, and lead / moderate a fair and rigorous process of coming to consensus on actionable solutions. If we are not fostering consensus, we are just adding to the noise. Let’s meet in The Big Middle, where most Americans are, and get started now.