No.
As an American, you are likely very tired of the same old two party system, and you yearn for another option. Especially when it comes to the President, and probably very much desiring that other option this year in particular. So you might want to entertain casting your vote for one of those candidates from a party other than the Democrats or the Republicans.
The answer to the question posed in the title is generally “No”, but there is a bit of nuance in there, especially in other races, so let’s dive in.
The biggest problem with most of these “third” parties is that they aren’t serious. Now, before you get offended and jump into the comments to tell me how wrong I am, what I mean by “serious” is they while they might have good ideas and their candidates might be good people, their party structure, organization, and the manner in which they go about trying to get elected is pretty much a complete waste, spending too much effort trying to run in elections they cannot win and not enough building a stable foundation upon which to grow future success.
The advantage that the two majors have over these upstart thirds is very simply “history”. They’ve been around for a very long time, and when they started it was much easier to start. Sure, that’s not fair to today’s third parties, but it’s reality. And ignoring reality only works if you have an entrenched base who is swallowing your propaganda unquestioningly, and a vast media empire keeping up the unceasing flow of that propaganda.
With that in mind, if the third party candidate you are considering voting for is in a local office, a town or city council, a mayor, or a state legislature, then go right ahead. If that third is running against an otherwise unopposed member of one of the big two, then definitely, vote for that third. In these smaller races, a third party has a better chance to win. When the constituency numbers in the thousands, a candidate can easily shake a lot of hands and meet people face-to-face, get their name out there and have a shot to swing the vote their way. And winning these sorts of races is how a third party can prove it is “serious”, capable of governing and building a base.
Once you get to statewide elections (like governor, US senator, etc) unless there is a very vocal and verifiable swell of support for a third party, they aren’t likely to win, or even come in second. The third party is going to come in third, which means your vote will only matter in that it didn’t go to one of the people who actually had a chance to win. This is what people usually call a “spoiler”, because it spoils the election for the member of the major party candidate politically closest to the third party. For example, a Libertarian candidate is more likely to pull votes from a Republican than a Democrat, and if that Libertarian gets 10% of the vote and the Republican loses by less than 10%, it’s not unreasonable to say that the Republican might have won if not for the Libertarian. It’s never clearcut that this is what would have happened, but it feels that way, which means that’s how people will act. Also, it’s probably true.
Now, Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff Voting, would be a big help with that. I’m not going into it. Read the link. But you should probably be writing to your local governmental bodies that control your elections and bug them about implementing it. And your state. And also your federal representatives and senators.
When it comes to the President of the United State though, I do not condone voting for third parties. They literally cannot win, and so voting for them is, at best, saying “I’d rather let everyone else pick the president and not have a voice in it at all.” And your vote is your voice. You might want to protest vote for that third party candidate, but they (the two major parties) aren’t listening to protest votes on election day. They only care if you vote for them or for the person they see as their opponent, the other major party candidate.
But, you might be asking, why can’t third parties win the presidency? The answer to that is…
The Electoral College.
You see, in the United States of America, we don’t technically vote for president. We vote to decide how the electors for our state will vote in the college. These electors are, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, awarded all-or-nothing to the winner of the state’s popular vote. So, unless the third party candidate is popular enough to win a state, they will get no electors. And in the college, they need 270 electors to win the presidency. If you can’t win states, you can’t win the presidency. That is, for now, a fact.
As an example of how this works, you only need to look at the 1992 presidential election between Republican George Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton… and independent Ross Perot. In this race, Ross Perot managed to garner nearly 19% of the popular vote nationwide. There were some states in which he performed better and in some states where he did worse. There are some states where he came in second place! But despite nearly 1 in 5 voters voting for him, Ross Perot got zero electoral votes, because he won no states. Bill Clinton won, 370 to 168 to 0.
He’s not the only example though. If you go back to 1968 you’ll find that George Wallace ran as a third party AND managed to win electoral college votes. I encourage you to look deeper at this race, because it’s got a lot of footnotes on it. Specifically who George Wallace was and the states that he won. His 46 electors were not enough to secure him the presidency.
Then there is the election of 1948, where Strom Thurmond ran as a “States’ Rights Democrat”, and again you need to look at who he was, and which states he won. His 39 electors were not enough to secure him the presidency.
There are a few more, but now we are a hundred years past, and every example of someone running third party for president AND getting electoral college votes has footnotes and asterisks. They are exceptions, not rules. They are also very clearly examples of why despite Donald Trump being a dumpster fire of a candidate, the Republicans keep lining up behind him, because if they kicked him off the ticket, he is likely to run third party, where he probably wouldn’t win, but would definitely spoil their chances.
Someone might try to distract you and say that if a third party garners more support they’ll get access to federal election campaign money and debates and more. But while that is true, it’s also fairly irrelevant. The amount of money they get access to isn’t nothing, but it isn’t all that, and it comes with strings. Read up on it. Debates, on the other hand, are completely arbitrary and party controlled. The big two don’t have to let anyone in they don’t want, and can just make the rules so that no one else qualifies. Sure, a third party can try to get public outcry to let them in, but then the moderators don’t have to give them time, and lots of other shenanigans.
Ignoring a third party’s poor chances of winning, if they did manage to win, how would a third party president with no party allies in the legislature govern? The answer is they’d have to make a deal with whichever of the major parties had the most control and work with them to get anything done. Or maybe we’d just get four years of no legislative action and lots of executive orders… Honestly, it’s not really worth spending much time on since the chance of a third party president win is just so infinitesimally small.
This isn’t even getting into how the Electoral College affects the weight of your vote, battleground states, etc. Or how you can win the popular vote nationwide but still lose the Electoral College (see the 2000 and 2016 elections). But there are efforts to fix that by getting 270 electors worth of states to pass National Popular Vote laws pledging their electors to the winner of national popular vote rather than just the popular vote of their own state.
With all this said about the dismal chances of third parties, the passing mention of the majors not caring about the voters who vote for these thirds, and the bit on how you can win without winning thanks to the electoral system, now you might be saying…
Does voting even matter at all? Maybe I shouldn’t vote.
You should definitely vote. Anyone telling you not to vote has a vested interest in you not voting – meaning they don’t want you voting against the candidate they support. Also the smaller the voting pool the easier it is to predict and even control.
Besides, in this country saying “voting doesn’t work” is wrong because we’ve never tried voting. Despite having elections every year, electing the House and a third of the Senate every two years, and the president every four, our voter turnout rates are pretty bad. The best voter turnout for a presidential election in the 20th and 21st centuries was in 2020 when 66.6% of eligible voters showed up. With the power of math and reducing fractions, this means that 1 out of every 3 eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s pathetic.
Just imagine, the number of people who didn’t vote is half the number of people who did vote. So if in this context, all of them showed up and voted for the same third party candidate, that candidate might win! Or in a much more likely scenario, if those people showed up and all voted for one of the two major parties and continued that vote down ballot, the chosen party would likely win the presidency in a landslide and take the House and Senate with a decisive mandate from the people.
So, again, you should definitely vote. And you should encourage all your friends, family, and strangers to vote. Even if you imagine you won’t like their politics. Because if we get 90% or better turnout and still don’t get a proper representative government, then we can finally say that “voting doesn’t work”.
But if you shouldn’t vote for third parties and you definitely should vote, that means you are left with…
Voting for the lesser evil.
I know! I know! But that’s the job. If you can’t vote for a candidate you want, you NEED to vote against the candidate you most don’t. There are, since we’ve established that third party isn’t a viable choice, only two options, and it is important that you vote for the one who will be better for us. For us as a nation, and us as a society.
And if you find yourself in the position of voting against the dumpster fire and voting for the guy who has a position or policy you don’t like, or whose administration has dramatically failed on one front or another, it sucks. But it is necessary. A democracy where you can continue to protest the thing you don’t like is better than an authoritarian country where you cannot.
This is part of a series where the answer to the question in the title is always “No.” Originally published at Probably Not Limited on Substack