preview

Why Aren’T Third Party Candidates Successful?. Third Parties

Good Essays

Why Aren’t Third Party Candidates Successful? Third parties offer voters an alternative to the same two parties that run in the presidential election every four years, often with more concrete goals and views, yet there has never been successful third party candidate. For over one and a half centuries, the Republicans and Democrats have held a duopoly over the United States government (Diamond 2015). People have been growing more and more frustrated in their government and the two parties, so why haven’t third-party candidates gained any ground in the political sphere?
USLegal defines a third-party candidate as “a candidate who does not belong to the two main US political parties, the Republicans or the Democrats (“USLegal”). Two-thirds …show more content…

Despite the majority of voters disliking the other two candidates, even people who agreed with Sarvis and preferred him as a candidate were afraid to vote for him (Conroy 2013). They didn’t want to waste their vote on somebody who could not win. Sometimes, voting for a third-party candidate can be seen as “worse than wasted,” such as in the 2000 election (Disch 2002). In winning 2.7 percent of the vote, Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate drew away votes from Al Gore, which may have lost Gore the election, and didn’t even achieve the 5 percent needed for public financing (Disch 2002). The election of 2000 showed the biggest problems of voting for a third-party candidate. Green voters gained nothing from voting for Ralph Nader, and allowed a party even further away from their own preferences to gain power. Another hurdle that third-party candidates face is getting the funding they need to be viable. According to Mark McKinnon, cofounder of the bipartisan group, No Labels, “the table stakes to get on the ballot is a minimum of $30 million” (Conroy 2013). It costs a third-party candidate a huge sum of money to even become a real candidate, even before knowing whether or not they can convince other people to support him. Because of this, potential candidates will not run unless they feel they can win or get something out of it. Beyond the difficulties of simply existing as a third party,

Get Access