How can third parties affect elections

The Socialist Party nominee received nearly one million votes in the fourth of his five bids for the White House. Texas billionaire Ross Perot surrounded by a sign-waving crowd of supporters at his presidential campaign rally. Bush vs. Bill Clinton Independent Ross Perot throws his hat into the ring, takes it back and then throws it again.

After supporters gathered enough signatures to place him on the ballot in every state, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot surged to the top of the polls in the spring of Advocating for a balanced federal budget, campaign finance reform and congressional term limits, Perot capitalized on low public support for President George H.

Despite his support, Perot made the sudden decision to drop out of the race in July , saying that he no longer believed he could win the presidency with the improving performance of Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. He later said the decision was based on his belief that the Bush campaign planned to spread rumors about his daughter and sabotage her impending wedding. Weeks before Election Day, Perot made the equally surprising announcement that he was resuming his campaign.

With his folksy manner and half-hour infomercials on broadcast networks, Perot received 19 percent of the vote, compared to 43 percent for Clinton and 37 percent for Bush. However, in a one-on-one contest, Clinton consistently led Bush in public polling from the summer of onwards. They are, in fact, quite similar with the biggest difference being the nature of coalition formation. In two-party systems, coalition formation happens before the general election. During the and Democratic presidential primaries, we saw this happening in the back-and-forth between the progressive and more moderate wings of the Democratic party.

In multi-party systems, coalition formation occurs after the election, since it takes a majority vote to pass legislation and therefore necessitates some parties to work together as a coalition with a majority of votes. To think of it another way, suppose we have four parties that successfully win seats to the U. Congress but none of the parties wins a majority. We can then start thinking about reforms to change the types of candidates that are nominated by the parties and what types of candidates ultimately win office.

This could include reforms to primary election or campaign finance law. Or reforms to nomination rules, like the use of super delegates in the Democratic presidential nomination, which can also impact the characteristics of the major parties. Or bringing things back to the initial topic of this piece: third parties can instigate positive, reformative changes to the major parties.

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Skip to main content. Campus Maps. News Center. Social Media. UNLV Mail. Series: Election Series. Dan Lee, UNLV professor of political science, examines how third-party candidates usually fare in presidential elections.

How do third party candidates usually fare in American presidential politics against this backdrop? Do third-party candidates ever have a viable chance of winning? How do they fare in local, county, or state races? How has the two-party system contributed to heightened partisanship, and can America overcome the current deep political divisions without rethinking the way the system operates? The Libertarians may have come close to altering the Florida outcome in the election.

Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, was the closest state in Barack Obama defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney there by just over 74, votes, a margin that might have been even narrower had Mr. Johnson not won nearly 45, votes in the state. The Florida outcome in the election may have been influenced by the Green Party's nominee Ralph Nader. In the end, Mr. Bush won the popular vote of Florida. Without the state's 25 electoral votes, he wouldn't have reached the electoral votes to win the overall election.

Another major complication for third parties is that the idea of voting for them is far more appealing than the act itself. The Populist Party, meanwhile, grew out of the Populist movement, and the Republican Party developed primarily out of the abolitionist movement.

If the leader leaves the party, however, the party often collapses, which is what happened to the Reform Party in the mids. In , the party split in two over the candidacy of former Republican Pat Buchanan.

Neither Buchanan nor his Reform Party rival gained many votes, and the party has largely disappeared from the national stage. Despite their lack of success in the polls, third parties can affect American politics in a number of ways:. Example: The Populist Party introduced ideas that influenced some economic policies of the New Deal, whereas the Anti-Masonic Party was the first party to use a convention to nominate its candidates, in the mid-nineteenth century.