Can’t Win

A Third-Party Candidate Can’t Win in 2024

No Labels is pushing a dangerous lie that would simply serve to put Donald Trump back in the White House.

Opinion by JIM MESSINA

Jim Messina is CEO of The Messina Group. He successfully ran President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign and before that was Deputy Chief of Staff in Obama's White House.

With a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump almost set in stone, it’s time to put a farce to rest: The notion that a third-party candidate could actually win the presidency in 2024.

The idea that a “unity ticket” featuring a Republican and a Democrat could somehow produce a nominee with “a clear path to victory” is worse than a political fiction. The group behind it, No Labels, is pushing a dangerous lie that would simply serve to put Trump back in the White House.

How can I be so certain? Look at the last half-century of election results. In modern U.S. presidential history, third parties have not won much. In 1968, George Wallace won 46 electoral votes by running a regionally-targeted (and racist) campaign. Since then, they’ve won zilch — not a single state. Not Gary Johnson or Jill Stein in 2016, and not Ralph Nader in 2000. None of them broke 5 percent of the vote.

Then there’s Ross Perot, who No Labels aspires to emulate for his appeal to “the vast middle of the electorate.” Despite unlimited cash and facing an unpopular incumbent in George H.W. Bush and a near-unknown in Bill Clinton, Perot failed to win a single state. Can No Labels twist the data and make an argument that Perot could have won if he had done things differently? Sure! But that’s like saying I could have been the quarterback of the Denver Broncos — technically true, but come on!

There’s a reason for this lack of success: Our political system isn’t designed to support third parties at the presidential level.

The biggest barrier is the Electoral College. States use a “winner takes all” system to distribute their electoral votes, which is why Perot won nearly 20 percent of the popular vote but got a big fat zero from the Electoral College. This leads to two practical effects: First, parties are incentivized to form the largest coalitions possible, which naturally leads to a two-party system. Second, many voters don’t want to “waste” their vote on a candidate with no chance of winning, so they default to the major parties. Both effects make it harder for third parties to compete.

The question of whether Americans are willing to vote for a third party comes up every presidential cycle. Consider this: Two months before the 2016 election, Gary Johnson polled at 10 percent. In June 1992, Perot led all candidates at 39 percent. These polls were mirages — neither got anything close to that number of votes. Third parties often poll well during a campaign, but that support vanishes on Election Day.

This points to a larger truth: Americans think a third party is needed, even if they won’t vote for one. Voters want to express discontent with their party. Sure, nearly half of the electorate thinks a third party is necessary, but No Labels mistakenly assumes this means those voters will actually vote for one. Once Americans get a good look at the alternatives, like Perot or Johnson, they end up sticking with the major parties.

While a third-party candidate can’t win, No Labels could still throw the election to Trump, and it wouldn’t take that many votes. Let’s look at three battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In 2016, Trump’s margin of victory was less than 50,000 votes in these states, and third parties won significantly more votes than that in each one. Did they flip the election for Trump? It’s possible. In 2020, with no third parties to contend with, Biden beat Trump in Michigan by 154,188 votes, Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes and Wisconsin by 20,682. All of those margins are smaller than what third parties received in 2016. These Blue Wall states will be close again in 2024, and if third parties perform similarly in 2024 as they did in 2016, they will deny Biden a second term.

This alone should give any responsible person pause. A No Labels candidate in these states could easily hand the election to Trump. But maybe that’s the goal. Whatever their original intentions, the people behind No Labels — including Harlan Crow, the GOP mega-donor who gifted travel and luxury vacations to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — are using dark money on this folly. The group is working to raise $70 million and has already qualified for the ballot in 12 states, including states that could be pivotal to the outcome, such as Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.

There are serious questions about how the group’s ticket would be picked (likely behind closed doors) and whether acting like a political party without registering as one is legal. Not to mention, its own founders and staff are in “open revolt” over the group’s current aspirations.

While I’m not a fan of polling done more than a year out (seriously), The Wall Street Journal did an analysis that showed third parties would more likely draw votes from Biden. The report points to an NBC survey that has Biden and Trump tied head to head, but if you add a third-party candidate, Trump leads by 3 percent. (Of course, this math might change if Liz Cheney or RFK Jr. make a serious run.) New polling of young voters shows a similar dynamic, shrinking Biden’s lead with the introduction of third parties.

Historical data suggests the same. Based on exit polling (a highly flawed metric), No Labels believes Perot in 1992 may have siphoned votes from both parties equally. However, an American Journal of Political Science study concluded that Perot increased turnout by 3 percent and decreased Clinton’s margin of victory by 7 percent.

If we look at who helped Biden win last time, they are the type of voters who might switch parties: Voters who selected a third party in 2016 voted for Biden by 29 percent. Those voters could be the difference for Biden in 2024.

From all the data I see, the practical effect of having No Labels run a third-party campaign is that Trump would win. And any argument that a third party can win next year is a false promise, an illusion and a lie spread by people with ulterior motives.

The prospect of Trump being president again should be repellent to any decent person who believes in freedom and building a more perfect union. The people at No Labels know better than this. It’s time to cut the crap, believe the data and be honest with the American people. Any well-funded third-party candidate would be a disaster for our republic — and risks putting us on a direct path to a dictatorship.