Is Voting for a Third-Party Candidate Effective or Is It a Wasted Vote? (And Other Third-Party Questions)
Green Party candidate Jill Stein (left) and Libertarian Chase Oliver (right), among other third-party candidates, are likely to draw votes away from front-runners Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Photos by Jacob Lee Green/Sipa USA and Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Is Voting for a Third-Party Candidate Effective or Is It a Wasted Vote? (And Other Third-Party Questions)
BU political experts on the effects third-party candidates have had on elections historically and the role they could play in the 2024 presidential race
Could a third-party candidate ever win the US presidency? Can voting third-party send an effective message to mainstream politicians? Is voting for a third-party candidate wasting your vote or is it inadvertently helping one of the other candidates?
By almost all accounts, the 2024 presidential race will be a nail-biter between Democrat and Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican and former president Donald Trump, based on the razor-thin margins coming out of the swing states. But for voters not satisfied with either choice, who they’ll vote for instead—and how that could impact an election this tight—are questions on many people’s minds.
For those voters, “there’s no good option for those people to register their discontent,” says Boston University political history expert Bruce J. Schulman, William E. Huntington Professor of History at the College of Arts and Sciences. “That’s the problem with our [two-party] political system.”
From liberal voters frustrated with the US response to Israel’s incursions into Palestine and Lebanon to conservatives tired of Trumpian politics, alternative candidates Jill Stein (Green Party), Cornel West (Independent/Justice for All Party), Chase Oliver (Libertarian), and Claudia De la Cruz (Party for Socialism and Liberation), among others, are likely to siphon votes away from Trump and Harris.
In an election that could be decided by how one small county in one state votes, could those third-party votes be enough to tip the scales toward one candidate or another? To help assess the role third-party candidates could play in this election, as well as their historical impact on elections, BU Today spoke to Schulman and to Arjun Vishwanath, a CAS assistant professor of political science.
Q&A
With Bruce J. Schulman and Arjun Vishwanath
BU Today: Is there a world in which a third party candidate could ever get the 270 electoral college votes needed to win the presidency?
Bruce Schulman: You can never say never, but it sure seems like no. The most successful third-party candidacy came in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt finished second and got around 27 percent of the popular vote. Of course, he was a former president of the United States who hadn’t been renominated by his party and formed his own party. In recent times, H. Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy in 1992 got 19 percent of the popular vote, the second most in US history—but he got zero electoral votes. With the electoral college system, it’s highly, highly unlikely a third-party candidate could win an election.
The best way to understand third parties, I think, was said by the famous post–World War Two historian Richard Hofstadter. He said third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die. With the more-substantial third parties, like those that get enough support to qualify for debates, they often form out of a social movement due to the two major parties not addressing a concern or constituency. What almost always happens is that they sting, and then they die because one of the major parties appropriates their message. That’s kind of the role of third parties—they can produce important changes in the political system. But none in the last century has ever threatened to take power.
BU Today: In this election, what are some of the factors that are making voters look outside the two-party system?
Arjun Vishwanath: There are a few types of reasons why voters might consider third parties. First, they may have ideological belief systems that don’t line up well with the party platforms. For example, someone might hold more libertarian views, and they would feel that neither the Democratic nor Republican nominees articulate their views. In a similar vein, they might be more extreme—a socialist, say—and think that neither party is good enough. In the 2024 election, this has manifested most prominently in the debates surrounding Israel and Gaza. Some voters believe that neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris has been sufficiently responsive to the plight of the Palestinians, and in doing so, they turn to other candidates, like Stein or West. The second type of voter is one who is disaffected with the broader American political system. They might think that the system is rigged between Wall Street and Washington, the elites are all the same and produce similar outcomes, and so on.
BU Today: We know this race is likely to be decided by tight margins in the swing states. How could these third-party candidates end up impacting the election results?
Schulman: We don’t totally know yet. In different states, there are different third parties on the ballot—control over voting is entirely local in the United States, which is unlike almost any other modern democracy in the world. For now, it would seem that votes for the Green Party are going to be votes taken away from Harris and the Democrats, and votes for the Libertarian Party are going to be votes taken away from Trump and the Republicans. That’s certainly been the pattern since 2000.
If you believe the polling for this election, it seems like third-party candidates are actually poised to do less well than in recent elections. Polls put the two biggest parties, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, at around one percent of the popular vote, whereas in 2016, they got around four to five percent of the vote. That said, if this election is as close as is being predicted, [remember that] last time around, the key states were decided by 40,000 to 80,000 votes in some places. This year, that could mark the difference between victory and defeat.
BU Today: You often hear it said that because America is, for better or worse, a two-party system, voting for a third-party candidate is “wasting your vote.” Do you agree?
Schulman: It’s very common to think of votes for a third party as wasted votes. Certainly, anybody who is an advocate for either of the two major parties will tell you that. But, it all depends on what you think the purpose of voting is: if you think it’s only to decide who is going to win and take elective office, then surely voting third-party is wasted. If you think that it’s a way for citizens to make statements about how they feel about the political system and what options they think they have, or would like to have, then you can see it as a statement. Now, oftentimes those statements might end up being counterproductive. For example: if you think that the two major parties are both servants of conservative corporate interests and don’t truly advocate progressive causes and you vote for the Green Party, and because of that, Trump becomes president, that’s not going to be advancing your views. But it is a way of making a statement.
Vishwanath: It depends on the context. Most general elections are not too close, and so the effect of a marginal vote is essentially zero in those cases. To take Massachusetts, for example, there is no way Trump will win this state. I think it’s more accurate in these cases to think about one’s vote as expressing one’s preference for whom they most prefer, since whether someone votes for Stein or Harris will have no bearing on the final outcome [here].
It gets slightly trickier in more competitive jurisdictions. The probability that one vote swings Michigan is infinitesimal—but a bloc of say, 10,000 voters deciding they prefer Stein over Harris could be decisive. The concern here is that those Stein voters may prefer Harris to Trump, but by voting for Stein, they would permit Trump to win, their least favored outcome. This may or may not be the case—returning to the Israel/Gaza example, if those voters care primarily about that and believe that Trump and Harris are similar on the issue, then they may not mind too much if Trump wins. But even if they do have a preference between the major party candidates, there is one more reason that their vote may “count.” The threat—and follow-through—of third-party voting can cause the major party candidates to change their platforms accordingly. The logic goes that if Harris is worried about losing these voters, she may adopt a more Palestine-friendly stance. And if she fails to do so and these voters cast the decisive votes against her, then future Democratic candidates will reorient their positions to gain these votes.
BU Today: At the end of the day, what are the pros and cons of voting third-party in a race where you don’t like the traditional candidates?
Vishwanath: The pros and cons are the same as in any other race—if one is not voting in a decisive election. The pros are that the voter is likely casting a vote for a candidate they prefer most and is able to send a message in doing so. The cons, especially in a close election, is that they may end up with a worse alternative than the one they most prefer. If a pro-life voter who is unhappy with Trump’s pivot on the issue instead votes for the Constitution Party’s candidate (Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist) and produces a Harris election in the process, Harris will presumably be worse on abortion than Trump from the perspective of the pro-life voter. These are always the trade-offs that go into third party voting.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.