BU Political Experts Discuss Third-Party Candidates and Their Potential Effect on 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.”
To read more, visit BU Today, where this article originally appeared on October 28, 2024.