I Normally Dismiss the Chances of a Third-Party Candidate. In a Trump–Biden Rematch, I’m Not So Sure

During every presidential election cycle, there’s a stage at which we start to see columns about public disgust with both major parties in which authors claim there’s a real opening for a third-party candidate. Typically, I roll my eyes at the idea, and I have on several occasions written articles essentially pointing and laughing at the people writing them. But if we truly are headed for a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the possibility of serious third-party challenge is something I would no longer dismiss out of hand.

To be clear, I’m still skeptical that anybody could pull off a serious third-party challenge. Whatever polls may say about the number of Americans who identify as independent, the reality is that most of those who will claim to be independent in a poll in actuality lean heavily toward one party or the other. The percentage of truly independent voters is in the single digits. Even if a third-party candidate can make some waves, when it comes time to vote, Americans do not want to feel like they are throwing their votes away or spoiling the election for the candidate they dislike less. There are also the advantages that come from being attached to a major party, such as access to ballots in all states, a built-in national organization, money, voter databases, a get-out-the-vote operation, and so on.

For all these reasons, and many more, I would still give low odds to a legitimate third-party challenge forming. But the election of Trump has taught me to be a bit more open to the idea of things happening in politics that I would never have thought possible. And the Trump vs. Biden race would be unprecedented, because we’ve never had two candidates who would both be going into the general election while being so extremely unpopular and facing such severe headwinds.

The CNN poll released this week should be seen as a blaring fire alarm for Democrats. Not only did the survey find Biden unpopular in a lot of the key metrics used to evaluate the chances of incumbent presidents (just 35 percent have a favorable view of Biden, only 39 percent approve of his job, 70 percent say things in the country are going badly), but there are serious concerns about his ability to perform his duties. A whopping 74 percent of respondents, and half of Democrats, said Biden did not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively.” And two-thirds of Democrats said they believe the party should nominate a different candidate.

Given these numbers in isolation, you’d expect Democrats to be in full-blown panic mode. But they are not, because even as Biden faces serious questions about his age and mental and physical fitness for office, Trump is facing his own set of serious problems. Though his four indictments have helped make him the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination, the general voting public does not see his actions after 2020 or his legal problems in the same light. In the dismal CNN poll for Biden, Trump has the same 35 percent favorability rating. A recent Politico/Ipsos poll said that by 51 percent to 26 percent (or nearly two-to-one), voters said Trump was guilty of crimes in connection with the 2020 election-subversion case. The argument that the Department of Justice has weaponized law enforcement to target a political opponent has less resonance outside of a Republican primary, with 59 percent of voters (and 64 percent of independents) saying the DOJ’s decision to indict was fair.

A CNN poll from June found that when combined, a plurality of 36 percent of Americans did not have a favorable view of either Trump or Biden. This is rare, because given the partisan nature of the times, most voters typically like at least one of the two major candidates. Harry Enten offers this recent history lesson: “Just 5% of voters said they had an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump in the final 2020 CNN poll. An even smaller 3% of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney in the final CNN poll of the 2012 campaign.”

Larry Hogan, the moderate Republican former Maryland governor, declined to run for president because he was concerned that a crowded field would only help Trump (and because he knew he couldn’t win a presidential nomination in the current Republican Party). He’s now serving as the co-chairman of No Labels and is leaving the door open for a third-party run. While the No Labels group, on its name alone, has generated a fair share of mockery from political observers, in interviews, Hogan has offered a relatively sober assessment of the current state of play. He is under no illusions that a third-party candidacy would face long odds and sees it as a sub-optimal scenario.

In an appearance on Face the Nation, he said he wants somebody other than Trump to be the Republican nominee and he has urged candidates who don’t have a realistic shot of winning the nomination to drop out to facilitate this. But he believes that if the parties insist on going down the road of nominating Trump and Biden, a choice that most Americans don’t want, then there will be an opening for somebody else. He acknowledges that “it’s something that’s never really happened” but also recognizes that “we’re at a point where we’ve never been in America, so we just don’t know.”

For a third-party candidate to have an actual chance, he or she would have to be somebody who could plausibly serve as president if elected. As a popular two-term Republican governor in a deep-blue state, Hogan himself would at least clear this threshold — unlike, say, Evan McMullin in 2016.

If Hogan or another plausible contender did decide to hop in, a major challenge would be to overcome the stigma of being dismissed as a mere vehicle for protest. It’s one thing to poll at 5 or 10 percent, but to poll in the 20s or 30s, and be seen as a genuine threat, is much different.

If somebody like Hogan could get to that point, there would no doubt be a constituency for a candidate who is not tied to partisan obligations, and who can argue that Biden is too old to be president and that Trump’s actions after 2020 were reprehensible and make him unfit for office. There are also many issues on which most Americans have less ideological positions than the ones major candidates are forced to adopt by the nature of their party’s coalitions. Freed from party politics, there are issues close to the typical voter on which an independent candidate could take positions.

All of this said, even if a third-party candidate could reach the point of having plurality support nationally, it becomes much more difficult to envision a scenario in which such a candidate wins 270 votes in the Electoral College. It is easier to imagine a universe in which a serious third-party challenger, who is polling at, say, 35 percent nationally, wins a close state such as Arizona or a quirky one such as Minnesota rather than deeply partisan states such as Massachusetts, California, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

Looking at the 2020 election and imagining a three-way race, if Trump and Biden held the states that voted by 15 points or more for one of them, it would take 288 votes off the table, leaving a third-party candidate 20 votes short of an Electoral College majority. Such an outcome would throw the election to the House of Representatives, which would choose one of the major-party candidates. Ultimately, this is why I still come out as a skeptic on the idea of third-party candidacy.

All of that having been said, Hogan is right that we are in unprecedented times. We’ve never had a clearly declining and unpopular president running for the chance to serve until age 86 against a highly unpopular and previously defeated ex-president who is facing four indictments (and who himself is just three years shy of 80). So, I’m reluctant to dismiss out of hand the potential emergence of a third option.