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With every passing primary, it's looking more and more like the US election is going to play out like groundhog Day, and voters are not excited about it.
We need a new generation in there. We need to look at the future.
I want to change a fresh fase.
At least those voters weren't. We spoke to them in Iowa last month. But it isn't just anecdotal. I asked my colleague Gregory Cordy about this. He's been covering political campaigns for more than two decades. Have you ever seen as many disillusioned voters as we have now?
No, and it's really remarkable.
Analysts have even come up with a term for this, what's a double hater?
A double hater is a term that posters use for people who have an unfavorable opinion of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Our Bloomberg News Morning Consult poll, they're about eighteen to twenty percent of the electorate.
That's one in five swing state voters who don't like either candidate.
Other polls have that number as high as thirty thirty five percent.
One big reason just how old both Biden and Trump are.
We have two septagenarian octogenarian candidates that have run before. Americans, they're wondering, why don't we have other options?
With all of this fatigue around a Trump Biden rematch this year, some people are wondering if this cycle has created an opening for a third party candidate. I asked Ralph Nader, who famously ran for president outside the two major parties four times, does he think an outsider candidate has a shot in twenty twenty four?
No, because most Americans, they've been taught from elementary school that only one of if two nominees can win Democrat Republicans, so they want to be with a winner.
What's made even Ralph Nader doubt the possibility of a third party success in an election when voters are begging for another option? And could anything make twenty twenty four different from Bloomberg's Washington Bureau? This is the Big Take DC podcast. I'm your host Sealia Mosen today on the show America's Third Party Problem. These days, it's something of a given that the Democratic and Republican parties hold all the chips in national politics, but it wasn't always that way.
Third parties changed America in the nineteenth century.
That was the voice of Ralph Nader. Many remember him as a perennial third party candidate.
They were first out of the box against slavery, first for women, right to vote, first for right to organize unions, on and on social security. Started with third parties, and the major parties picked it up.
That spirit of pushing the government to champion new issues is what first led Nader to run for president. He'd spent his career as a consumer advocate, and he told me that he didn't think the two main parties represent American voters.
Look where they get their money from. The bulk of the money come from the business community. The countervailing powers have gotten very weak, the unions have gotten weaker. Consumer groups can't keep up, and there's nothing to counteract the swarms of lobbyists.
Nator hoped he could carry on that mantle of dissent. He first ran as a third party presidential candidate in nineteen ninety six, representing the Green Party. He says that the roadblocks were endless.
It's the hardest democracy, so called in the Western world. Just to get on the ballot. It was like climbing a sheer cliff with a slippery rope.
Democratic and Republican candidates get on the ballot pretty much by default. Third parties, on the other hand, often have to circulate petitions and get thousands of signatures just to have their names appear on the ballot, and that has to happen on a state by state level. Getting those signatures takes a lot of volunteers or money to pay people to do the work.
State by state, millions of signatures, and the Democrats would pick at him and try to disqualify him and say, well, this letter didn't comport with the name, et cetera, and it exhausted us.
Unlike some other third party candidates like Ross Perrot, who could use his personal wealth to fund his campaign, Nader relied primarily on small dollar donors.
We filled Madison Square Guard with twenty dollars entrance to raise money.
Third party candidates don't qualify for federal campaign funds like the two main parties. When Nader ran for president in two thousand, he knew if he got enough votes he could qualify for funding in the next cycle, so he had to play the long game. When you launched your campaign in two thousand, how likely did you think your chances were of winning well.
We were going for the five percent level. If we could get five percent or more, then on the next four year cycle we could qualify for federal campaign funds and try to go higher.
For Nator, that long game goes long past his own political ambitions. A persistent third party effort could at least urge the major parties to take up issues they might have overlooked.
But in the last few decades that hasn't worked. The major parties are so smug and arrogant that they don't listen to third parties anymore. We're losing a lot in this country by not providing more voices and choices on the ballot, which most Americans want. They don't just want one Democrat, one Republican.
Nator has a point. As America's two party system has become so entrenched, it's left to a lot of voters behind.
Right now, the Democrats and Republicans are trying to be these catch hall parties that represent everybody's point of view, and they don't.
Scott Schroffnagel is a political scientist at Northern Illinois University. He's been studying third parties on and off for his entire thirty year career.
The Democratic Party is really two different parties at least, you know, and same could be said for the Republican Party. The Trump crowd is not the same as the John McCain crowd, right, Those are completely different parties and to have to put them all under one umbrella is really a shame.
It's particularly a shame, he says, because the current system, with its two polls, doesn't represent the position of most American voters who fall near the center, and over the past few decades, ballot access laws have made it harder and harder for new groups to gain a foothold.
All of these laws were written in a purely self interested fashion to try to eliminate third party competition.
Back in the days that Ralph Nader yearns for, when third parties had a real seat at the table. Well, political parties are a lot more influx than they are now. Voting blocks kept realigning.
We're in a similar sort of period now.
That's Gregory Cordy, a national politics reporter at Bloomberg News.
With Republicans reaching out to non college educated, blue collar voters that traditionally had voted Democratic. Conversely, you have some more white collar educated workers who used to be Republicans now voting Democratic. You would think that there might be some room for a third party to get in there, and.
A handful or trying. You might have heard the super Pac ad for Robert F. Kennedy Junior that aired during the Super Bowl. The ad echoed his uncle's popular nineteen sixty campaign with its nostalgic visuals and sound. Or you may be familiar with Cornell West, a longtime political activist who's running as an independent. But there's one new group that's gotten a lot of buzz this year by trying to do things differently. No Labels it's trying to grab
all those dissilllutions voters in the middle. Just listen to their chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, lay out their sales pitch in an informational video. It isn't about what No Label supports, it's about what they don't support.
We worry the two major political parties might leave us with no good choices. We worry they might force us to vote for the least bad option.
No Labels is trying to upend the traditional outsider approach. Instead of leading with a compelling candidate or a platform, it's saying we're going to offer you an option that's not Biden and not Trump, but who that option is going to be and what they support. They haven't actually said they're waiting until after Super Tuesday in March.
We are sitting here in February. There's an election in November, and we don't know who the No Labels candidate is going to be, whether there will be one. This is an organization that says it's going to run would like to run a candidate for president one time. They're not interested in necessarily long term party building, and they're not interested in running candidates for other down ballot races. And one of the big questions for No Labels is there enough passion in the center?
No Labels As chief strategist Ryan Clancy, who you heard in that ad, He thinks so. We spoke to him this week while he was in transit.
An independent wouldn't be able to win if either party was able or willing to put forth choices that most of the public found appealing. They have been unable to do that, even though the vast majority of the public has been signaling for well over a year they don't want this rematch we see an opening unlike any other that we've seen in modern American history for an independent ticket. I mean, ultimately, if the public didn't want this, they
wouldn't be signing the petitions. But they are signing them in droves.
He told us No Labels has already gotten over a million Americans to sign petitions to get them on the ballot. But if you ask political scientists Scott Schroff novel, saying you support another option is very different from voting for another option. He says that without structural changes to the way US elections are run and more grassroots third party momentum, No Labels RFK Junior, none of these guys have a shot.
Success is not going to come to any of them. But they can be a spoiler, and they can throw the election to one or the other candidates.
Coming up the boogeyman of the third party spoiler. If none of these outsiders can win in twenty twenty four, could they still shape the outcome of the race. Ralph Nator's name has gone down in history, not so much because of his passion for consumer advocacy, but more because of the two thousand presidential election. Here's how Cable News at the time covered his campaign somewhat ominously.
Ralph Nader campaigning in Madison today, Despite mounting criticism that he might cost al Gore the election.
Nator ran against al Gore and George W. Bush. The entire race came down to just five five, one hundred and thirty seven ballots in Florida, a state where Nader got over ninety seven thousand votes. Many of his critics say that he spoiled the election for Gore. That's an idea that he rejects.
They don't call each other spoilers, the Republicans and the Democrats. Everyone has their equal right to run for election, then they have an equal right to get votes from one another, and none of them should be called spoilers who are trying to do something about spoiled politics to begin with.
Nieder argues that many of his voters would have stayed home if he hadn't run, that he and other third party candidates mobilize people who feel left out of the political system, and there's evidence that that's true. But data on the two thousand race also suggests that if Nader hadn't run, enough of his voters would have gone for Gore to change the outcome of the election, and so far it's looking like a similar dynamic could play out
when it comes to twenty twenty four. My colleague Gregory Cordy told me even a centrist group like No Labels, which is aiming to capture moderate voters from both parties, would likely pull more of Biden supporters.
Donald Trump's supporters are so much more loyal and so much more committed, whereas Biden supporters. A large part of the Biden coalition in twenty twenty, remember, was independence, and even some more liberal or moderate Republicans who had had enough of Donald Trump, had seen enough, are sort of realigning away from the Republican Party and went into the Biden coalition, but were never really huge fans of Joe Biden.
And the feeling is among Democrats that No Labels poses a big threat to Biden's appeal to that segment, that middle of the road, business oriented Republican segment.
Even Nader seems to see No Labels that way.
Well, who knows what it is. They don't have a candidate, they don't seem to have an agenda. All they do is irritate the Democratic Party.
We asked the chief strategist that No Labels Ryan Clancy about this.
We just disagree with this basic premise that some of our critics try to advance to suggest an independent one could only be a spoiler into it could only spoil in favor of former President Trump. Frankly, all these attacks against us that we would inevitably a spoiler is, in our view, a lot of noise about protecting the established
party's political turf. And I think one of the things voters across the political spectrum should be pretty outraged about is the extent to which both parties have tried to demonize all these independent voices and to try to keep them off the ballot.
The trouble is, voting in the US might be a zero sum game, meaning a vote for No Labels is one less vote for Biden or for Trump, and that shapes the way people act in voting booths.
Voters do tend to be strategic. They're trying to figure out how much does my vote matter? If it doesn't really matter, If neither of the two major party candidates needs my vote, then maybe I'm a little bit more free to vote for a third party candidate just to send a message. But if voters get into the polls in November in sense that it's close, then some of this third party's support that we're seeing right now might dissipate.
It's something that even Ralph Nader admits. Do you see the seeds for a viable third party candidate having already been planted where we might see some of this happen in twenty twenty four?
No, because most Americans, when they're asked, you think we should have a viable third party, they come in around sixty percent, but they don't vote for a third party because they've been taught from elementary school that only one of two nominees can win Democrat Republicans, so they want to be with a winner. I had people telling me in my campaigns, Ralph, we really like what you stand for.
We like your books and articles and testimony and all the laws help pass to protect health and safety, but you'll have to excuse us.
We want to be with a winner.
Major donors see this too, and without their support, it's unlikely a third party could gain enough traction to take on the two headed beast of American politics.
The problem with trying to have a third party IPO. If you want to think of it that way. If you want to start a third party and say, okay, I want people to invest in this, you need some seed capital. But where are those investors going to come from if they don't see a path to victory? The big money donors that the kind of money that goes to super PACs. If you're a billionaire and you are spending money on political contributions, you didn't get to be
a billionaire by throwing good money after bad, right. They want to see a return on investment, and frankly, that return on investment comes from the two major parties.
Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from Bloomberg News. I'm Salaiah Mosen. This episode was produced by Julia Press and Naomi Shaven. It was fact checked by Tiffany Choi. Blake Maples is our mix engineer. Our story editors are Caitlin Kenney, Wendy Benjaminson, and Michael Sheppard. Nicole Beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. I'll be back next week.