After the 2020 election, Americans were clear: they wanted a viable third political party.
In modern US history the country has been dominated by the Republican and Democratic parties almost to the exclusion of all others, effectively creating a near two-party monopoly on power in the White House, Congress and the state level.
Other parties, like the Reform party, the Greens or the Libertarians have never really broken through. In 2021, as the fallout from the 2020 election continued, polling showed widespread support among Americans for a fresh third party that would offer something different from the status quo. Even a majority of self-identified Republicans said they wanted a new party in the mix.
This should be prime ground, then, for the Forward party, founded in July by a group of self-defined centrists including the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
People wanted a new third party, and they have been given one – one that has boasted of already raising more than $5m. So what are the chances of Yang and co winning office, and holding forth on the floors of the US Capitol?
“Slim to none,” says Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. “With an emphasis on none.”
Third parties face resource problems, for one thing. Forward’s $5m pales in comparison with the $1bn Joe Biden raised from donors during his 2020 election campaign.
Donald Trump raised $774m from donors, according to Open Secrets, while data from the Federal Election Commission shows that House and Senate candidates raised $4bn between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020, spending $3.8bn.
The two dominant parties also have huge structural advantages: mailing lists, email addresses, existing supporters and name recognition, things that have taken decades to build.
A more fundamental issue is that the US election system just isn’t set up to accommodate a third party.
The first-past-the-post system, in which one person is elected in each congressional district, means that a third party could, in theory, win 49% of the vote in a given area, and it would count for nothing if their opponent wins more.
Forward, which launched on 23 July, was formed from three existing political groups: Renew America Movement, made up of dozens of former Republican administration officials ; the Forward party, which was founded by Yang after his failed bid to become the Democratic party’s nominee for New York City mayor; and the Serve America Movement, a centrist group of Democrats, Republicans and independents.
“The rigid, top-down, one-size-fits-all platforms of the outdated political parties are drifting toward the fringes, making solutions impossible,” Forward’s website reads.
“We stand for doing, not dividing. That means rejecting the far Left and far Right and pursuing common ground.”
The party’s mission: “Not left. Not right. FORWARD,” as its slogan lays out, is a noble one. But there are doubts about what a centrist party might actually look like and stand for.
“There are a lot of people who would consider themselves moderate or centrist, who disagree very strongly with other people who consider themselves moderate or centrist. It’s not one group,” Hershey said.
The Forward party is yet to lay out a detailed platform. But once it does set out its positions on divisive issues like abortion, social security and tax cuts, Hershey said, “some of that middle is going to disagree with other parts of that middle, and the so-called huge middle is no longer huge.”
In a statement, the Forward party said it “can’t be pegged to the traditional left-right spectrum because we aren’t built like the existing parties.
“The glue that holds us together is not rote ideology, it is a shared commitment to actually solving problems. The hunger for that simple but revolutionary kind of politics is immense.”
In terms of how it will compete with Democrats and Republicans, the party said it “isn’t looking to drop a billion dollars in a 2024 presidential race”.
Instead, it will focus on gaining ballot access and recruiting candidates to run in races across the country.
“That takes money,” Forward said. “But more than money it takes people, and we are rich with them.”
Forward is less than two weeks old, but has already attracted a good deal of both cynicism and criticism, not least for the false equivalency it deployed when describing the need for a third party.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Most third parties have failed. Here’s why ours won’t,” Yang, Whitman and David Jolly, another co-founder who was previously a Republican congressman from Florida and executive chairman of the Serve America Movement, appeared to offer disingenuous arguments for why their efforts were required.
On guns, Forward suggested that most Americans are “rightfully worried by the far right’s insistence on eliminating gun laws”, but “don’t agree with calls from the far left to confiscate all guns and repeal the Second Amendment”.
As Andrew Gawthorpe, a historian of the United States at Leiden University and host of the podcast America Explained, wrote in the Guardian:
“These two things are not the same: the first is what is actually happening in America right now, whereas the second is a view that was attributed to Kamala Harris as part of a fabricated smear on Facebook and enjoys approximately zero support in the Democratic party.”
Third parties can have an impact, said Bernard Tamas, associate professor of political science at Valdosta state university and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival?. But there’s usually a pretty specific formula.
“It’s always built on outrage,” Tamas said. “It has to be where the public is galvanized.”
Tamas pointed to the Progressive party, founded in 1912. That party, led by former president Theodore Roosevelt, advocated for child labor laws and the establishment of improved working conditions, including and eight-hour working day and “one day’s rest in seven” for workers.
Roosevelt, who was shot during his campaign, won 27.4% of the vote, besting William Howard Taft, the incumbent Republican, but losing to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But progressive reforms were eventually introduced.
“What they have historically done successfully could be described with an analogy of ‘sting like a bee’,” Tamas said.
“They emerge, really often quite suddenly, and they attack the two parties [and] they effectively pull voters away from them.
“And the two parties then respond, and in critical moments, they respond by trying to take away these issue bases, whatever is making the third party successful. They take those away, the major party changes, and then effectively the third party dies.”
Forward, which has pledged that it will reflect “the moderate, common-sense majority”, has plenty of people skeptical as to whether it can sting like a bee – let alone do more and actually elect candidates.
“The way that they’re presenting themselves, it may not have the galvanizing message,” Tamas said.
“Simply saying: ‘Hey, you know, let’s all get together and work together’ is barely something that gets people running on the streets protesting.”
