The founders of a new political party, “Forward,” acknowledge that third parties usually fail. They say that previous third-party efforts flopped “either because they were ideologically too narrow or the population was uninterested.”
Theirs will succeed, they reason, because polls show that Americans are eager for an alternative to the two dominant parties and theirs will be broad-based and moderate. That’s the explanation that two former Republicans and one former Democrat — former U.S. Rep. David Jolly of Florida, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang — offered in the Washington Post.
What they say about what their new party will stand for is vague enough to sound attractive. As a general proposition, going forward beats the alternatives. But people don’t always agree on where they should go forward to. The trio is attempting to get broad support by not specifying a destination.
