In New York, the state’s Working Families Party is embroiled in a fight to maintain its ballot line, a struggle that provides insight into the squeeze smaller parties have been put under this year to maintain relevance and exert influence despite the fact that an increasing number of Americans say they would support another political party.
In New York, minor parties must maintain 2% support in elections in order to keep their ballot line. This provision was passed as part of a package that also provided public financing for campaigns. In practical terms, this means the Working Families Party needs to convince 130,000 voters to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, on the Working Families Party line, Row D, instead of under the Democratic Party line.
The Working Families Party is what political scientists would call a “fusion party,” a third party that normally nominates the same candidate as a major party and essentially acts like an interest group within that larger party. The Working Families Party in New York almost always nominates the same candidates as the Democrats. Likewise, the state’s Conservative Party normally nominates the same candidate as the Republicans.
Fusion parties stand in contrast to a more traditional third party, like the Green Party or the Libertarian Party, which normally nominate their own candidates. This year the Green Party nominated Jill Stein and the Libertarians nominated activist Chase Oliver. While third-party nominees are ostensibly in the race to win, they’ve historically had the biggest impact when they are able to present a real threat of acting as a spoiler to major parties.
Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University and the author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties,” told Salon that this strategy is known as the “sting like a bee” strategy.
“The idea is that the purpose of a third party is to pick an issue or some set of issues that people feel is being ignored and to attack one or both of the major parties on this,” Tamas said. “As much as they like to say ‘we’re not spoilers’ the strategy is threatening to spoil them. If they’re successful then the major parties will co-opt whatever issue the third party was campaigning on.”
A classic example of this is the Progressive Party or the Bull Moose Party of the early 20th century. Tamas said that the party was able to pressure the Republican Party into adopting anti-child labor laws and other progressive positions that made a major impact in American life.
In recent history, however, there hasn’t been a credible threat like that of the Progressive Party, according to Tamas. The most recent example was with the Reform Party, led by businessman Ross Perot in the 1990s. Since then, Tamas said, there hasn’t been a third party with enough voting power to really impact an election.
This year, Robert Kennedy Jr., who was mounting an independent bid for the presidency, saw his support collapse and dropped out of the race well before Election Day, endorsing former President Donald Trump, apparently in exchange for a chair position on a proposed vaccine commission.
In the absence of a credible “sting like a bee” strategy, third parties have fallen into two categories, parties like the Working Families Party and parties like the Green Party.
Ana Maria Archila, the co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told Salon that this year, she sees voting on the Working Families Party line as a way “for voters in New York state who want to defeat Trump but are frustrated by the continuing bombing of Gaza to send a message.”
“Having a ballot line is a way for voters in New York State to have a more expressive vote,” Archilla said. “We enter this year with a commitment to defeat Trump, to defeat the MAGA Republicans who enable his agenda here in New York and to work hand in hand with Democrats to flip congressional districts.”
In many ways, Tamas noted, the Working Families Party operates more like an interest group or a labor union, except instead of delivering money or the votes of union members, it delivers manpower for activism and a bloc of progressive voters. So far this method had allowed the Working Families Party to maintain its ballot line in a state in which the fusion party system was explicitly designed to stamp out third parties, dating all the way back to former President Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election campaigns, when Democrats feared labor parties could play the spoiler.
“They came in with the attitude that ‘we need to be practical’ when they first developed the party,” Tamas said “They refer to this as an inside-outside party and so what the Working Families Party claims to do is if they like a Democratic candidate they'll co-nominate them and try to support that candidate but if they don’t like the third party candidate they’ll run their own against them. They almost never nominate their own candidate.”
This year, the most high-profile candidate on the Working Families Party line is congressional candidate Anthony Frascone, who is running in New York’s 17th. Frascone, however, did not receive the party’s endorsement and the Working Families Party says that Frascone is a Republican plant running a "fake campaign" intended to spoil the race for the Democratic nominee, former Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who is facing Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y.
Tamas noted that this sort of maneuver is something third parties are particularly vulnerable to and part of the reason why a party running fusion candidates is typically on its last legs. Tamas noted, however, that the Working Families Party has been unusually durable, even if it is acting mostly as an interest group in the Democratic coalition.
“I’ve long been skeptical of the Working Families Party but I’ll have to say after watching how deeply ineffective the Greens and Libertarians have been this year at least they have a seat at the table,” Tamas said.
The other strategy, embodied by the Green Party this cycle is to try to build a political infrastructure fully independent of the two major parties.
“Building power is an interesting way to put it because we are in a position in NYS where we have been officially repressed,” said Peter LaVenia, a New York Green Party co-chair. “When you don’t have a ballot line it’s very difficult to run candidates.”
LaVenia said that the Green Party is trying to get its party line back this year with Stein as a presidential candidate but that it’s an uphill battle. He added that the party was increasingly skeptical even of the traditional “sting like a bee” strategy of picking an issue to try and force a major party to adopt, saying “this idea of policy concessions, that’s liberalism, that’s reformism and that’s not what the party is about.”
“I don’t see on any level, neither Biden nor Kamala Harris, are making any overtures on any level,” LaVenia said. “What ends up happening typically is that if they seize on any of these issues is to avoid any real change.”
LaVenia said that the party’s current strategy is “the idea that working people and people that think we need a radical change in this country need their own organization and it’s a harder road to walk.”
“We’ve been hit with election law and a public that’s very skeptical of smaller parties,” LaVenia said. “Our legitimacy — it’s difficult for people to see it.”
In terms of whether any third-party effort in the United States is operating effectively this year, Elain Kamarck, a senior fellow for governance studies at the Brookings Institution, says she’s “unimpressed.”
“Structurally with third parties you have to be skeptical of their intentions because they're not doing a very good job of building a party. If they were they would be running candidate for county commissioner,” Kamarck said. “There’s a Republican county committee in all 3,000 counties in America, how many Green Party county committees are there? How many Conservative party county committees are there?”
Kamarck said that, generally when a third party is relatively successful they will get absorbed into a larger party, like with the Reform Party, and when they fail it tends to be because of a lack of grassroots support. She used the Uncommitted movement this year as an example of an organization that did its best to try to affect policy but ultimately “fizzled” because it could only win 37 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
“They had a good idea, they got a fair amount of attention for it, they build as good as they can, but ultimately they didn’t have the votes,” Kamarck said.
What the Uncommitted movement did understand, in Kamarck’s analysis, is that, structurally, primaries are the time to have the sorts of policy and ideological fights many sympathetic to third parties want to have.
“If you look at The Squad, these are people that got themselves elected to Congress. They have influence and people listen to what they say. Similarly, look at the Freedom Caucus and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. In fact the Republican Party is essentially split,” Kamarck said. “Primaries are the place to do it, you’re never going to get anywhere with a third party.”
