Split the Vote Out: Third-Party Candidates, Presidential Politics, and Electoral Disruption

- John Louis

Introduction: Breaking Duverger's Law, or Why do Third-Party Candidates Participate in Presidential Politics?

American presidential politics has usually been analyzed as a function of two-party competition. Indeed, the first past-the-post electoral system, and electoral college's mediating influence are supposed to have discouraged third-party candidates.The French Sociologist Maurice Duverger first posited that electoral systems determined party structures. His finding that first past-the-post elections promoted two-party electoral contests has come to be called Duverger's law. In such a system, only a candidate capable of capturing a majority of the vote could win the election, and winner-take-all rules discouraged fringe players from entering the electoral game.

In an electoral system like that of the United States, Duverger's law predicted that third-party candidates were very unlikely to prevail. Nevertheless, multi-candidate elections featured prominently in the history of American presidential politics. Approximately 15% of all U.S. Presidential elections resulted in multi-party elections. What can explain America's divergence from Duveger's law?


Duverger's theory suggested that third-party candidates in a first past-the-post elections cannot win. But political science recognized that the interposition of additional candidates produced vote splitting -- the process whereby electoral support became split between two or more similar candidates. If third-party candidates understood that their entry into the race would produce vote splitting rather than victory why did they participate in Presidential politics?

The interposition of non-major party candidates entry into the electoral arena should not simply be explained as an artifact of mere political ambition. In the history of American presidential politics a third-party candidate never won and election, yet third-party candidates produced significant electoral disruption that worked to undermine stable patterns of party governance.

The Election of 1824: The Corrupt Bargain's Conquest of Single Party Hegemony

Setting aside the uncontested election of Washington, the election of 1820 was the most dominant electoral college victory ever achieved in its time, and at any time since. The 1820 election marked the nadir of democratic-republican ascendancy over national politics. The incumbent Monroe ran unopposed, with one electoral vote cast for a recalcitrant John Quincy Adams, who was subsequently awarded the post of Secretary of State in Monroe's second administration.

Despite the peachy atmosphere of 1820, the election marked the beginning of the end for the era of good feelings. The democratic-republicans had little time to bask in their triumph. Factions vying for grip over the national administration worked on a strategy to undermine the party's dominance. Smooth transition was disrupted by a plurality of contenders. 

The election of 1824 was a debacle. After Monroe's departure the decentralized party-state failed to coherently organize the approaching horse-race. Despite the clear feature of parties in American elections, the stigma of faction still clung to the labeling of candidates. In an era before formal campaigning, when such activities would have been derided as demagogic pandering not befitting of dignified statesmen, Candidates ran on the strength of their reputations rather than their oratorical ability. National party conventions were still taboo, and thus forging a disciplined ticket required backdoor maneuverings and elite networking. The system of elite bargaining that had produced the era of good feelings capitulated to the ambition of individual politicians, and the allure of localism.

Four candidates vied for the title of Commander in Chief. John Q. Adams, the son of founding father John Adams, wonder-boy ambassador, and former Congressman from Massachusetts, was destined to carry New England, and the mass of electoral votes packed into its compact borders. The strongest democratic-republican in the field, Andrew Jackson was a Senator from Tennessee, and a celebrated hero of the War of 1812 made famous by his victory at the Battle of New Orleans. William H. Crawford, was the inside man most favored by elite party members to win the presidency. Crawford had spent many years of service within the regime, first as diplomat to France, then in the cabinets of both Madison, and Monroe. A former Congressman, turned Senator from Georgia, Crawford represented the southern, rather than western wing of the democratic faction, and thus was most likely to steal southern votes from General Jackson. Henry Clay a popular Senator from Kentucky rounded out the field. Opposed to the democrats, Clay had gained notoriety as a major broker of the Missouri Compromise. Clay's standing in the west posed the greatest threat to Jackson, who looked to pull in the most votes from the frontier.

The electoral college, was not built to withstand a multi-candidate election and it faltered. No clear victor emerged. Jackson overwhelmingly won the popular vote, but Crawford carried Georgia as a native son, and also managed to capture Virginia's hefty 24 electoral votes. The two candidates took in 78 electoral votes, and a combined 26% of the popular vote. Without Crawford's vote splitting Jackson would have easily carried the day. Instead, the chaos of the election prevented any candidate from capturing a majority of the electoral college and forced the contest into the House of Representatives.

In the house of representatives democratic-republican politicians were unable to resolve factional disputes between those supporting Jackson, and those supporting Crawford. Crawford's supporters refused to broker a deal, and throw their support behind Jackson. Meanwhile, Clay, no friend to the democratic-republican philosophy, understood that Adam's was a democrat in name only. Finding a harmony of interest between the north and the west Clay threw his support behind Adams. 

Clay's detractors would later denounce the maneuver as "the corrupt bargain", but with Clay's electoral votes, and the south still splintered between Jackson and Crawford, Adams captured the election, on a one-vote-per-state rule. Vote splitting, not personality, defeated Jackson. The interposition of Crawford's candidacy on Jackson's electoral fortune cost him the presidency, and ushered in one of the most unpopular Presidents in American history.

The Election of 1860: Three v. One -- or Lincoln's Path to the Presidency

In 1852 the Democrats had regained clear electoral dominance. The Whig Party had managed to grasp presidential power under the banner of Mexican-American war hero, and Louisiana native, General Zachary Taylor in 1848. But Taylor's untimely death and the disappointing administration of Millard Fillmore combined with increasing internal party divisions over the extension of slavery left the party in shambles. The Whig's again ran another Mexican War General, this time the six-foot five, Virginian, Winfield Scott. The Southerner Scott was chosen over ambitious northern Whigs as a favorite to leach votes in the solidly democratic south. More radical Whigs, driven to ideological fervor over the slavery question resisted Scott's candidacy and formed the fringe Free Soil party, which would eventually coalesce into the Republican Party.

Franklin Pierce captured the presidency, and turned a blind eye to the issues of slavery, and expansion. Meanwhile those issues galvanized his opposition. By 1856 internal disputes among Whigs resulted in a decisive party-split. Whigs ran on a generally nativist platform, and loosing their enchantment with war heroes nominated the mediocre former President Millard Fillmore, who had served nearly a full term in the highest office following the death of Zachary Taylor. The disaffected Free Soil Whig factions of 1852 had by 1856 crystallized into the newly formed Republican party. The Republicans nominated John C. Fremont, the fresh California Senator, and ardent Free Soiler, who took a hard line on the issue of extending slavery.  Divergence over the issue split the Northern vote. New England and the upper mid-west went for Fremont. But vote splitting in border states gave the moderate, dougfaced Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan a commanding electoral victory, despite a meager 45% of the popular vote.

Fremont and Fillmore combined for 55% of the popular vote. Without Republican vote splitting the Democratic hold on the White House would have been much more tenuous, yet if vote splitting was the Democrat's savior in 1856, it proved their undoing in the election of 1860. 

By 1860 the Republican Party had completed the process of absorbing the remaining Whig sympathizers. Meanwhile, the Democratic coalition began to unravel under sectional strains. The once dominant Democrats splintered into three parties. Southerners intractable on the issue of slavery showed their solidarity by forming the Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats alienated themselves from Northern Democratic sympathizers, while the Constitutional Union party tried to split the difference and advocated a policy of accommodation. The splitting of once democratic votes among candidates with similar ideological stances and strong independent regional support, opened an window of opportunity for the obscure Illinois Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, to capture the Presidency.

Fissures in the Democratic party gave the Democrats little chance in the general election. Had Bell and Douglas not split the votes in the border and lower mid-west, chances are Abraham Lincoln would not have won his home state of Illinois. Vote splitting guaranteed a divisive outcome, and catapulted a candidate with only 40% of the popular vote into the nation's highest office. The three-on-one nature of the vote splitting resembled the pattern of party conflict played out in the election of 1824. Like Adams, Lincoln won the support in the northeast and relied on southern and western factionalism to achieve an upset victory. The anti-popular electoral outcome shattered the country, and forced a man supported by fewer than half his people to struggle for reunion. 

The Election of 1912: Theodore Roosevelt Progressive Challenge to Republican Orthodoxy 

From the close of the Civil War until the Election of 1912, the Republican Party dominated national politics. With a stranglehold over the Northeast, Mid-West, and West Coast, the Republican Party promoted a pro-business regime that rested on protective tariffs, the gold-standard, and a lassies-fair domestic economic policy. Farmers, labor, and southerners disgruntled by hard money, and incensed by abuses of corporate power rallied four times behind the fiery oratory of the "Great Commoner", Williams Jennings Bryant. In 1896, republicans had nominated the non-threatening, traditional republican William McKinley for the Presidency, who with solid support in the industrial Midwest and Northeast gained the presidency. In 1900 McKinley retained the nomination, and won another victory over Bryan. 

The 1900 election featured the then 40-year-old, grandiloquent, Spanish-American war hero Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley's Vice Presidential nominee. Roosevelt embodied a new breed of progressive Republican, no longer strictly committed to a lassies-fair, increasingly worried about the influence of money power in politics, and openly hostile to the large corporate conglomerations, or "trusts" that overawed the American industrial landscape. Roosevelt's philosophy, and vision of an activist state, clashed with the more conservative views of traditional Republicans. Lodging Roosevelt within the Vice-Presidency, was viewed by Republican party elites as a strategy to relegate the up-start New York Governor to political obscurity. The plan backfired, when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, and Republican elites shivered at the thought of a crusading Roosevelt in office. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's charisma, leadership, and populist appeal assured him the party nomination in 1904, and a confident victory in the 1904 election. 

Faithful to Washington's strictures against one man holding power for too long, Roosevelt stepped down after his second term. The Republicans ran the able administrator, William H. Taft, former Appeals Judge for the Sixth Circuit, Governor of the Philippines and Roosevelt's Secretary of War. Taft was an establishment candidate, with a clean reputation for efficiency and honesty, that would one day win him the job of Supreme Court Justice. Taft's orthodoxy vanquished Bryan's radical populism, and led to four more years of republican preeminence in national politics. 

1908 was a typical republican victory during the period. Taft carried the North, Midwest, and West Coast, winning 66% of the electoral vote, but four years removed from the spotlight was too much for the energetic Roosevelt. With the bombast endemic of his character Roosevelt challenged his own party, and launched the most successful third-party candidacy in American history.

Roosevelt's candidacy under the Progressive banner cut the Republican vote in half. The popular Roosevelt captured more votes than the incumbent Taft. TR won an impressive 88 electoral votes, but in states where Republican voters split heavily between TR and Taft the Wilson dominated. With only 42% of the popular vote, clearly a loosing margin against a united opposition, the former Princeton President, and New Jersey Governor, Woodrow Wilson captured 82% of the electoral vote -- an astounding margin of victory. Wilson walked away from the 1912 contest with the largest number of electoral votes ever captured by a candidate receiving less than fifty percent of the popular vote. Vote splitting again placed a minority party candidate in the White House.

Oddly, by 1916 Roosevelt had ceased his campaign against the republican establishment. Perhaps co-opted by Wilson's progressive turn for the Democratic party, the Progressive party fell into disarray, Roosevelt gave his official support to the Republican candidate Supreme Court Justice Charles E. Hughes of New York. In 1916 Wilson won  the electoral vote with 277 of a required 266, and he captured only 49% of the popular vote against stiff Republican opposition. The 1916 election was one of the closest elections in American history, and demonstrated how much Wilson's first-term victory depended on Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 candidacy.  

The Election of 1968: George Wallace's Failed Revenge

The 1964 election was a clear victory for Lyndon B. Johnson. The former Vice President had taken the White House following John F. Kennedy's tragic assassination. The 1964 election was as much a referendum on  the Kennedy Administration, as it was on Johnson's leadership. Johnson championed the same progressive faith in the competency of government to affect positive change, and pledged a war on poverty that would culminate in the realization of a "great society." The Republicans, mediated through the primary process, settled on the most conservative, reactionary candidate in the field. The laser-eyed Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater won the nomination. Goldwater's conservatism and hard-line anti-statist positions failed to win him support anywhere but the south, where voters embittered by the aggressive Civil Rights policies of the 1960's turned against the Texan Johnson, and threw their support to Goldwater. 

In 1964, the Democrats looked invincible. Johnson's victory had by any measure been a landslide. But four more years of stalemate in Vietnam, racial violence, and social unrest eroded the popularity of both Johnson and his party. The 1968 election was one of the strangest in American political history. Once again a third-party candidate intervened to create electoral disruption. The election featured three dissimilar candidates: American Independent Alabama Governor George Wallace, Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon.

George Wallace, the populist governor of Alabama, who had achieved his gubernatorial victory on a segregationist ticket, held no illusions of capturing the presidency. Running as an American Independent, Wallace disrupted the regularity of two-party politics threatening not to splinter the  democratic, but rather the republican vote. Wallace instead sought to vindicate the south, and carry enough electoral votes to botch the election and force a repeat of 1824. 

Only the unpredictable success of Richard Nixon foiled Wallace's ambition to play power broker.  

Nixon's election in 1968, therefore, becomes all the more perplexing considering he won, not because of George Wallace, but in spite of him.   Humphrey was perhaps not the most exciting contender in the Democratic party, but the assassination of the charismatic, affable Robert Kennedy during the primary had assured him the party's nomination. Humphrey failed to carry any of the mid-western states that had so cleanly gone to Johnson in 1964, and perhaps most surprisingly Nixon captured the key swing states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin. 

Wallace had counted on Nixon needing the south for clean victory, but the election results proved Wallace wrong.  Wallace dominated the deep south by winning five states. Had the balance between Humphrey and Nixon in the Midwest been closer, Wallace's scheme may have succeeded.  Nevertheless, had Nixon gained the support of Wallace's solid southern base, his electoral mandate would have been clearer. Winning only 43% of the popular vote, Nixon would struggle to assert his leadership throughout his presidency. 

The Election of 1992: Ross Perot Takes Millions -- of Vote's that is.

After Reagan's masterful triumph in the 1984 contest things looked to be on the up-and-up for the Republican party. In 1984, the former actor, turned California Governor, then incumbent President captured every state save Minnesota. The map of his election showed an almost unbelievable level of Republican electoral support.  

In 1988, the aging Reagan's second term ended, and the Republicans chose current Vice President George H.W. Bush, a former ambassador to China, and ex CIA director as the party's candidate. That election Bush was able to keep a strong hold on Reagan's electoral coalition, maintaining republican inroads into both New England and the Midwest. Bush won a staggering 79.2% of the electoral vote, and the election portended the possibility of a protracted era of Republican presidential power.

Bush's reelection bid in 1992, however, would tell a different story. While in 1988 the elder statesman Bush had trounced Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, electoral disruption in 1992 would prove Bush's undoing. In 1992 Bush again ran against an less experienced, younger, Democratic opponent in the folksy, former Rhodes scholar, and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Clinton had more broad based appeal than the Northeastern Dukakis, but Bush's defeat, perhaps, had less to do with Clinton than with the interference of Billionaire Ross Perot's entry into the race as an independent candidate. 

America suffered from recession in 1991 that stubbornly lingered into 1992, and the Bush administration's response was criticized by opponents as ineffectual. A successful businessman, Perot put his own money into the campaign, and built a strong following by offering a fiscally conservative, socially liberal platform that appealed to many disaffected mainstream voters. Although many have argued that Perot took votes from both major candidates, the election was extremely close. While Clinton won a heavy margin of electoral college votes, his victories in key swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Georgia were by small margins. 

There were 17 states with a margin of less than 5%, 10 of which went to Clinton. Demographic data suggests that Perot captured predominantly independents, and moderates, with strong partisans remaining loyal to the major candidates. While it is difficult to claim conclusively that Perot's entrance threw the election to Clinton, his decision to run clearly upset the party balance that allowed the republicans to carry the day in 1988. Republican vote splitting gave Clinton a slight edge, and in a close election, that edge made the difference. Perot ran again in 1996, taking 8% rather than 19% of the vote. He again polled better among centrists and left-leaning republicans than he did among their democratic counterparts. The saga of Ross Perot's brief tenure in presidential politics helped assure eight years of Democratic control over the presidency. 

Conclusion: Vote-Splitting and Electoral Disruption

Vote splitting has featured heavily in the history of American Presidential Politics. In 44 presidential elections vote-splitting has significantly impacted the outcome in at least 7 contests. Third-party candidates, or internal division within one of the major parties have impacted approximately 16% of all presidential elections. Traditional accounts of vote splitting held that the most dissimilar candidate would likely have benefited from third-party entrants as similarly situated candidates destroyed their own chances in futile competition over the same groups of voters. The potential for third-party electoral disruption was exacerbated by the winner take all American electoral system. Despite Duverger's law, third-party vote splitting has been neither rare, nor inconsequential in American politics. 

In each of the cases examined above vote-splitting disrupted entrenched patterns in partisan politics, and presaged further long-term electoral shifts. Adam's 1824 win undermined Democratic-republican electoral hegemony, and paved the way for a string of closely contested election in which the Whig party mobilized a substantial opposition to the once invincible Democratic establishment. Lincoln's victory depended largely on a three-way split in the democratic party. The Democratic party's failure to develop a united opposition sped the nation towards disunion. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive campaign divided republicans, leading the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to victory. Roosevelt undermined Republican party unity at a critical juncture, which allowed Wilson to hold onto the Presidency through the first world war. Wallace's attempt to alter the 1964 election failed to vault the decision into the house of representatives. However, Wallace's candidacy marked a turning point for the future of the Democratic party in the south. The once solidly Democratic south would never again support a Democratic presidential candidate. Finally, Ross Perot's entry into the 1992 campaign spoiled conservative dreams of republican ascendancy, and stimulated a Clinton victory which helped forestall a complete republican takeover of national politics for another 8 years. 

Third-party candidates could not win, but they did matter.While my treatment of the cases above has been cursory, these elections demonstrated that electoral disruption rather than outright victory was the major strategy of third-party Presidential candidates. In each case, third-party candidates introduced major rifts within dominant party coalitions, upset durable partisan balances, and catalyzed lasting electoral changes. Evaluated by their potential to produce electoral disruption, rather than their capacity for electoral success, it becomes apparent that third-party presidential candidates profoundly impacted the trajectory of American political development. 

About the Author: John Louis is a graduate student in political science at Boston College. His research focuses on American Political Development, state building, public law, and public administration.