Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics

7: Thunder Left and Right: Short-Lived Parties, 1912–1960s

7 Thunder Left and Right Short-Lived Parties, 1912–1960s The old parties are husks with no real soul within either, divided by artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day. Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at national convention of the Progressive Party (Bull Moose), 1912 The elephant lives in the Northland, the donkey resides in the South. But don’t let either one fool you. They’ve got the same bit in their mouth. Ditty sung during 1948 Progressive Party campaign Duopoly has prevailed for more than a century now. Twentieth-century third parties found no opening wedge, no rupture or tear in the hegemony shared by two particular major parties like those which in the nineteenth century fueled AntiMasonic , Know Nothing, Republican, and Populist hopes of breaking for the long term into national major-party ranks. Twentieth-century Democratic and Republican policy makers used their power to erect a duopolistic wall of protection for the two major parties, going to great lengths to neutralize challengers. Above all there have been notoriously onerous state ballot-access laws, especially legislation passed since 1930. In all presidential elections from 1920 through 1976, not a single nonmajor-party presidential campaign cracked the ballots of every jurisdiction, and only seven have ever been able to do so since. But transient national parties as well as independent electoral campaigns did arise in the twentieth century. Some of these influenced the making and substance of public policy, and there were those with vote tallies that affected election outcomes and occasionally even secured election victory. Four of them ran presidential candidates who racked up higher vote percentages than did any nonmajor-party candidate in the last third of the nineteenth century: Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive (Bull Moose) (1912) 27.4 Ross Perot, independent (1992) 18.9 Thunder Left and Right 99 Robert La Follette, Progressive, other (1924) 16.6 George Wallace, American Independent (1968) 13.5 Transient nonmajor-party electoral movements in the twentieth century were unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors in several respects. Many in the twentieth century organized around the will, objectives, and personality of a founder, existed as the agency for the founder’s goals, and withered and died when the founder’s interest and commitment were withdrawn. The third-party and independent stories involving Teddy Roosevelt and La Follette, Wallace and Perot, have few if any parallels in the century before. Unlike their predecessors, many of these transient movements organized from the top down, not the grass roots up, and they focused upon presidential election politics. This was due in part to opportunities opened by new electronic media to communicate directly with voters and potential contributors. And it is one reason why few candidates running as national transient parties’ nominees won twentiethcentury elections to congressional and state offices. The nine Progressives elected in 1912 made up the largest twentieth-century short-lived national party bloc in the U.S. House, and just two candidates from parties of this type won twentieth-century gubernatorial elections. Some state-level third parties were more successful than that in winning governor’s races. There were in the twentieth century, especially in its later years, some electoral challenges to the major parties that organized and presented themselves as independent candidacies rather than as the offerings of new or established parties. At play in this were the intricacies of ballot-access laws, some of which make access easier for independents than for minor-party candidates. There also has been the popular disaffection for parties that led so many voters themselves to declare that they were independents. The major parties in the twentieth century used poll results to fortify their argument that votes for outside challengers would be“wasted”on campaigns doomed to fail. Partly because of this, the most significant of the third-party and independent challengers suffered an average drop-off in support of about 34 percent from peak to just before election day. As table 7.1 indicates, there also was the intractable problem of money—the “mother’s milk” of politics. Except for Perot in 1992, no challenging presidential candidate came anywhere close to the bankroll available to and used by the majorparty campaigns. The Progressive Era According to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, American history unfolds in cycles.1 Periods of agitation, change, and reform and years of...