To Weigh the Chances of a Third Party, Look to the 2016 Voters Who Feel Adrift

Coming off an election featuring the two most unpopular presidential candidates in modern history, a significant portion of the voters who actually showed up to the polls are drifting further away from the country’s two major political parties -- spelling trouble for both parties as they look toward 2020.

Antipathy about the Republican and Democratic parties is not a new phenomenon. Voters have grown more likely to eschew the labels, especially in the 21st century, and embrace the “independent” moniker. It’s a trend that’s occasionally revived the argument that the time is ripe for the formation of a third major political party.

Morning Consult’s analysis of a survey of nearly 20,000 registered voters conducted at the start of the 2020 presidential cycle shows that while data shows significant appetite -- even among those that identify with two of the major parties -- for the formation of such a party, those findings are essentially red herrings.

“The key factor is the strength of party identification,” said Stephen K. Medvic, a professor of government and program chair of public policy at Franklin & Marshall College. “People whose strength of party identification is low or nonexistent are much more likely to vote for a third-party candidate if one is available. The problem is those people are less likely to vote in general.”

"Disaffected” voters, or those in the survey who said they identified less with the party they backed at the top of the ticket in 2016, are a more important bloc than those expressing interest in a third party, experts said -- and the survey shows Trump voters are more likely to fall under that classification.

A quarter of respondents who voted for Trump in the most recent presidential election said they identify less with the party they voted for in 2016, compared with one-fifth of the Americans who cast their ballots for Democrat Hillary Clinton. (Small shares of both parties cast votes for the other party’s candidate: Five percent of Democrats voted for Trump and 3 percent of Republicans voted for Clinton.)

Republicans or Democrats who said the country would benefit from the creation of a third major political party had views of their own parties similar to those of the average party member.

Disaffected voters, on the other hand, were more likely than third-party supporters to deviate from rank-and-file partisans from each party -- with Trump voters slightly more out of step with Republicans.

The best predictor of a third party’s influence on an election is not how a voter feels about the third party, said Ron Rapoport, a professor emeritus of government at The College of William & Mary.

What is more important, he said, is “whether there is a difference in your evaluation between the major parties,” or distance between your own views and that of the two major political parties.

Disaffected Clinton voters were more likely than Democrats overall to say the Democratic Party compromises too much, while disaffected Trump voters were more likely than GOP voters to say the Republican Party doesn’t compromise enough.

Questions on the direction of the party did not result in a huge gap between Democrats and disaffected Clinton voters, but it did for Republicans and disaffected Trump voters -- not because of voter pessimism, but because Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say their party had improved.

Similarly, nearly equal shares from each party agreed that their side was well-informed about the public’s needs -- but disaffected Clinton voters were 10 points more likely than Trump voters to agree that the party they voted for in 2016 knows what the public wants. The Jan. 10-Jan. 28 survey had a margin of error of 1 percent.