Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: With every passing primary, it's looking more and more like
Speaker 2: the US election is going to play out like groundhog Day,
Speaker 2: and voters are not excited about it.
Speaker 1: We need a new generation in there. We need to
Speaker 1: look at the future.
Speaker 3: I want to change a fresh fase.
Speaker 2: At least those voters weren't. We spoke to them in
Speaker 2: Iowa last month. But it isn't just anecdotal. I asked
Speaker 2: my colleague Gregory Cordy about this. He's been covering political
Speaker 2: campaigns for more than two decades. Have you ever seen
Speaker 2: as many disillusioned voters as we have now?
Speaker 1: No, and it's really remarkable.
Speaker 2: Analysts have even come up with a term for this,
Speaker 2: what's a double hater?
Speaker 1: A double hater is a term that posters use for
Speaker 1: people who have an unfavorable opinion of both Joe Biden
Speaker 1: and Donald Trump. Our Bloomberg News Morning Consult poll, they're
Speaker 1: about eighteen to twenty percent of the electorate.
Speaker 2: That's one in five swing state voters who don't like
Speaker 2: either candidate.
Speaker 1: Other polls have that number as high as thirty thirty
Speaker 1: five percent.
Speaker 2: One big reason just how old both Biden and Trump are.
Speaker 1: We have two septagenarian octogenarian candidates that have run before. Americans,
Speaker 1: they're wondering, why don't we have other options?
Speaker 2: With all of this fatigue around a Trump Biden rematch
Speaker 2: this year, some people are wondering if this cycle has
Speaker 2: created an opening for a third party candidate. I asked
Speaker 2: Ralph Nader, who famously ran for president outside the two
Speaker 2: major parties four times, does he think an outsider candidate
Speaker 2: has a shot in twenty twenty four?
Speaker 4: No, because most Americans, they've been taught from elementary school
Speaker 4: that only one of if two nominees can win Democrat Republicans,
Speaker 4: so they want to be with a winner.
Speaker 2: What's made even Ralph Nader doubt the possibility of a
Speaker 2: third party success in an election when voters are begging
Speaker 2: for another option? And could anything make twenty twenty four
Speaker 2: different from Bloomberg's Washington Bureau? This is the Big Take
Speaker 2: DC podcast. I'm your host Sealia Mosen today on the
Speaker 2: show America's Third Party Problem. These days, it's something of
Speaker 2: a given that the Democratic and Republican parties hold all
Speaker 2: the chips in national politics, but it wasn't always that way.
Speaker 4: Third parties changed America in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: That was the voice of Ralph Nader. Many remember him
Speaker 2: as a perennial third party candidate.
Speaker 4: They were first out of the box against slavery, first
Speaker 4: for women, right to vote, first for right to organize unions,
Speaker 4: on and on social security. Started with third parties, and
Speaker 4: the major parties picked it up.
Speaker 2: That spirit of pushing the government to champion new issues
Speaker 2: is what first led Nader to run for president. He'd
Speaker 2: spent his career as a consumer advocate, and he told
Speaker 2: me that he didn't think the two main parties represent
Speaker 2: American voters.
Speaker 4: Look where they get their money from. The bulk of
Speaker 4: the money come from the business community. The countervailing powers
Speaker 4: have gotten very weak, the unions have gotten weaker. Consumer
Speaker 4: groups can't keep up, and there's nothing to counteract the
Speaker 4: swarms of lobbyists.
Speaker 2: Nator hoped he could carry on that mantle of dissent.
Speaker 2: He first ran as a third party presidential candidate in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety six, representing the Green Party. He says that
Speaker 2: the roadblocks were endless.
Speaker 4: It's the hardest democracy, so called in the Western world.
Speaker 4: Just to get on the ballot. It was like climbing
Speaker 4: a sheer cliff with a slippery rope.
Speaker 2: Democratic and Republican candidates get on the ballot pretty much
Speaker 2: by default. Third parties, on the other hand, often have
Speaker 2: to circulate petitions and get thousands of signatures just to
Speaker 2: have their names appear on the ballot, and that has
Speaker 2: to happen on a state by state level. Getting those
Speaker 2: signatures takes a lot of volunteers or money to pay
Speaker 2: people to do the work.
Speaker 4: State by state, millions of signatures, and the Democrats would
Speaker 4: pick at him and try to disqualify him and say, well,
Speaker 4: this letter didn't comport with the name, et cetera, and
Speaker 4: it exhausted us.
Speaker 2: Unlike some other third party candidates like Ross Perrot, who
Speaker 2: could use his personal wealth to fund his campaign, Nader
Speaker 2: relied primarily on small dollar donors.
Speaker 4: We filled Madison Square Guard with twenty dollars entrance to
Speaker 4: raise money.
Speaker 2: Third party candidates don't qualify for federal campaign funds like
Speaker 2: the two main parties. When Nader ran for president in
Speaker 2: two thousand, he knew if he got enough votes he
Speaker 2: could qualify for funding in the next cycle, so he
Speaker 2: had to play the long game. When you launched your
Speaker 2: campaign in two thousand, how likely did you think your
Speaker 2: chances were of winning well.
Speaker 4: We were going for the five percent level. If we
Speaker 4: could get five percent or more, then on the next
Speaker 4: four year cycle we could qualify for federal campaign funds
Speaker 4: and try to go higher.
Speaker 2: For Nator, that long game goes long past his own
Speaker 2: political ambitions. A persistent third party effort could at least
Speaker 2: urge the major parties to take up issues they might
Speaker 2: have overlooked.
Speaker 4: But in the last few decades that hasn't worked. The
Speaker 4: major parties are so smug and arrogant that they don't
Speaker 4: listen to third parties anymore. We're losing a lot in
Speaker 4: this country by not providing more voices and choices on
Speaker 4: the ballot, which most Americans want. They don't just want
Speaker 4: one Democrat, one Republican.
Speaker 2: Nator has a point. As America's two party system has
Speaker 2: become so entrenched, it's left to a lot of voters behind.
Speaker 5: Right now, the Democrats and Republicans are trying to be
Speaker 5: these catch hall parties that represent everybody's point of view,
Speaker 5: and they don't.
Speaker 2: Scott Schroffnagel is a political scientist at Northern Illinois University.
Speaker 2: He's been studying third parties on and off for his
Speaker 2: entire thirty year career.
Speaker 5: The Democratic Party is really two different parties at least,
Speaker 5: you know, and same could be said for the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: The Trump crowd is not the same as the John
Speaker 5: McCain crowd, right, Those are completely different parties and to
Speaker 5: have to put them all under one umbrella is really
Speaker 5: a shame.
Speaker 2: It's particularly a shame, he says, because the current system,
Speaker 2: with its two polls, doesn't represent the position of most
Speaker 2: American voters who fall near the center, and over the
Speaker 2: past few decades, ballot access laws have made it harder
Speaker 2: and harder for new groups to gain a foothold.
Speaker 5: All of these laws were written in a purely self
Speaker 5: interested fashion to try to eliminate third party competition.
Speaker 2: Back in the days that Ralph Nader yearns for, when
Speaker 2: third parties had a real seat at the table. Well,
Speaker 2: political parties are a lot more influx than they are now.
Speaker 2: Voting blocks kept realigning.
Speaker 1: We're in a similar sort of period now.
Speaker 2: That's Gregory Cordy, a national politics reporter at Bloomberg News.
Speaker 1: With Republicans reaching out to non college educated, blue collar
Speaker 1: voters that traditionally had voted Democratic. Conversely, you have some
Speaker 1: more white collar educated workers who used to be Republicans
Speaker 1: now voting Democratic. You would think that there might be
Speaker 1: some room for a third party to get in there, and.
Speaker 2: A handful or trying. You might have heard the super
Speaker 2: Pac ad for Robert F. Kennedy Junior that aired during
Speaker 2: the Super Bowl. The ad echoed his uncle's popular nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty campaign with its nostalgic visuals and sound. Or you
Speaker 2: may be familiar with Cornell West, a longtime political activist
Speaker 2: who's running as an independent. But there's one new group
Speaker 2: that's gotten a lot of buzz this year by trying
Speaker 2: to do things differently. No Labels it's trying to grab
Speaker 2: all those dissilllutions voters in the middle. Just listen to
Speaker 2: their chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, lay out their sales pitch
Speaker 2: in an informational video. It isn't about what No Label supports,
Speaker 2: it's about what they don't support.
Speaker 3: We worry the two major political parties might leave us
Speaker 3: with no good choices. We worry they might force us
Speaker 3: to vote for the least bad option.
Speaker 2: No Labels is trying to upend the traditional outsider approach.
Speaker 2: Instead of leading with a compelling candidate or a platform,
Speaker 2: it's saying we're going to offer you an option that's
Speaker 2: not Biden and not Trump, but who that option is
Speaker 2: going to be and what they support. They haven't actually
Speaker 2: said they're waiting until after Super Tuesday in March.
Speaker 1: We are sitting here in February. There's an election in November,
Speaker 1: and we don't know who the No Labels candidate is
Speaker 1: going to be, whether there will be one. This is
Speaker 1: an organization that says it's going to run would like
Speaker 1: to run a candidate for president one time. They're not
Speaker 1: interested in necessarily long term party building, and they're not
Speaker 1: interested in running candidates for other down ballot races. And
Speaker 1: one of the big questions for No Labels is there
Speaker 1: enough passion in the center?
Speaker 2: No Labels As chief strategist Ryan Clancy, who you heard
Speaker 2: in that ad, He thinks so. We spoke to him
Speaker 2: this week while he was in transit.
Speaker 3: An independent wouldn't be able to win if either party
Speaker 3: was able or willing to put forth choices that most
Speaker 3: of the public found appealing. They have been unable to
Speaker 3: do that, even though the vast majority of the public
Speaker 3: has been signaling for well over a year they don't
Speaker 3: want this rematch we see an opening unlike any other
Speaker 3: that we've seen in modern American history for an independent ticket.
Speaker 3: I mean, ultimately, if the public didn't want this, they
Speaker 3: wouldn't be signing the petitions. But they are signing them
Speaker 3: in droves.
Speaker 2: He told us No Labels has already gotten over a
Speaker 2: million Americans to sign petitions to get them on the ballot.
Speaker 2: But if you ask political scientists Scott Schroff novel, saying
Speaker 2: you support another option is very different from voting for
Speaker 2: another option. He says that without structural changes to the
Speaker 2: way US elections are run and more grassroots third party momentum,
Speaker 2: No Labels RFK Junior, none of these guys have a shot.
Speaker 5: Success is not going to come to any of them.
Speaker 5: But they can be a spoiler, and they can throw
Speaker 5: the election to one or the other candidates.
Speaker 2: Coming up the boogeyman of the third party spoiler. If
Speaker 2: none of these outsiders can win in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 2: could they still shape the outcome of the race. Ralph
Speaker 2: Nator's name has gone down in history, not so much
Speaker 2: because of his passion for consumer advocacy, but more because
Speaker 2: of the two thousand presidential election. Here's how Cable News
Speaker 2: at the time covered his campaign somewhat ominously.
Speaker 3: Ralph Nader campaigning in Madison today, Despite mounting criticism that
Speaker 3: he might cost al Gore the election.
Speaker 2: Nator ran against al Gore and George W. Bush. The
Speaker 2: entire race came down to just five five, one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty seven ballots in Florida, a state where Nader
Speaker 2: got over ninety seven thousand votes. Many of his critics
Speaker 2: say that he spoiled the election for Gore. That's an
Speaker 2: idea that he rejects.
Speaker 4: They don't call each other spoilers, the Republicans and the Democrats.
Speaker 4: Everyone has their equal right to run for election, then
Speaker 4: they have an equal right to get votes from one another,
Speaker 4: and none of them should be called spoilers who are
Speaker 4: trying to do something about spoiled politics to begin with.
Speaker 2: Nieder argues that many of his voters would have stayed
Speaker 2: home if he hadn't run, that he and other third
Speaker 2: party candidates mobilize people who feel left out of the
Speaker 2: political system, and there's evidence that that's true. But data
Speaker 2: on the two thousand race also suggests that if Nader
Speaker 2: hadn't run, enough of his voters would have gone for
Speaker 2: Gore to change the outcome of the election, and so
Speaker 2: far it's looking like a similar dynamic could play out
Speaker 2: when it comes to twenty twenty four. My colleague Gregory
Speaker 2: Cordy told me even a centrist group like No Labels,
Speaker 2: which is aiming to capture moderate voters from both parties,
Speaker 2: would likely pull more of Biden supporters.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's supporters are so much more loyal and so
Speaker 1: much more committed, whereas Biden supporters. A large part of
Speaker 1: the Biden coalition in twenty twenty, remember, was independence, and
Speaker 1: even some more liberal or moderate Republicans who had had
Speaker 1: enough of Donald Trump, had seen enough, are sort of
Speaker 1: realigning away from the Republican Party and went into the
Speaker 1: Biden coalition, but were never really huge fans of Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: And the feeling is among Democrats that No Labels poses
Speaker 1: a big threat to Biden's appeal to that segment, that
Speaker 1: middle of the road, business oriented Republican segment.
Speaker 2: Even Nader seems to see No Labels that way.
Speaker 4: Well, who knows what it is. They don't have a candidate,
Speaker 4: they don't seem to have an agenda. All they do
Speaker 4: is irritate the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: We asked the chief strategist that No Labels Ryan Clancy
Speaker 2: about this.
Speaker 3: We just disagree with this basic premise that some of
Speaker 3: our critics try to advance to suggest an independent one
Speaker 3: could only be a spoiler into it could only spoil
Speaker 3: in favor of former President Trump. Frankly, all these attacks
Speaker 3: against us that we would inevitably a spoiler is, in
Speaker 3: our view, a lot of noise about protecting the established
Speaker 3: party's political turf. And I think one of the things
Speaker 3: voters across the political spectrum should be pretty outraged about
Speaker 3: is the extent to which both parties have tried to
Speaker 3: demonize all these independent voices and to try to keep
Speaker 3: them off the ballot.
Speaker 2: The trouble is, voting in the US might be a
Speaker 2: zero sum game, meaning a vote for No Labels is
Speaker 2: one less vote for Biden or for Trump, and that
Speaker 2: shapes the way people act in voting booths.
Speaker 1: Voters do tend to be strategic. They're trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how much does my vote matter? If it doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter, If neither of the two major party candidates
Speaker 1: needs my vote, then maybe I'm a little bit more
Speaker 1: free to vote for a third party candidate just to
Speaker 1: send a message. But if voters get into the polls
Speaker 1: in November in sense that it's close, then some of
Speaker 1: this third party's support that we're seeing right now might dissipate.
Speaker 2: It's something that even Ralph Nader admits. Do you see
Speaker 2: the seeds for a viable third party candidate having already
Speaker 2: been planted where we might see some of this happen
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty four?
Speaker 4: No, because most Americans, when they're asked, you think we
Speaker 4: should have a viable third party, they come in around
Speaker 4: sixty percent, but they don't vote for a third party
Speaker 4: because they've been taught from elementary school that only one
Speaker 4: of two nominees can win Democrat Republicans, so they want
Speaker 4: to be with a winner. I had people telling me
Speaker 4: in my campaigns, Ralph, we really like what you stand for.
Speaker 4: We like your books and articles and testimony and all
Speaker 4: the laws help pass to protect health and safety, but
Speaker 4: you'll have to excuse us.
Speaker 1: We want to be with a winner.
Speaker 2: Major donors see this too, and without their support, it's
Speaker 2: unlikely a third party could gain enough traction to take
Speaker 2: on the two headed beast of American politics.
Speaker 1: The problem with trying to have a third party IPO.
Speaker 1: If you want to think of it that way. If
Speaker 1: you want to start a third party and say, okay,
Speaker 1: I want people to invest in this, you need some
Speaker 1: seed capital. But where are those investors going to come
Speaker 1: from if they don't see a path to victory? The
Speaker 1: big money donors that the kind of money that goes
Speaker 1: to super PACs. If you're a billionaire and you are
Speaker 1: spending money on political contributions, you didn't get to be
Speaker 1: a billionaire by throwing good money after bad, right. They
Speaker 1: want to see a return on investment, and frankly, that
Speaker 1: return on investment comes from the two major parties.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to The Big Take DC podcast from
Speaker 2: Bloomberg News. I'm Salaiah Mosen. This episode was produced by
Speaker 2: Julia Press and Naomi Shaven. It was fact checked by
Speaker 2: Tiffany Choi. Blake Maples is our mix engineer. Our story
Speaker 2: editors are Caitlin Kenney, Wendy Benjaminson, and Michael Sheppard. Nicole
Speaker 2: Beemster Bower is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our
Speaker 2: head of Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in. I'll be back
Speaker 2: next week.