The short answer is no. As long as the United States has an Electoral College and winner-take-all process for presidential elections, third-party and independent candidates will have a hard time finding any traction.
There have been times in American history, though, when third-party candidates have upended the political landscape, winning entire regions of the country, although never the presidency. But unlike Schultz, those candidates weren’t self-proclaimed “independents” railing against “divisiveness” from the center; they were polarizers who built support by cultivating personal followings and sharpening ideological, cultural and geographic divides.
Formed in early 1892 in an effort to make the farmer’s cooperative movement a national political crusade, the Populist Party hoped to, in the words of one leader, “march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people.” That summer, delegates at a nominating convention in Omaha, Nebraska, chose James Weaver, a former Union Army general, for president and a Confederate veteran, James Field, for vice president, a bisectional ticket meant to unify farmers in the North and South.
Weaver’s campaign pamphlet, “A Call to Arms,” provides a taste of the candidate’s rhetoric in the presidential campaign. “Capitalists have entrenched themselves within the governments of the world and wield the machinery of state as the policeman does the baton and the revolver — to inspire fear, control the refractory and suppress revolt,” Weaver wrote. He called on the nation’s farmers and laborers to “make the year 1892 memorable for all time to come as the period when the great battle for industrial emancipation was fought and won in the United States.” This was the language of division and conflict, of class warfare and unambiguous opposition to a well-defined political enemy. And it helped the Populist Party win 8.5 percent of ballots cast, four Western states and 22 electoral votes overall — an unusually strong showing for a third party in American presidential politics.
Theodore Roosevelt had an even stronger showing in the 1912 election, running against Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican incumbent William Howard Taft as the Progressive Party’s nominee. Roosevelt, who had served nearly two terms as president, pushed a platform drawn from his 1910 “New Nationalism” address, in which he called for leadership that “puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage” and is “impatient” of “the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock.”
Roosevelt’s campaign was heated and divisive, aimed at making clear distinctions and mobilizing his broad national following. “There are only two ways you can vote this year,” he said in a speech titled “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual,” given just after he survived an assassination attempt. “You can be progressive or reactionary. Whether you vote Republican or Democratic, it does not make any difference, you are voting reactionary.” Roosevelt won six states and 88 electoral votes — the only third-party candidate to finish second in a presidential election. He also crippled Taft’s re-election effort, keeping Republican progressives out of office and giving the Democratic Party its second president since the Civil War.
If Weaver and Roosevelt show how a distinctive ideology positioned near the poles of American politics — or unique personal appeal — can clear the path to some third-party success, then Strom Thurmond and George Wallace show how you can do the same through focused appeal to a distinct regional minority.
In 1948, Thurmond, the governor of South Carolina, ran as the nominee of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (known as the Dixiecrats), organized after the national Democratic Party adopted a modest civil rights plank in its platform during its July convention in Philadelphia. The Dixiecrat platform was an unambiguous appeal to white Southern racists. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race,” it said, specifying opposition to “the repeal of miscegenation statutes” and “the control of private employment by federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.”
It worked. Thurmond won Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina in the general election, states where he was on the ballot as the official Democratic nominee.
George Wallace’s third-party campaign for president in 1968 was built on a similar foundation of white racism and anti-government rage, skillfully exploiting the fears and hatreds of Americans who despised the upheavals of the 1960s. He would disrupt the two-party system by mobilizing an angry minority. And not just in the South — Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, drew crowds across the country, prompting his now-infamous realization that “the whole United States is Southern!”
Despite losing some support to Richard Nixon, who managed both to co-opt his appeal and to persuade white Southerners not to “divide” their vote, Wallace still won five states, 46 electoral votes and 13.5 percent of all ballots cast. He would run again in 1972 and 1976, both times in the Democratic primary, on a similar message of white middle- and working-class anger at Washington lawmakers on one end and the urban poor on the other. He condemned liberals, attacked busing and railed against welfare, winning primaries in Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, and winning substantial support from working-class white Democrats in Illinois and Massachusetts.
All of these examples share key elements. The most successful third-party candidacies relied on a pre-existing mass constituency, whether a movement or a charismatic following or a distinct minority with shared political and cultural interests. To mobilize those constituencies, candidates threw themselves into polarizing the electorate from novel positions — not the center — sharpening differences and working to reorganize the electoral playing field around their concerns. And they played on divisions in the major parties themselves, capitalizing on shifting attitudes within each coalition. The Populists exploited agrarian discontent within the Democratic Party; the Dixiecrats did the same for white Southern opposition to racial liberalism.
To believe, as Howard Schultz does, that “a formidable third choice for president also has a chance to succeed for the first time since George Washington,” one also has to believe that the structure of American politics has suddenly changed, with a large and distinct constituency of voters just waiting to be tapped by an enterprising candidate. Neither is true. One must also ignore the virtues of our particular system, especially in its modern, polarized form. By pushing varied interests and communities into one of two sides, it clarifies the stakes, helps ordinary people make otherwise complicated political decisions and produces governing coalitions with points of real consensus.
Let’s say Schultz is right. Should we want an “independent” president? Would it benefit American democracy? If you see partisanship and traditional political parties as major obstacles to representative government, the answer is yes. But if you see them as an essential part of our democracy, necessary tools for taming conflict, balancing discordant values, ordering democratic deliberation and organizing democratic action, you might recoil when someone like an unaccountable billionaire suggests we’d be better off without them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.