Third parties in the United States | US government and civics | Khan Academy

Let's talk about "third parties" in the United States. I put the word "third" in quotation marks because there's more than one third party; so you could even think of it as a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh parties.

The reason why people say third parties is because in the United States, you have two dominant parties: you have the Republicans, and you have the Democrats. Any other party is considered to be a third party after those first two big dominant parties.

Here are some of the logos of some of the, I would say, major third parties in the United States. I'm going to put "major" in quotes because they don't have much of a say in our government today.

You have the Libertarian Party, which is very focused on people's individual liberties. They generally think about the government doing as little as possible. Whenever the government tries to get bigger, it infringes on people's liberties, either in the economic sphere or in the social sphere.

The Green Party is also very pro-civil liberties, but you can also imagine that, because it's called the Green Party, it is very concerned with the environment.

Now, this third "third party," and there are many more than just these three, is the Reform Party. The Reform Party is really interesting because it was started by Ross Perot in 1995. This was after, in 1992, Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate for president and he did surprisingly well. He got nearly 20 percent of the popular vote.

An interesting question is: even though he got 20 of the popular vote in 1992, and even though the Reform Party had some reasonable support even in the 1996 election, how come we don't see congresspeople who represent the Reform Party?

There are two real answers here. One is the winner-take-all system. Winner-take-all means that when we're dealing with a situation where even if a third party gets 20 percent of the vote, they're not going to get any representation for it. You can contrast that with a proportional representation system like you have in some parliaments.

In some countries, their parliament is elected by proportional representation. So, let's say that 20 percent vote for Party A, 70 percent vote for Party B, and then the remainder, 10 percent, vote for Party C. In a parliamentary proportional representation system, Party C would get roughly 10 percent of the seats in the parliament.

But that's not the way it works in our government. In our government, in almost any jurisdiction, if you had a voter breakdown like this, Party B would win, or maybe sometimes Party A would win. Even if Party C does get some votes, it's never going to cross the threshold to actually get representation.

Now, with that said, this doesn't fully explain why we don't see more third-party representation in, say, the United States Congress. There are countries that have more third-party representation even though they don't have proportional representation.

Another reason that's often cited for why we don't see third-party representation is that the major parties, the Republicans and Democrats, oftentimes incorporate the third party's messages into their own.

To get a sense of this, I'm going to show you a little bit of an excerpt from a Reform Party ad in 1996. At that time, they were saying things that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans were saying very strongly. I want you to think about, when you hear it, whether some of those messages have later on become part of either the Republican or the Democratic candidates' messages.

“Washington is selling our future to the special interests. Don't waste your vote on someone who will sell you out. Ross Perot is the only candidate who will work for our interest instead of the special interest. Just vote for Ross because you own this country.”

As you saw in that ad from the Reform Party, there's a lot of talk about the influence of special interest and how people need to take their government back. If you fast forward to the 2016 presidential election, you had two major forces—actually one on the Republican side and one on the Democratic side.

On the Republican side, you have Donald Trump, who's echoing the need to focus on special interest, that Washington is a swamp and it needs to be drained. It wasn't obvious from that ad, but Ross Perot in 1992 was ringing the alarm bells about NAFTA and free trade, saying why it would be bad for the United States.

In 2016, you heard many of these same things from the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. The same thing with Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side—he echoed the need to take a second look at free trade and that special interests had taken over Washington.