Third Parties and Strategic Voting

By Chase Quinn, Elections
Photo: ottawacitizen.com

Elections in the United States are dominated by a two-party system with Democrats on the centre-left and Republicans on the centre-right. Although there are other parties, they receive negligible amounts of support and often fail to win any significant elections. For voters who support third parties, elections can be frustrating, as it seems like there is no good outcome when casting a vote. 

A possible solution to this is an idea known as strategic voting, sometimes referred to as tactical voting. Strategic voting occurs when voters cast ballots for candidates that would not otherwise be their first choice in the hopes of producing a better election outcome (The Center for Election Science n.d). For example, if you are a registered member of the Green Party, your first choice of candidate would be the Green Party candidate. Strategic voting occurs if you choose to instead vote for the Democratic candidate in the hopes of them winning the election and getting environmental protection laws passed. This can produce a better outcome for you because if you voted for the Green Party, your vote would have no effect and you’d be taking votes away from the Democrats, increasing the chances that the even less-preferred Republicans may win. If the Democrats win, they at least have some policy that you may agree with. To better understand strategic voting, however, we must first examine the way that our electoral system works. 

Voting System Matters

The dominance of the two-party system in the United States is mainly due to how our voting system is structured. The United States uses single-member district elections, meaning that for each election, there is only one candidate that can win. We also use a first-past-the-post or “winner takes all” electoral system, meaning that whichever candidate gets the most votes automatically wins. This can be seen in the electoral college, where if a candidate wins the majority of votes in a state, they win all of the state’s electoral votes. 

These factors contribute to a phenomenon known in political science as Duverger’s Law, which states that “…the statewide-plurality method of electing a president and governors, plus the single-member-district-plurality method of electing national and state legislators, have made “third” party growth unlikely” (Scarrow 1986). 

Following this law, voters concentrate their support on two main parties: the party in the lead, and the second most competitive party that serves as the “opposition” to the leading party. Voting for a third party makes no rational sense because unless the party can gain enough support to become the main leading or opposition party, there is no chance that they will win the election. In lower level state and local elections some third party candidates do in fact win seats, but this is largely absent for presidential elections. The only recent exception to this was Ross Perot’s Presidential run in the 1992 election, where he won a historic 18.9% of the national vote as an independent. Despite his relatively high numbers for an independent, he won zero electoral votes and had no real chance of victory.

Policy Dimensions

In political science, a simple way of visualizing competition between different parties is to use what’s known as a “policy dimension.” In this case, the scale is a straight line, with points towards the left representing more left-leaning ideology and points to the right representing more right-leaning ideology. Points on the scale represent the political ideology of government policy.

The ideal outcomes of Democrats, Republicans, and the Green Party are all plotted above. Status Quo, represented by Q, is where policy currently resides. Ideal points are where different parties would prefer the status quo to be.  The goal of each party is to get the status quo as close to their ideal policy point as possible. Moving the status quo closer to your ideal point means that the direction of government policy moves closer towards your preferred ideology. For simplicity, the status quo is placed equally distant between the ideal points of Democrats and Republicans. Note how the Green Party’s ideal point is much farther away from the status quo than those of the Republicans and Democrats. 

Strategic Voting Visualized 

To simulate how strategic voting works, we can use the policy dimension above. In this example, assume you are a member of the Green Party. You believe that the status quo is much farther to the left than the democrats or the status quo. You’d prefer to shift the status quo to the left, as close to your preferred policy point as possible. 

There’s an important election coming up, and the race is closely tied between a Democratic candidate and a Republican. The Green Party is polling at barely 1% of the total vote. As much as you believe in the Green Party’s platform, you know that the voting system of the country makes it nearly impossible for them to win any significant amount of support. With this knowledge in mind, there are four choices you can make:

1. You choose to vote for the Green Party anyway.
2. You choose to vote for the Democratic Party.
3. You choose to vote for the Republican Party.
4. You choose to abstain and not cast a vote,

If you choose to vote for the Green Party, your vote is negligible due to lack of support and as a result has no effect on the election outcome. If you are dissatisfied with the choices presented to you and decide to not cast a vote, you also have no effect on the election outcome. This leaves two remaining choices. Voting for the Republican Party does not make sense, as your ideal policy preference is on the left of the dimension and you don’t want it to move further to the right. As a result, the remaining, most strategic decision is to vote for the Democratic Party because if they win, policy will at least shift leftwards and put the status quo closer to your preferred point. Assuming your vote is the deciding factor in the race, policy dimensions based on the two possible outcomes are shown below.

In this scenario, your vote results in a win for the Democratic candidate, shifting policy to the left. Although it is still considerably far away from your ideal point, it is the best outcome for you given the circumstances. In theory, if the status quo moves far enough left, the Green Party may actually be able to gain enough broad support to be a competitive party in the future.  

In the case of a Republican victory, policy shifts to closer to the Republican ideal point. This increases the distance between the Green Party’s ideal point and the status quo, resulting in the worst outcome for you given the circumstances. With the current voting laws in the United States and the dominance of the two party system, a Democratic or Republican win are the only realistic outcomes to the election. 

In real life, a shift of ideology either way means that the government is more inclined to pass laws and policy that align with that ideological shift. For example, if Republicans win and the status quo shifts to the right (Q3), the ideological stance of the government favors more right-leaning policies and vice versa. While policy might shift closer to the Republican ideal point, in reality it is highly unlikely that policy will ever reach their ideal point, as there are competing parties that are constantly attempting to shift policy closer to their own ideal positions.  

Closing

For voters of third parties, elections in the United States can be troublesome. Voting for a third party candidate often means that your vote has no real effect, and as a result voters may feel that their voices are not considered in our democracy. Although strategic voting provides an alternative to this, it is by no means perfect. On paper, strategic voting can help move government ideology closer to a voter’s ideal point, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will benefit from it. Furthermore, it’s disheartening for voters to sideline their own true beliefs and vote for candidates that they wouldn’t support otherwise. Without significant reform to the voting system in the United States, however, it is unlikely that this will change in the near future.

References

Scarrow, Howard A. 1986. “JSTOR.” Duverger’s Law, Fusion, and the Decline of American “Third” Parties. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1010076.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:dab6cb1be39076f0ad3d8db534c45b25&amp=&ab_segments=0/basic_phrase_search/control&amp=&origin=&amp=&acceptTC=1 (October 29, 2025).

Hurley, Meghan. 2015. “Strategic Voting Signs Surface in Ottawa Ridings | Ottawa Citizen.” Ottawa Citizen. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/strategic-voting-signs-surface-in-ottawa-ridings (October 29, 2025). 

“Tactical Voting Basics.” The Center for Election Science. https://electionscience.org/research-hub/tactical-voting-basics (October 28, 2025).