Andrew Yang’s New Forward Party is Unlikely to Go Anywhere

Third parties in America sound good until you try to stand one up

New York City Mayoral candidate Andrew Yang during a rally at City Hall Park in Manhattan on May 24, 2021 (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Former failed Democratic presidential candidate and failed NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Yang and two retired Republican elected officials, Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, and David Jolly, a former congressman from Florida, have announced that they are launching a new political party, the Forward Party, in the hopes of saving America from “divisiveness and extremism” and giving a new home to the “moderate, common-sense majority.” It’s almost certainly not going to work.

Here’s why. It’s one thing to cite polls showing that a majority of Americans want a new major political party. That’s been true since the 1990s. It’s another thing to actually build one that can attract and hold a meaningful base and not get sidelined by our winner-take-all electoral process or marginalized by the media.

I’ve been tracking and writing about third parties in America for decades. In all that time, I’ve seen only two kinds. The first are narrow, ideological parties like the Libertarians or the Greens. While they have had success electing a handful of people to office, those are largely for local positions (mayor, city council) where elections are held without party labels. At the…