This is all to say that in the United States, a successful third party is not necessarily a national party. Instead, a successful third party is one that integrates itself or its program into one of the two major parties, either by putting important issues on the agenda or by exposing the existence of a powerful new electorate. .
Join the Free Soil Party.
During the presidential election of 1848, after the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a coalition of anti-slavery politicians from the Democratic, Freedom, and Whig parties formed the Free Soil Party to oppose expansion. of slavery in the new western territories. At their national convention in Buffalo, the Free Soilers summed up their platform with the slogan “Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!”
The Free Soil Party, historian Frederick J. Blue observes in “The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854,” ratified the Wilmot Proviso by declaring that Congress had no power to expand slavery and should in fact prohibit its expansion, thus returning to the principle of the Northwest Ordinance from 1787.” It is the duty of the federal government, its platform stated, “to relieve itself of all responsibility for the existence of slavery wherever that government has constitutional power to enact legislation on that subject and is thus responsible for the existence of slavery.” of it.”
This was controversial to say the least. The entire two-party system (the first was the roughly 30-year competition between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans) was built to circumvent the conflict over the expansion of slavery. The Free Soil Party—which in an ironic twist nominated Martin Van Buren, the architect of that system, as president in the 1848 election—fought to put that conflict at the heart of American politics.
It worked. In many ways, the rise of the Free Soil Party marks the beginning of a massive anti-slavery policy in the United States. It elected several members to Congress, helped the Whig party break along section lines and forced the anti-slavery “free” Democrats to leave their party. The Free Soilers never elected a president, but in just a few years they changed American partisan politics. And when the Whig Party finally succumbed to the weight of its own contradictions, after the defeat of General Winfield Scott in the presidential election of 1852, in 1854 the Free Soil Party would become the nucleus of the new Republican Party, which formed an even larger coalition. brought. of former Whigs and ex-Democrats along with free radicals under the umbrella of a sectional, anti-slavery party.
There are a few other examples of third-party success. The populist party failed to rise to high office after approving Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, for president in 1896, but went on to shape the next two decades of American political life. “In the wake of the defeat of the People’s Party, a wave of reform quickly swept the country,” writes historian Charles Postel in “The populist view“Populism gave impetus to this modernization process, with many of their demands being adopted and reformed by progressive Democrats and Republicans.”