Poll Watch Daily

As poll after poll finds confidence in Washington at a low and disdain for the performance and policies of both Republicans and Democrats, a new Gallup survey finds that a majority of Americans say that it is time for a third political party.

Gallup, in the poll conducted Sept. 8-11, put its question this way: ” In your view, do the Republican and Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people, or do they do such a poor job that a third major party is needed?”

Fifty-five percent answered “yes”  while 38 percent disagreed. The public has gone somewhat back and forth on this idea. In 2008, they were evenly divided at 47 percent each; in 2007, 58 percent said a third party was needed; and in 2003, 56 percent had said the two major parties were doing an adequate job and a third wasn’t needed.

The strongest proponents of a third-party were independents among whom 68 percent said one was necessary. (Independents comprised 44 percent of the sample). Gallup said a slight majority of Democrats said a third-party is not needed, while Republicans were evenly split on the issue.

Whatever the sentiments of Americans are about this — whether the poll result is a venting of their frustration with the current political climate or truly a belief that a new party is needed — the country is a long way from a competitive third party coming into existence, if the definition of a third party is one that fields candidates across the country for Congress as well as putting up a nominee for President, (not to mention state and local office).

While there are some formal tea party movement groups, the tea party, as its adherents say themselves,  is not a “party” in the same sense as Republicans and Democrats.

Even if the movement was to become a “party,”  recent polls have shown the tea party movement also is seen in an increasingly unfavorable light by the public.  Many surveys that have asked whether support for a candidate by the movement would make a difference in voters’ decisions, and found that it would either make no difference or make support for that candidate less likely.

Third parties have had some successes. The Reform Party, which grew out of  Texas billionaire Ross Perot ‘s run in the 1992 presidential election, saw one of its candidates, Jesse Ventura, win the Minnesota governorship in 1998.

In presidential elections, even the strongest of the candidates to run as an independent or on third party tickets like the Green Party or Reform Party in recent times never did better than being potential spoilers. The strongest such candidate  was Perot who, in 1992,  at one point led both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the polls, and finished with 19 percent of the vote.

Dan Quayle, Bush’s running mate,  wrote last year that there was no doubt in his mind that Perot’s candidacy “eliminated any chance” that the Republicans would win the white House because “a majority of (Perot) voters would probably have gone Republican in a two-party race…Speaking on behalf of the Bush-Quayle campaign, to this day we firmly believe that Perot cost the Republican Party the White House.”

Ralph Nader, who won 2.7 percent of the vote in the hotly contested 2000 election between Al Gore and George H.W. Bush, has been excoriated as a spoiler who cost the Democrats the White House, although studies by some political scientists dispute that.

The Gallup poll on the third party question comes against a backdrop in which a separate survey it did Sept. 15-18 found that 67 percent of Americans believe that President Obama and Congress are doing a poor or very poor job in dealing with the nation’s most important problems. Fifty-two percent said Obama and the current Congress were doing a worse job than their predecessors.

The new poll, which included the third party question, said that more Americans see the Republicans rather than the Democrats doing a better job of “keeping the country prosperous (48 percent to 39 percent, with 13 percent undecided) and protecting the country from terrorism and military threats (49 percent to 38 percent, with 13 percent undecided).

But that result has to be taken in the context of other polls not as favorable to the Republicans, even though the questions posed to those survey were somewhat different.

A recent CNN poll found that majorities of Americans don’t like the policies of congressional leaders from either party , a Pew Research Center survey found that Americans had far more confidence in Obama on dealing with the deficit than they did in Republican congressional leaders, and past polls have produced a variety of results about which parties Americans trust the most to handle the economy in specific and important issues facing the country in general.

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