The standard dismissal of third parties in American politics goes like this: they've never won the presidency, the system isn't designed for them, and the only thing they accomplish is splitting the vote for whoever they most resemble. The history says something more complicated.

Third parties have won thousands of local and state offices. They've forced their platforms onto major parties that stole their ideas to neutralize the competition. They've shifted the range of what politicians will say out loud, pulled debates in directions the two major parties wanted to avoid, and in some cases become the dominant party within a decade of being founded. Measuring them only against the presidency misses most of what they've actually accomplished.

The Republican Party

The most obvious starting point is the party that currently holds the presidency. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as a third party. The existing two parties at the time were the Democrats and the Whigs. The Republicans ran their first presidential candidate in 1856 and lost. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won. Six years from founding to the White House.

The circumstances were specific: the Whig Party had collapsed under the weight of the slavery question, and the country was in a genuine political crisis that the existing parties couldn't contain. A new party that could consolidate the anti-slavery vote across regional lines had an opening that rarely exists in stable political periods. Building a new major party took a national crisis. The lesson is that the two-party system has broken down before, and when it does, something new fills the space. The conditions that produce breakdown, broad public disillusionment with both parties, a major unresolved issue that neither party will address directly, voters who feel abandoned and are looking for somewhere to put their energy, are present in recognizable form today.

The Populist People's Party

In the 1880s and 1890s, farmers across the South and Midwest were being systematically squeezed by railroads, banks, and grain elevator operators who set prices and terms that left small farmers with almost nothing. The two major parties were both controlled by the financial and corporate interests doing the squeezing.

The Farmers' Alliance organized millions of people and eventually launched the People's Party in 1891. At its peak, the Populists elected governors, senators, and state legislators across the Great Plains and the South. Their presidential candidate in 1892 won 22 electoral votes across five states. In the 1894 midterms, they elected more than a thousand state and local officials.

Their platform called for public ownership of railroads, a graduated income tax, direct election of senators, and monetary reforms to relieve farmer debt. Most of that platform eventually passed, absorbed by the Democratic Party over the following decades after the Populists demonstrated that it had a political base. The graduated income tax became the 16th Amendment in 1913. The direct election of senators became the 17th Amendment in 1913. Railroad regulation expanded through the Progressive Era.

The Populists didn't win the presidency. They changed what was on the table in American politics for a generation.

The Socialist Party of America

The Socialist Party ran candidates for office from the 1890s through the 1940s and built significant electoral strength at the local level. Over its lifetime, the party elected more than 1,000 officials in 353 American cities and towns. Milwaukee elected Socialist mayors three times: Emil Seidel in 1910, Daniel Hoan from 1916 to 1940, and Frank Zeidler from 1948 to 1960. In total, more than 70 Socialist candidates were elected mayor somewhere in the United States between 1901 and 1948.

Victor Berger of Milwaukee and Meyer London of New York City both served in Congress as Socialist Party members. Eugene Debs ran for president five times as a Socialist, receiving nearly a million votes in 1912 and again in 1920, the second time from a federal prison cell where he'd been sent for speaking against World War I.

The Socialist platform in the early 1900s called for national insurance against accidents, unemployment, sickness, and old age. It called for public ownership of utilities and industries controlled by monopolies. It demanded the right of workers to organize. Much of that platform became New Deal policy in the 1930s, after decades of Socialist electoral activity had demonstrated that the ideas had a substantial constituency.

The Progressive Party

Theodore Roosevelt had been president from 1901 to 1909 and left office voluntarily. He grew dissatisfied with his handpicked successor William Howard Taft and decided to run again in 1912. When the Republican Party refused to nominate him, he launched the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.

Roosevelt won 27 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes, finishing ahead of the sitting Republican president Taft. It was the strongest third-party presidential performance in the 20th century. He lost to Woodrow Wilson, but his campaign forced progressive reforms onto the national agenda and demonstrated that the Republican Party's establishment wing didn't own its voters.

Robert La Follette's Progressive Party candidacy in 1924 pulled 17 percent of the national vote on a platform calling for public ownership of electric utilities and railroads, direct election of the president, and the right of Congress to override Supreme Court decisions. He carried Wisconsin's electoral votes. His candidacy helped establish the range of economic populist politics that would feed into the New Deal eight years later.

What These Parties Have in Common

Each of these movements shared several traits that the Labor Party is specifically designed to replicate.

They made the argument in material terms. The Populist platform centered on debt relief, railroad rates, and money supply. The Socialist platform centered on pensions, workplace safety, and the eight-hour day. The people who voted for these parties were voting for something concrete that would change their lives, and the enemy they named was specific: the railroads, the banks, the grain elevator operators, the robber barons and the trusts. Roosevelt called them the "malefactors of great wealth." Voters fighting for something concrete can fight a named corporation or a specific mechanism. They can't fight a mood or an abstraction.

They ran where they could win, not where the optics were best. The Socialist Party built its strength in Milwaukee and in dozens of smaller cities where it could actually govern and demonstrate results. The Populists organized systematically in agricultural states where their base was concentrated. Neither movement led with a presidential campaign and expected the rest to follow.

They built from the base. Local offices produced the candidates and credibility for state offices. State offices produced the visibility and track record for national ones. The organizational work came before the electoral ambition.

What Happens to Platforms

One of the consistent patterns across American third-party history is that successful movements see their platforms absorbed by one or both major parties. The graduated income tax, direct election of senators, the eight-hour day, workplace safety laws, unemployment insurance, public power utilities: all started as third-party demands. All eventually became law.

The ideas succeeded even when the parties faded. The purpose of building political power is to change policy, and the policies changed. A party that forces its ideas onto the national agenda and into law has done something real, even if it didn't form the government.

The Labor Party is building for electoral wins at the local and state level, and it intends to win them. The broader pattern of American political history suggests that a movement with a clear economic argument, a real base, and the discipline to build from the ground up will shape the politics of the next generation regardless of which party eventually takes credit for the ideas.

Learn more at votelabor.org.