America Wants a Centrist Party—in Theory
More than 4 in 10 in a new survey say they’re open to a moderate alternative.
The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution last week released the 13th annual American Values Survey. This year, for the first time, we probed Americans’ attitudes about potential third parties and independent candidacies. (I’m a longtime member of the Brookings team.)
We asked respondents to choose among four options: candidates from a new party to the left of the Democrats, to the right of the Republicans, between the Democrats and the Republicans, or none. Three in 10 rejected third-party and independent candidacies. One in 10 preferred candidates to the right of the Republicans, and an equal number wanted candidates to the left of the Democrats. But 42% said they would support a candidate between the two major parties.
In one respect, this isn’t surprising. An annual Gallup survey has long shown a solid majority of Americans open to third-party and independent efforts. What is surprising is that so many of these voters opted for a new party of the center. Previous studies (including one in which I participated) suggested that support for such a party was much smaller than what the PRRI-Brookings survey found.
One possible explanation is that in recent years, hyperpolarized politics have driven more voters toward the center. Another possibility is that the way we asked the question somehow encouraged the answer we received. But fine-grained examination of voters who support a new center party casts doubt on the latter explanation by showing that they have strong reasons for their announced preference.
On the one hand, these voters reject many of the positions of the Republican base. They don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that whites, Christians and men are singled out for discrimination, or that immigrants pose a threat to Americans’ culture and way of life. On the other hand, they part ways with key tenets of the contemporary Democratic Party. Even though they endorse abortion rights and same-sex marriage, they do not believe—as more than 7 in 10 Democrats do—that generations of slavery and discrimination have made it difficult for black Americans to work their way out of poverty. They do believe that there are only two genders, a proposition rejected by 62% of Democrats.
For the coming midterm elections, these centrist Americans place issues that Republicans emphasize—especially immigration—far down on their list of concerns. Nor do they share Democrats’ focus on matters such as climate change and the gap between rich and poor. Their top issues are inflation and the health of American democracy (which both parties care about), crime (which preoccupies Republicans), and abortion, which the Supreme Court decision pushed to the center of Democrats’ concerns.
These voters place themselves on the political spectrum just about where one might expect them to. Fifty-eight percent of self-identified moderates say they would support candidates between the Democrats and the Republicans, as do 57% of independents. Forty percent of Democrats (including 53% of those calling themselves “not strong Democrats”) would support such candidates, compared with 34% of Republicans. In 2020, 40% of this potential third force voted for Joe Biden, 27% for Donald Trump. (The rest voted for other candidates or didn’t vote.)
These voters aren’t pleased by the prospect of a 2024 presidential election that is a rematch of 2020. Only 29% want Mr. Trump to be the Republican nominee, and even fewer—23%—want Mr. Biden to be renominated. If a rematch happens, it is likely that centrists would be even more open to a third-party candidate.
It is easy to be skeptical of these findings. After all, large shares of Americans perennially say they want new electoral choices, but such candidacies have always fallen short. No third force has ever gotten close to the 42% who say they want a centrist candidate in 2024—unless you count the Republicans, who succeeded only by displacing one of the two major parties during the 1850s and edging Abraham Lincoln into the presidency with less than 40% of the vote in 1860.
There’s a gap between being open to a certain kind of candidate in principle and voting for one. To have a chance in 2024, a centrist effort would need to recruit a candidate with national stature and immediate credibility. If not, voters would do what they’ve always done—flirt with the independent candidacy during the spring and summer and then return home to their party in the fall.
The PRRI-Brookings survey makes clear that a center option is more attractive to Democrats than to Republicans. This makes sense: Fully half of Democrats identify as moderate or conservative, while just one quarter of Republicans call themselves moderate or liberal. If an independent candidacy doesn’t win outright in 2024 but draws more support from Democrats than Republicans, it could end up returning Donald Trump to the Oval Office.