Whenever an election cycle rolls around, millions of people flock to the ballots in hopes of voting for the candidate of their choice. However, as the 2024 presidential election draws closer, however, many are beginning to feel disillusioned by the traditional two-party system.
A recent Pew Research Center survey suggested 37% of Americans wish there were more political parties to choose from. That number only climbs higher with young people, with 48% of people aged 18 to 29 saying they are very in favor of more parties.
California remains a cornerstone Blue state. Since 1992, the state has voted for a Democratic candidate for president every election year, with the last Republican winning being George H. W. Bush in 1988. The chance of any third party winning a significant amount of votes in a state as deeply blue as California is low, and the idea of a third-party candidate carrying the state entirely remains laughable. But this challenge still doesn’t deter people like Nancy Robles, the local chapter leader of the third party Party for Socialism and Liberation. If anything, it encourages her.
“We [PSL] don’t believe that the two-party system is a democracy at all,” Robles said. “We believe that it’s definitely an oligarchy where we get to vote for the next capitalists to be in power.”
Robles, alongside other members of the self-described “revolutionary” PSL, is campaigning for their presidential candidate Claudia De La Cruz and her vice presidential nominee Karina Garcia. PSL was founded in 2004, following the San Francisco chapter of the Workers World Party splitting off. Since then, Robles said it has involved itself with several activist causes.
“We do a lot of local campaigns,” Robles said. “If there’s a local death, a police death, we really hit the streets to make sure that folks know that there’s somebody who’s representing them and who’s willing to fight.”
In her campaign platform, De La Cruz promises to adopt policies that the traditional two-party system would not consider, such as dismantling the “dictatorship of the rich,” working to form a democracy for the “working class,” cutting military spending by upwards of 90% and withholding all U.S. aid to Israel.
That last point in particular has been controversially a cornerstone of PSL’s advocacy. Since its formation in the early 2000s, PSL has been a participant in the A.N.S.W.E.R (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, which originally was formed in opposition to American intervention in the Middle East.
Since the October 7th attacks in Israel, PSL has been advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza. Robles said that the De La Cruz campaign and its support for Palestine has been a major reason that PSL has grown.
“Palestine was really the tip of the spear,” Robles said. “I think that for us, Palestine has been huge in getting support.”
Third parties like the PSL hope to use the upcoming election to send a message to the general public that their voice matters, even if they may not align with the mainstream.
“Elections are important, even third-party elections because they’re a measure of our power,” Robles said. “Once folks see that we are not only like a small third-party candidate who’s just on the ballot for a vanity project, they will look to get more involved [in the party].”
In July 2024, the Democratic Party sued the PSL for alleged signature fraud, prompting the PSL to accuse the Democrats of trying to take third parties off the ballot to prevent “spoiling,” or vote-splitting. Though congressional progressives denounced the Democratic National Convention’s decision to not let a representative from the Uncommitted movement speak, supporters of the PSL still criticize these progressive representatives for their ties to the Democratic Party.
“They [Democrats] are still tied to the system that they’re representing,” Robles said. “The Democratic Party is still tied to war, profit, and corporatism, and none of that goes away because one individual person decides that they want to be really progressive. It’s really about the larger system in place.”
That larger system in question — the two-party system — has held hegemony over the United States for over a century. Few independent candidates have even come close to challenging it. Even the late Ross Perot, the independent candidate who challenged both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush in 1992, garnered an impressive 18% of the national vote but failed to win a single electoral vote. The political party he formed afterward, the Reform Party, has failed to have any electoral relevance for the last two decades.
Every year, numerous third parties wage campaigns for a long shot at the presidency. De La Cruz herself debated against several third-party candidates at a debate organized by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation. These campaigns are often portrayed as attempts to incite a protest vote, or merely as sideshows for hardline ideologues.
Although historical precedence exists for candidates running to get protest votes — such as with Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Ralph Nader in 2000 — Robles does not see the PSL ticket as a conventional protest vote. Instead, she posits that voting for PSL can be an entry point into a broader social movement, one which the party argues can eventually “liberate” the working class from capitalistic exploitations.
“If [voters] think that every four years one of the two parties will win anyway, they’ll continue to operate as they have,” Robles said. “Once the two parties feel that there’s a risk that they might actually lose to another candidate, then I think elections would look very different […] I don’t think it’s just a protest vote. We should highly encourage people to vote third party.”
Robles argues that the bubbling social discontent with the slow pace of change and the seeming rollback of change in some cases is what’s driving people into voting for the PSL.
“We’re third party only in the sense that that’s really the only option that we have because we don’t feel that the Democrats nor the Republicans represent us,” Robles said. “People are voting for Claudia and Karina because they’re tired. They’re tired of always living paycheck to paycheck. They’re tired of seeing nothing change.”