Re “Viable Third Party in ’28? Conditions Are Right, but Odds Are Still Long,” by Nate Cohn (The Upshot, June 15):
The opening for a third party is not where Mr. Cohn thinks it is.
It is not with his “new neoliberals.” Most of the wealthy donors, professional politicians and party operatives who run the two major parties still promote the neoliberal policies that Mr. Cohn claims provide the recipe for a successful third party: “deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration.”
Mr. Cohn promotes the trendy “abundance agenda” that is simply rebranding the old nostrum of growth, not redistribution that neoliberals have been running on since they began displacing New Deal liberals in the 1970s.
Mr. Cohn fantasizes that a third party could emerge from an “establishment-friendly campaign” with “the support of wealthy elites.” But disaffected voters are anti-establishment and disgusted at billionaires buying elections.
Polling consistently shows majority support for progressive reforms that the major parties won’t support, including Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, free public child care and education through college, and taxing the rich to fund such reforms.
The opening is for a progressive third party.
Howie Hawkins
Syracuse, N.Y.
The writer was the Green Party candidate for president in 2020.
Originally posted at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/29/opinion/progressives-third-parties.html
Mr Cohn Responds to Howie’s Letter
Another common reply was that the real third-party opportunity was on the left. One of those was from Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for president in 2020, whose reply was published in The Times. He concludes:
Polling consistently shows majority support for progressive reforms that the major parties won’t support, including Medicare for all, a Green New Deal, free public child care and education through college, and taxing the rich to fund such reforms.
The opening is for a progressive third party.
In general, third-party movements to the ideological left or right of the two major parties are quite challenging, as the Green Party can attest. In most respects, it makes more sense for these movements to try to advance their demands through the major parties.
First, the major parties tend to find it relatively easy to accommodate their demands. Progressives may not get every single policy they want, but Democrats could do a lot: They could support trillion-dollar investments in renewables, even if not a Green New Deal; they could support higher taxes for the rich, even if not at Mr. Hawkins’s preferred levels.
Many progressives and conservatives, of course, still won’t be satisfied with the major parties. But if they became so large that they could win as a third party, they could also win Democratic or Republican primaries, obviating the need for a new third party. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral Democratic primary is an excellent example.
Cohn’s full column is at: https://www.nytimes.com/
Howie’s Comment on Cohn’s Response:
Nate Cohn is naive to think that the Democrats will “find it relatively easy to accommodate [progressive] demands” and that if a progressives “could win as a third party, they could also win Democratic or Republican primaries.”
The Democrats won’t adopt progressive reforms because they are firmly in the control of ultra-wealth donors and upper-middle-class professionals who are the party’s politicians and staff for the politicians, campaign organizations, party committees, and the pro-Democratic nonprofit advocacy groups and campaign consulting, advertising, and law firms. This upper and upper-middle class leadership of the Democratic Party will never tax themselves to fund the social and environmental programs progressives want.
Nor will the Democrats let progressives run in primaries without pledging allegiance and support to the neoliberal centrists who control the party. For example, in order to be allowed on party ballots and in primary debates, Bernie Sanders had to pledge to support the winner of the 2016 presidential primaries, which he like everyone else when he started his campaign assumed would be Hillary Clinton. Thus Sanders vigorously campaigned in the general elections for the corporate militarists heading the Democratic ticket: Hillary the Hawk in 2016 and Genocide Joe in 2020 and 2024. Progressives running in the Democratic primaries don’t change the Democratic Party; they get co-opted by it.
