The Voice of America has this story about the Forward Party, and about minor parties in U.S. history.

It says the reason for the weakness of minor parties in the U.S. is Duverger’s Law, which says that in the absence of proportional representation creates a two-party system. But that cannot be a complete explanation, because Great Britain and Canada use the same election system the U.S. does (for the most part), and yet those countries have vigorous third parties. The article doesn’t even mention the U.S. ballot access laws.

The story repeats the tired theory that Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign caused President George H. W. Bush to lose to Bill Clinton. This cannot be true, because during the period mid-July through October 1, Perot was not running, and the polls still consistently showed Clinton winning. Furthermore the exit polls in November showed that half the Perot voters would have voted for Clinton if Perot had not been running, and half would have voted for Bush.

The story says there were only two million votes cast for minor party and independent candidates for U.S. House in 2020, but it doesn’t mention that there were only such candidates on the ballot in 201 of the 435 districts. Also the actual minor party and independent vote for U.S. House in 2020 was 2,708,679, although to be fair, that includes votes cast for the Working Families and Conservative Parties of New York, and the Working Families Party in Connecticut, which were running people who were also Democratic and Republican nominees.

The story delves into history and talks about the Prohibition Party. It has a picture of the Prohibition Party’s 1944 national ticket, listing Floyd C. Carrier as the party’s vice-presidential nominee. But he had resigned from the ticket shortly after being nominated in 1943, and had been replaced by Andrew Johnson.

The story quotes former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Unfortunately, she misues the term “open primary”. “Open primary” has been defined in several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and in political science textbooks, as a system in which each party has its own primaries and its own nominees, but a voter is free to choose any party’s primary ballot. She is really talking about top-two, top-four and top-five primaries. There is no good term for this system, although some writers call it a “jungle primary.” Thanks to Thomas Jones for the link.