Jamelle Bouie doesn't think so:
Let’s not mince words. The new Forward Party announced by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Representative David Jolly is doomed to failure. The odds that it will attract any more than a token amount of support from the public, not to mention political elites, are slim to none. It will wither on the vine as the latest in a long history of vanity political parties.
Maybe he's right, but the real question for me is not whether the Forward Party will succeed but whether the Democratic Party will fail. Bouie's historical arguments in his piece proceed as if we're living in ordinary times, when in fact we're living in extraordinary times that most resemble the 1850s. The story then was not so much about the emergence of a third party but about the replacement of an old, ineffective one. If Democrats consistently fail in the next decade to beat the GOP nationally, it will have to be replaced, whether it will be with the Forward Party or something else.
So I agree that a third party cannot succeed in an environment in which the Democrats retain some level of viability, but it's questionable whether it will. A successful new Party will have to be essentially the Democratic Party but reborn, as the Republican Party was the Whig Party reborn. So we're not talking third party here in the ordinary sense, but rather the death and rebirth of the Democratic Party in a form that will be more appealing to sensible non-elite Americans.
I understand that the idea of replacing the Democratic Party seems far fetched at this moment because the Dems seem strong in Blue States and they won the presidency in the last cycle by a healthy margin. But how strong are they going forward if their support among "little-guy" Americans continues to erode? If you are among the educated, affluent elite living in an urban or coastal Liberal enclave, it's your party and you can't understand why everybody doesn't feel about it the way you do. But you're only about a quarter of the electorate, and you have no compelling story that makes your politics attractive to the other 75%. You are hemorrhaging working class voters--even brown and black ones. You have no structural advantages in the Senate or the electoral college or the courts. A lot of your votes in '20 weren't about choosing you but about rejecting Trump. In the long run, if all you have to offer is we're not those guys, you will fail. The future of American politics will be largely shaped by who wins the white, black, and brown non-elite vote, and right now it's not digging the Dems, and for good reason.
The silver lining of Republicans seizing control in the short run would be that it will clear the deck to make room for something new and sane, and from where I sit that would be a party that looks a lot like what the Democratic Party was in the pre-Reagan days before Neoliberalism ruined it, i.e., before it became the party of educated elites and was the party of the little guy.
The problem with any party that Yang, Whitman, and Jolly endorse lies in that it will probably be something more along the lines of what educated urban elites would feel comfortable with rather than what most non-elite white, black, and brown Americans would feel comfortable with. Is the Forward Party New Deal 2.0 or just another iteration of Neoliberalism? It will depend on who the key players will be that play a role in shaping it. Will it become a party dominated by Michael Bloomberg types? Then it's dead in the water.
Nevertheless, I like that the Forward Party sees itself as starting in local races and building ground up. They have no aspirations to put up a presidential candidate in '24. As such, I see them as building an alternative infrastructure that will be in place should the Dems fail in the next two cycles. So I have no idea how all this will play out, but I'm glad that Jolly et al are taking this initiative in the meanwhile. If the Dems fail, it will be a good thing that the infrastructure for something to replace it will have been established.
The new party that I think could be a winner would be New Deal 2.0. It would be center right on traditional, i.e., family values, center left on economic and environmental issues, compassionate but realistic on immigration issues, common sense on gun safety, and less blunderingly grandiose in foreign policy. I think this is where a good chunk of the rank-and-file Democrats are today, but the party is hemorrhaging blue-collar membership because, as I've argued here and here, the party is too identified with cultural and economic Neoliberalism, the Aspen Institute Liberalism embraced by corporate and other cultural and technocratic elites who play such a large role in shaping the current perception of what the Democrats stand for.
So the most important question is whether the Dems can staunch the hemorrhaging. If they don't, they will go the way of the Whigs. I'm still a registered Democrat, not out of loyalty or conviction, but because the Republicans are so off-the-charts horrible, and other parties are too narrow in their focus. So I'll continue to vote Democratic until something more broadly realistic emerges, and we'll see if the Forward Party can be that or whether it will just be Neoliberalism in different packaging.
Update: Tim Miller takes up the same question here. He sees such a party as failing if it has to compete with the other two parties. I agree, but I would say the same to him as I would say to Bouie: A Third Party isn't the answer, but rather is the death and rebirth of the Democratic Party and its fundamentally pro-little-guy progressive impulses. That requires that something like the Forward Party be waiting in the wings should the current Dems fail.
I would also say that Miller is wrong to think that such a party has to capture Trump voters if by that he means hardcore MAGA voters. According to Gallup, 27% of Americans identify as Republicans, 27% identify as Democrats, and 43% identify as Independents. These Independents are evenly split as to whether they lean Republican or Democrat. A "reborn" Democratic Party along the lines described above can attract a big chunk of the Independents who lean Republican in a way that the current party can never do so long as the Democratic brand is so toxic in traditional-values Middle America.
I'm arguing that the Democrats as they currently present themselves to the country can never win decisively enough to break the gridlock. Far more Americans are Independents than either Republicans or Democrats, which means they have no confidence in either party as they are currently constituted. This is a ripe situation for something new to emerge that holds most people who currently identify as Democrat or lean Democrat, and wins over the many Republican voters who vote against their interests because they believe Republican propaganda about Democrats.
7/30/22 Update: In a post earlier this week I used the metaphor of a string dipped in a chemical solution to which some facts--molecules in the solution--cluster on the string and others find no place to adhere. Whether I'm right about the chemistry is irrelevant--the point is that the string either repels or attracts certain facts or story lines.
The question I'm asking in the post above is whether the Democratic Party has a string anymore that works for non-elite black, brown, and white Americans. If it does, what is it? I'm saying that the Dems need a new string, not because its basic policy agenda is wrong, but because they have become incapable of selling it to a huge chunk of the electorate who have come to see the Dems according to Republican negative stereotypes. Republicans do not hate what most Democrats actually stand for but rather they hate the idea of Democrats as they are negatively stereotyped in conservative media. The Dems so far have found no effective way to push back against such negative stereotyping because they no longer have a positive stereotype that appeals to non-elite Americans.
The idea of a new party is to provide a new string. Again whether that will be the Forward Party, I don't know. But one way or another American politics needs a more powerful left-of-center narrative string attractive to non-elite Americans than Democrats are now capable of providing. Maybe the only solution is to throw the old one out and start all over. Obviously we're not there yet, but we'll see how things look at the end of the decade. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems likely to me that the Democratic Party, because of its association with the elite ethos of the cultural Left, will continue to lose on other Progressive issues regarding the economy, environment, gun safety because so many people who would side with Democrats on these issues won't vote for them because they believe the Republican negative stereotypes about them.