Last week, the UK’s Green Party (GP) won a heavily watched election in Greater Manchester’s Gorton and Denton. The election was held to fill the parliament seat previously held by the Labour Party’s Andrew Gwynne, who stepped down due to health complications. For almost the last century, Gorton and Denton have been considered a strong Labour Party area, so the GP’s victory last week has left other party’s politicians shocked and worried, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The Labour Party won over half the votes in Gorton and Denton in the 2024 general election.
The Green Party candidate, Hannah Spencer, a plumber and local councilor, won with 14,980 votes, 40.7 percent of total votes. The hard-right Reform Party candidate, Matthew Goodwin, came in second with 10,578 votes, and the Labour Party candidate, Angeliki Stogia, was third with 9,364 votes.
This outcome has many analysts pointing to “the fracturing of the UK’s traditional two-party politics,” as Spencer’s win has earned the GP their 5th seat in Parliament. Following the announcement of the results, the leader of the Reform Party, Nigel Farage, made a post on social media, claiming that the GP’s win was “a victory for sectarian voting and cheating”. A GP spokesperson called the comment “an attempt to undermine the democratic results… straight out of the Trump playbook”.
So, how was the GP able to win an election in an area previously dominated by the Labour Party? Well, according to GP leader Zack Polanski, the party has expanded far beyond environmental concerns to also focus on issues like “the cost of living, legalization of drugs and support for the Palestinian cause”. Over the last few years, UK’s GP has “positioned itself as an alternative to Labour, arguing that the governing party has moved away from some of the values it once championed”. Many voters who have supported the Labour Party in the past have been “feeling disillusioned” by Starmer’s leadership and the UK government’s continued support of Israel and the genocide in Gaza. Additionally, the growing demographic of young university students and Muslim residents in the area has shunned the Reform Party’s far-right and anti-immigration agenda.
So, could we see similar success for third-party politicians in the US? I sure hope so! Recent voting trends and polls have shown that as Democratic nominees shift closer and closer to the middle, they are more likely to lose elections. We saw this in the 2024 presidential election, when many far-left voters decided to support third-party candidates over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. The democratic party has long believed that moving towards the center is the best way to pick up voters, but doing so causes those on the far-left to search for other candidates.
In fact, at a recent conference for “Moderate Democratic” politicians called Winning the Middle, political think tank Third Way urged those within the party to avoid prioritizing far-left policies if they wanted to win back the White House. But that type of thinking is what got us into this mess. In fact, election data has shown “in eras in which Democrats moved to the right have rarely resulted in significant electoral success, while the eras in which they have moved to the left have seen their greatest electoral victories”.
As the Democratic Party continues to move closer and closer to the middle of the political spectrum, this leaves the door wide open for far-left third-party politicians. As we head into the midterms, while I don’t know if we will see widespread success for these politicians, I do know that many people are growing tired of the two-party system and may be willing to support outside candidates.
