The Green Party of Missouri had to know they weren’t going to win any races this year. Missouri is heavily controlled by Republicans, and third parties seemed to generate even less buzz than they did in past years.
Local member Les Hahn said the goal is incremental growth.
“You know, eat the elephant one bite at a time — not necessarily, you can eat donkeys, too,” he said.
A big step would have been getting 2% of the vote in any statewide race. At 2%, the Green Party would stay on the ballot for the next two elections. Without it, they’ll have to again mount an effort to collect 10,000 signatures to secure ballot access.
Danielle Elliott, the Green Party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, received 57,676 votes, good for 1.995%.
“It feels very defeating, like, pointless to run in Missouri, almost,” Elliott said. “I don't want to be negative because I had 57,000 people vote for me, which is amazing, and I'm so grateful. But at the same time, there were a lot more people who voted for someone with no experience.”
She’s referring to David Wasinger (R), a St. Louis lawyer who won by more than an 18-point margin.
“It just feels like if you don't have that ‘R’ after your name in Missouri, what's the point?” she added.
Most of the Green Party’s time in 2024 was dedicated to gathering signatures. Small parties and independent candidates need 10,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot, and they shoot for 15,000 to account for any mistakes.
“The number of man-hours to do a petition drive is beyond intimidating if you stop and think about it,” Hahn said. “So we try not to think about it.”
Wanting to represent moderates who dislike the two-party system, Elliott began her campaign as an independent. She started to collect the signatures she’d need to appear on the ballot in March of this year.
“And then after a couple months, I realized that even though I had collected like 1,500 signatures on my own, mathematically, I wasn't going to meet the deadline of the end of July,” she said.
So she joined up with the Green Party, which provided her with more support and infrastructure. But it was still tough.
“People would refuse to sign because they felt like we were stealing votes from the Democrats,” Hahn said. “And as we know from the election outcome, that didn't happen.”
The Green Party of Missouri also bars its candidates from accepting money from corporate political action committees, making resources hard to come by.
“Our budget is very low, and I actually ended up l messaging friends on Facebook and being like, ‘Can you just donate $5,’” Elliott said. “So I was able to get some yard signs, and then I got the billboard from the ballot access money that the national party gave.”
“To miss 2% by less than 200 votes is kind of upsetting, but at the same time, I was just shocked that I got that many votes,” she said.
While small parties and independent candidates are draining themselves to be on the ballot, Democrats and Republicans can spend their money and time on campaign events and advertising. And both major parties would like to keep it that way, experts say.
“It's worth remembering that the legislatures that pass these measures are made up almost exclusively of Democrats and Republicans,” said Gregory Magarian, law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “While we know that we are in a very polarized, partisan environment, the one thing that Democrats and Republicans generally can agree about is that they don't want anyone else honing in on their primacy.”
The biggest barrier for third-party candidates is the voting system. The winner of most elections in the U.S. is whoever gets a plurality of votes after a single round of voting. This is sometimes called the “first-past-the-post” system.
This means that third-party voters do run the risk of siphoning votes from the major party that is closest to them ideologically.
“You don’t want to waste your vote. You don't want to throw it away,” Magarian said. “If you're not confident that the candidate you vote for has a chance to win, you're not likely to vote for that candidate”
This can also exacerbate the lack of funding that independent candidates receive.
“People aren't going to bet on minor parties when they know that the major parties have a series of substantial built-in advantages,” he said.
That’s why successful independent candidates tend to be wealthy and fund their own campaigns, such as Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns in the ‘90s.
In contrast, a ranked-choice voting system allows people to order candidates by preference. If their favorite candidate gets last place, then their vote goes to their second-favorite candidate.
The process repeats until one candidate has a majority.
“That kind of system is a lot friendlier to minor parties,” Magarian said. “Because a voter thinks, ‘OK, I'm not just throwing away my vote. I can rank my preferences so I can put the Libertarian first, and if she doesn't win, I can go for the Republican second.’”
But very few places in the U.S. have actually implemented that system. And by passing Amendment 7 in the 2024 general election, Missouri voters banned ranked-choice voting, which the state doesn’t use, and also banned non-citizens from voting, which was already illegal.
Critics described the latter as “ballot candy” meant to deceive voters. The amendment passed by a margin of nearly 37 percentage points, more than any other Missouri ballot measure in 2024.
“What we just saw here in Missouri is clearly a blueprint for the major parties to resist those reform efforts,” Magarian said. “They just write a jingoistic ballot measure that has some anti-immigrant stuff and bury underneath it a ban on a voting system that ordinary voters have no idea what they're voting on.”
Magarian said fusion voting would also allow third parties to have an impact. Electoral fusion allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate, allowing voters to support a third party while not splitting their vote. It used to be commonplace, but now, it’s not allowed in most states.
“The legal structures that entrench the major parties have been durable,” he said.
“Minor parties are almost completely locked out of any kind of meaningful political influence,” he added. “It doesn't seem like the major parties have any incentive to waste their legislative energy coming up with yet more tricks to lock out minor parties because the ones that already exist are phenomenally successful.”
But that won’t stop minor parties from trying to mount some kind of effort. The other major third party, the Libertarian Party, has had consistent ballot access in Missouri for many election cycles and multiple candidates surpassed 2% in the 2024 elections. And while their presidential candidate performed worse than ones in past years, the party itself has seemingly had success exerting influence over the incoming Trump administration.
While Elliott said she’s done running in statewide races, she said she’ll run for Jefferson County Council in 2026.
And Hahn said Missouri’s Green Party isn’t done trying to win.
“I was really hoping that (Elliott) could get that extra five thousandths of a percent to get us qualified to remain on the ballot for two cycles, so I was a little disappointed there,” Hahn said. “But we averaged one to 1 1/2% on every ballot line. So that's a mark on the wall too that we can use to step a little higher next time.”
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