Andrew Yang in 2019 (Gage Skidmore, CC)

To hear the founders of the new Forward Party — a would-be third party that was announced on Wednesday by Andrew Yang, Christie Todd Whitman, and David Jolly — tell it, the basic problem with American politics is that the system has been “torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes.” While Yang and his colleagues begin their manifesto by citing January 6 and the fact that many Republicans support using violence to return Donald Trump to power, the vision behind their new party is, crudely speaking, “a pox on both their houses.” The Forward Party, they argue, will embrace the “sensible center” of American politics, and on issue after issue find a “reasonable approach most Americans agree on.”

Obviously no one is against sensible and reasonable policies. But its rhetoric notwithstanding, it’s hard to see how the Forward Party will end up making a serious difference in American politics. To begin with, while the party frames its appeal as wide-ranging, the obvious constituency for its approach actually seems to be a fairly narrow one, namely the kind of fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters who voted for John Anderson as a third-party candidate in 1980 or perhaps dominated the Democratic Party circa 1993. And even that is a bit of a guess, since one of the curious things about the party is that, unlike the most successful third parties of the past — like the Free Soil Party and the Populists — it doesn’t have a clear policy agenda.

Second, while it’s true that a plurality of American voters describe themselves as independents, and that in polls a sizeable majority say that they’d like there to be a third party, in practice the barriers to successful third-party runs are very high. Most independent voters are, in fact, committed to one party or the other, and consistently vote that way. And the structure of the American political system means that voting for a third-party candidate almost always means throwing your vote away, since for federal and state offices the U.S. typically has single-district voting where only one candidate wins, making it essentially impossible for a party that gets even 20% of the vote to win any races at all.

That’s why third parties that did make a meaningful impression in the past — like the Populists of the late 19th century — often did so in regions dominated by a single party, like the South. It’s also the case that in the 19th century, the idea that we would have only two parties, and that they would be effectively permanent, was not fixed — after all, the Republican Party was born in 1854, and in less than a decade had elected Abraham Lincoln president. The task confronting a third party today is far more difficult — the last serious effort was Ross Perot’s Reform Party effort in 1992, and while Perot certainly shook up that year’s election and ended up winning 20% of the vote despite running one of the more bizarre campaigns in presidential history, he quickly burned out.

To be sure, the more realistic goal of the Forward Party may be to change political discourse by serving as, if not kingmaker, than spoiler (even if Yang and his colleagues explicitly disavow this approach). On this reading, the goal will be to draw enough votes away from the two parties to force them to change their approach. It’s not an inconceivable feat — the Populist Party’s success in the late 19th century helped re-shape the Democratic parties.

The Populists, though, were an ideologically coherent party with a committed membership, which is almost the antithesis of what the Forward Party is aiming for. And the natural constituency for the Forward Party is, as we’ve seen, fiscally conservative, socially liberal (at least moderately socially liberal) suburbanites. Voters like that who are still voting Republican even in the Trump era seem unlikely to jump ship just to give Andrew Yang a few extra votes, so it’s not clear the Forward Party will really be able to pull the GOP toward the center. It’s perhaps more plausible that the Forward Party might be able to draw voters who lean Democratic but are disaffected by high inflation and the perception of rising crime rates. But if that’s the result, then all the Forward Party will end up doing is helping Republicans get elected, which hardly seems like a recipe for moderating political discourse in the U.S.

And that, in the end, is the core problem with the emergence of the Forward Party at this particular historical moment: it’s implicitly predicated on the idea that both parties are equally extreme. And even if you think that’s true in policy terms, it’s obviously untrue when it comes to the basic mechanics of democracy, where much of the G.O.P. has become invested in the idea that the 2020 election was stolen and that overturning the results of democratic elections is a justified and reasonable response. In this environment, starting a third party with an approach that runs a clear risk of helping election truthers get elected to state and federal office seems not just obtuse, but willfully irresponsible. It’s not 1980 or even 1992. Andrew Yang should stop pretending like it is.