Third Parties Once Mattered In Michigan's Governor Races

(Source: MIRS.news, Published 06/29/2026) As Anthony Hudson enters the gubernatorial race this week as the Libertarian Party nominee, MIRS reviewed every Michigan governor's race since statehood to see what impact third-party candidates have had.

The results? In the last 100 years, not much.

A review of the attached spreadsheet shows that no Libertarian candidate has ever collected more than 1.33% of the vote. In the six times they've even fielded a nominee, they have yet to even play the role of spoiler.

However, the Libertarians aren't alone in the world of third-party futility. In the last 100 years, only once has a third-party candidate for governor crossed 2%.

That was Robert Tisch, the anti-tax populist who ran under the Tisch Independent Citizens Party in 1982 with his populist conservative, anti-property tax platform.

Tisch's 80,288 votes, though, didn't rise to spoiler status that year. Democratic candidate Jim Blanchard beat Republican Richard Headlee, another tax limitation candidate, by 191,709 votes, a much larger margin that all the third-party candidates combined.

The closest we have to a spoiler in the gubernatorial race since the 1950s was in 1990, when Worker's League nominee William Roundtree, the only third party candidate on the ballot, took 28,091 votes. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Jim Blanchard lost to Republican John Engler by 17,595 votes.

Otherwise – outside a couple of nailbiters in 1950 and 1952 – third-party gubernatorial candidates since 1920 have been widely forgotten non-factors in Michigan.

But during the run-up to the Civil War and from Reconstruction to 1916, third parties were far more than protest movements. They were major players, at times capturing double-digit support and occasionally threatening to upend the state's political order altogether.

The review of every gubernatorial election since statehood found Michigan voters regularly abandoned Republicans and Democrats for a variety of alternative political movements, from abolitionists and prohibitionists to populists, progressives and socialists.

The state's first notable third-party movement came in the 1840s with the Liberty Party and later the Free Soil Party, both born from the anti-slavery movement.

By the 1870s and 1880s, economic discontent fueled the rise of the Greenback Party, which advocated expanding the money supply to help indebted farmers and laborers. In 1878, Greenback nominee Henry S. Smith won nearly 28% of the statewide vote, a total that would be considered extraordinary by modern standards.

Even more remarkable, in 1872, former Republican Gov. Austin Blair, running as a “Liberal Republican,” captured 36.4% of the vote in the anti-slavery, punish-the-South sentiment of the time. He lost by a large margin, though. Republican John Bagley won with 62.96% of the vote while Democrat William Ferry watched his party fall to third-party status that year. He managed only 1.23% of the vote.

Issue-oriented parties also found considerable success. The Prohibition Party, centered on banning alcohol, won more than 7% of the vote in 1890, while the People's Party, or Populists, topped 7% in 1894 amid growing frustration with railroads, banks and concentrated economic power. In fact, the Prohibition Party fielded a nominee 37 times in Michigan history until it faded away in 1960, the most among all third-parties in Michigan.

The most remarkable third-party showing of the 20th century came in 1912.

That year, former President Theodore Roosevelt split from the Republican Party and launched the Progressive, or Bull Moose Party, creating one of the most successful third-party movements in American history.

In Michigan, Progressive gubernatorial nominee William Gordon rode Roosevelt's coattails to a second-place finish, winning roughly 31% of the vote and outpolling the Republican nominee. Only Democrat Woodbridge N. Ferris, who received 35.34% of the vote, finished ahead of Gordon. That year, the third party candidate came 22,487 votes from being governor.

While no third-party gubernatorial candidate in Michigan has come close to matching that level of success in the century since, they've continued in various forms. In 1934, during the height of the Great Depression, a record eight third-party candidates were on the ballot, although none got more than 1% of the vote.

The Farmer-Labor Party emerged during the Great Depression, advocating for workers and farmers. Socialist candidates periodically drew support from organized labor. Later came the American Independent Party, which rode the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s and '70s.

More recently, Michigan voters have seen candidates from the Libertarian, Green, Natural Law and U.S. Taxpayers parties appear on gubernatorial ballots, but those four have only appeared on the ballot together in the last three elections, a minor blip in a history of numerous options offered – but rarely taken -- to Michigan voters.