2024 would seem to be ripe for a third-party candidate. The likely nominees of both major parties are deeply unpopular. Prominent independent contenders, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West, have already announced bids. And the deep-pocketed group No Labels is eyeing its own potential yet-to-be named ticket.

“There is a huge opening for third parties,” said Bernard Tamas, a political scientist at Valdosta State University who studies third party movements in the United States and is the author of “The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties.”

They almost certainly won’t win the White House. But in a close race between presumptive nominees Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a third-party candidate could easily siphon off enough votes in one state or another to tip the election. They could absolutely play “spoiler.”

Unlike today, however, third parties of the past were more deliberate about “spoiling with a purpose,” Tamas said.

Successful third parties rallied voters around an issue or a policy agenda that was being ignored by the major parties. Victory was claimed not by winning an election but when one or both of the parties engaged on the issue, and effectively co-opted it as their own. Think of Ross Perot’s obsession with the deficit — an issue he forced onto the national agenda in 1992 while snagging nearly 20 percent of the popular vote.

The third-party contenders now reaching for the White House don’t have a galvanizing issue behind them — and that’s one reason why, despite polling that suggests an unprecedented appetite for third party candidates, Tamas thinks the independent candidates are likely to fade come November.

Still, in an uncertain political environment, they can’t be counted out.

“Successful third parties are like tidal waves,” he said. “You don’t really know that they’re here until they’re coming at you.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Third parties are not as powerful as they were about 100 years ago, but they’ve been growing in popularity in recent decades. How do you see their role in 2024?

I think that there is a huge opening for third parties, especially a moderate conservative party, one that actually would be a more traditional conservative party now that the Republicans have shifted so far to the right and in the MAGA direction.

There is this giant gaping hole. I would think the Libertarians would be the perfect group to step into this, but the Libertarians don’t seem interested in that. They seem very stuck on the issues that they’ve always been stuck on since the 1970s.

So there would be a real possibility for third parties to actually take a shot at making a significant change in American politics. But that’s not really what we’re seeing.

What we’re seeing is the third parties — the established ones, the Greens and the Libertarians — basically sticking to where they’ve always been strategically. And then there are these other groups coming in that seem to be doing nothing more than promoting........

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