We’ve reached the dog days of summer and it’s usually a pretty slow political time of year. Once they hammer out some kind of deal on the debt ceiling and go home for the August recess, we’ll be looking for something, anything, to talk about. Mocking Tommy Friedman is usually a good bet, and this year we have him promoting an asinine plan called “Americans Elect.” Ben Adler does an adequate job of dissecting and dismissing the idea that we can solve our problems and our differences by electing a third-party president. I want to talk about something different.
What about third-party candidates for Congress? Now, I hope you are familiar with our winner-take-all system which is mandatory in federal elections because of our Constitution. What this means is that you can win an election with a mere plurality of the votes, and that if you lose by even one vote you lose everything. And this has very real consequences. Suppose you have candidates from the Red, Blue, and Green parties. The Red candidate disagrees with you about abortion rights and the blue and the green candidates both represent your views on the issue nicely. Assuming this is a dealbreaker issue for you, in the sense that you won’t support someone who disagrees with you, you can eliminate the red candidate and choose between blue and green based on some other considerations. If everyone behaves like you do, the blue and green candidates will split the abortion vote (for your position) between them while the Red candidate will get all the votes opposing your position. It’s possible for the Red candidate to win with as much as one vote shy of two-thirds of the voters opposing their view on abortion. You can substitute for abortion any issue which sharply divides the Democratic and Republican parties, which increasingly means almost every social and economic issue under the Sun.
So, the first problem with third-party candidates is that they have to win or they risk being spoilers that throw the election to a candidate who holds views out of the mainstream for their district. A recent example of this occurred in Illinois’ 8th District. Tea Party activist and deadbeat dad Joe Walsh won election by a margin of 291 votes. Green Party candidate Bill Scheurer won 6,494 votes. Democrat Melissa Bean was out of a job. The people of the 8th District were left with a moron to represent them.
Of course, once in a blue moon a third party candidate can actually win. This most often happens through the consent and conniving of one of the two major parties. For example, the Democrats simply agree not to field a candidate against Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Or, another example, the Republicans fielded a joke candidate against Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont, and openly pulled for Lieberman’s victory.
But it’s instructive to see what happened to Sanders and Lieberman once they got to Washington DC. If they wanted to sit on any committees they had to agree to join one of the two major party caucuses. This also involves voting for that party’s leader to be the Majority Leader of the Senate. For the House, it involves voting for that party’s candidate for Speaker of the House.
On top of this, they can be removed from their committee assignments or stripped of their seniority on those committees at any time. And, if they aren’t fairly loyal on important votes, they’re unlikely to rise to the level that they can actually chair a committee. Sen. Lieberman is an exceptional case in that he was already a chairman with a lot of seniority before he was officially kicked out of the Democratic Party. He did lose his slot on the Environment & Public Works Committee, but he otherwise maintained his positions and his seniority. Had he lost them, it’s likely he would have simply switched to supporting the Republican caucus.
In other words, even if a third-party candidate can somehow get on the ballot and beat a Democrat and a Republican, they will immediately discover that their path to power and influence and effectiveness is blocked unless they fall in line with one of the major parties. They might be to the right, left or center of whomever they replaced, but they’ll find that the can’t get too far out of line.
This is our system, flawed as it may be. It really doesn’t allow for third-parties. A third-party president is possible, but in our polarized political climate, they’d quickly discover that only one party was willing to work with them. They’d wind up being effectively a Democratic or Republican president.
My advice to the people who are trying to set up Americans Elect is to forget about it. The best thing to do is take all that hedge-fund money and start running Eisenhower Republicans in Republican primaries. Focus first on the states that let independents vote in Republican primaries and build from there. New England is probably the best place to start, but California and the Pacific Northwest could also work. Maybe even in the Scandinavian part of the Upper Midwest where there’s a history of progressive Republicanism. We’d all be grateful for an aggressive effort to moderate the Republican Party. The Democratic Party has its flaws but it isn’t what is screwing up all our lives right now.