Americans Elect announced their intentions with some basic boilerplate:
American voters are tired of politics as usual. They want leaders that will put their country before their party, and American interests before special interests. Leaders who will work together to develop fresh solutions to the serious challenges facing our country.
That they came out of the box sounding exactly like every Democrat and Republican running for office should have been our first warning. Were they really going to be different?
They had three mechanisms that were supposed to assure that their members would nominate a competent truly bipartisan ticket. First they created a “bipartisan” and “independent” committee charged with producing minimum standards of achievement and experience based on the record of prior presidential and vice presidential candidates. Then they made it a requirement that whoever won the nomination would pick a running mate from a different party. And to assure that a Republican didn’t just pick a right-wing Libertarian or a Democrat didn’t pick a Green, each candidate was required to answer an issue survey. The nominee had to pick someone with whom they had significant disagreements on that survey. For example, Arlen Specter and Lincoln Chafee might now be from different parties but they don’t disagree on a whole lot. Their ticket might have been disallowed.
The people who put this together made a lot of assumptions. One was that the primary reason that we have so few viable third party presidential runs is the extremely high barrier to entry. They sought to take care of all of the dirty work of getting ballot access and figuring out how to find delegates. So far, they’ve attained ballot access in 28 states and claim confidence that they’ll win it in all 50 in time for the November election. They also have money. All a candidate has to do is win the nomination and they’ll be off and running.
But almost no one wanted to run, and the few that did either did not meet the minimum standard for experience, didn’t garner enough support, or both. In fact, no one won the minimum amount of support.
There’s are lessons to be learned from this, but it’s easy to learn the wrong ones. Take, for example, the reaction of Dana Milbank:
Faced with this twin disappointment — desirable candidates being uninterested and interested candidates being undesirable — Americans Elect has announced that it is abandoning its online nominating process because no candidate had reached its minimum threshold. This is profoundly depressing, and not just because it dashes the [candidate Kenneth] Domagala plan to admit Cuba to the union. It’s discouraging because it shows politics may be too broken to fix.
Our politics are broken in a real sense, but the failure of Americans Elect is in no way proof of that. To demonstrate my point, imagine an Americans Elect ticket joining the most conservative Democratic senator with the most liberal Republican senator. Would Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Olympia Snowe of Maine be able to agree on a program that would overcome the filibuster? If their program didn’t advance the Republican Movement, it would be rejected by the Republicans. If it shredded the New Deal, it would be rejected by the Democrats. This is why the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction committee couldn’t even pass their own recommendations. It’s why the Supercommittee totally failed. Making Simpson and Bowles the president and vice president wouldn’t help solve that problem and neither would doing the same with Manchin and Snowe. Our problem stems from two things. Ideological incompatibility between the parties makes divided government completely dysfunctional, and the filibuster rule makes majority government impossible. The only way out is for one party of the other to win control of everything with a supermajority of at least 60 votes (and probably a few more than that) in the Senate. The Democrats met that minimum standard for only three months of Obama’s first two years. There are no signs of either party reaching that level of power in either of the next two cycles. A third party not only can’t help solve that problem, it actually makes it less likely that one party will break out and win enough support to govern effectively.
I suppose you want to know why I say that. Before I answer, I want you to take a look at how Americans United answers a common question on their website:
WON’T THIS JUST SPOIL THE ELECTION FOR ONE OF THE PARTIES?
Can a presidential ticket chosen directly and securely by millions of voters really be a spoiler? Some people will think Americans Elect will cost the Democrats the election. Others will think the same about the Republicans. In reality, Americans Elect will open up the political process and allow voters to send a more important message: the status quo in Washington is not acceptable, and Americans want leaders who are committed to working together constructively to address our nation’s serious challenges, regardless of their party.
Notice that they didn’t answer the question. They might succeed in sending a message that the status quo is unacceptable, but presidential elections are not about sending messages. They’re about putting people in power. And presidential elections, like all federal elections, are based on a winner-take-all principle. The losers win nothing and have no power whatsoever. The winners win everything and have all the power. In 1992, Bill Clinton won complete control of the Executive Branch despite winning only 43% of the vote. In 2000, George W. Bush took total control of the Executive Branch even though he lost the popular vote, and even though a run-off between he and Gore would have almost definitely have resulted in Gore being elected president. In both cases, the winner of the election may have been the simple byproduct of the role third parties played. With winner-take-all elections, and with the absence of run-off elections to make sure the winner attained a majority, all third parties do is make it more likely that candidates will win with a mere plurality of the vote, and that the candidate preferred by the majority will not win.
In addition, third parties tend to harm the party they’re most closely aligned with. If antiwar voters can choose between two candidates while pro-war voters have only one choice, then the pro-war candidate has an advantage. The same is true for any issue you might want to consider: abortion rights, gun control, gay marriage, support for ObamaCare, etc. Again, this is because we don’t have proportional representation so the winner takes all. With Americans Elect, their influence will be different if the pro-life candidate is the presidential nominee than if they are the vice-presidential nominee, and vice-versa. And if they’re both on the same side of the issue, they’ll do even more damage to the mainstream candidate they’re aligned with.
As a result of these factors, third parties can only have a positive influence if they actually win the election. If they lose, they might send a message, but they do so at the risk of changing the rightful outcome of the election. That’s less their fault than the fault of our system, which is badly flawed. But, if they aren’t cognizant of these realities, they do incur legitimate blame for distorting our process.
Finally, I need to address something else that Milbank argued in his piece today. He wants us to believe that the only reason that qualified candidates didn’t embrace Americans Elect is because they didn’t want to be subjected to the nastiness of modern campaigns or the acrimony of their colleagues in their former party.
Among would-be candidates, there was fear and loathing of “the permanent and negative campaign.” Another person involved with Americans Elect said that would-be candidates feared they would be subject to particularly brutal treatment by the party they abandoned.
Complaints about nasty politics are nothing new, but it adds a new layer of despair to think this has become such a deterrent that all qualified candidates would refuse the free offer of a turnkey presidential campaign and ballot access in all 50 states. That suggests there’s little hope for a jolt to the system from a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt, or even a Ross Perot.
There is really nothing preventing a prominent or fabulously wealthy person from making an independent run. If Bill Clinton were eligible (as Teddy Roosevelt was), he’d have no difficulty replicating Ross Perot’s effort. He might even win, but my money would be on Mitt Romney in a landslide (in 1912, President Taft won eight Electoral Votes). Likewise, Mayor Mike Bloomberg could easily finance a run, and it would probably achieve the same result. I don’t think either of them would be deterred by the nastiness of modern politics, although Clinton probably would not enjoy the ensuing wrath of Democrats.
The truth of the matter was explained by Paul Krugman. President Obama is a Democrat who is prepared to make precisely the kinds of compromises envisioned by Americans Elect. The problem isn’t his ideological inflexibility. The problem is that he has no partner. Americans Elect failed because there is no appetite for something we already have.
