A Third Party in 2008?

[palepeony]

Some of the last few US presidential races have been colored with a third candidate, which in some cases influence the outcome. Will we see a third in this one? What do you think?

In my opinion, there will most certainly be a third podium in the race. This is one of the most crucial elections in our history. I even think we could possibly have runners-up from the RNC/DNC defect and run on the Unity08 platform. Either way, this election is too big to leave to the two parties, especially if the race descends into nit-picking about moral or personal issues.

[vetbridge]

I hope so. As a voter who cannot imagine voting Republican or for HRC, I sure do hope so.

[Lemur866]

Except, what do any of the current Democratic or Republican candidates have to gain by defecting to a third party?

Here’s the thing. If you don’t have enough support to win the nomination of the Ds or the Rs, what good is it going to do to run on a third party ticket? If you’re so special that the public deserves to have your name on the ballot, why can’t you get enough support to win the nomination?

Don’t tell me that the party fatcats shut you out and rigged the game against you. If they’re able to shut you out and rig the game against you in the primaries, they’re surely going to do the same in the general, only worse. And anyone who pulls out of a major party to run on a third party ticket is finished in the major party. You’re done.

The way for independents and mavericks to effect change is not to run on a third party ticket. If your personality and policy prescriptions are that popular, you run on a major party ticket and transform the major party. 30 years ago every conservative southerner was a Democrat, now every conservative southerner is a Republican. They didn’t like the way the Democratic party was going and so they took over the Republican party. That’s the way the game is played in the US.

The only effect third party candidacies can have is if they become powerful enough to convince one of the major parties to adopt parts of their platform. And once a major party adopts the platform, the consituency for the third party vanishes back into the major party. If you care about having a party not named “Democrat” or “Republican” this is bad, if you care more about getting that platform adopted this is good.

[BrainGlutton]

The Reform Party failed and fell apart for two reasons: 1. Ross Perot, so long as he remained in the picture, stubbornly quashed efforts to turn it into something more than his own campaign vehicle, something that would run candidates for offices other than the presidency. 2. It had no coherent ideology, being a coalition of nativist-populist-protectionist paleocons like Pat Buchanan and fiscal-conservative good-government progressives (in the old sense of the word) like John Anderson; when Perot was no longer there to hold them together, the two factions split (the paleocons forming the America First Party, and some of the progressives forming the Independence Party, neither of which has yet attained even the relevance the Reform Party once enjoyed).

Unity '08 has no charismatic leader and not even that level of ideological coherence.

Unity08 has four major goals:

Enable Americans to rank America’s most crucial issues.
Empower Americans to draft or evaluate Unity08 candidates and actively engage them in debate about the crucial issues.
Empower Americans to nominate a bipartisan Unity ticket via an online convention and secure voting process.
Elect the Unity08 presidential ticket to national office.
The Unity08 presidential ticket must be two candidates that come from different political parties. This bipartisan team must also propose a bipartisan cabinet in an effort to end paralysis in government. Co-founder Doug Bailey claims “What we are trying to do is to create a forum for people who are in the middle who have been left out of politics.”[1]

I’m sorry, but you just can’t build a political movement out of that. You need more policy content before you even start. You can’t just declare a process out of which policy content will emerge – we’ve already got that process, it’s called civil society and the electoral system and Congress. If they get on any ballot, it will be a one-shot flash in the pan (as the very name implies); there likely won’t be any Unity '12, and if there is it will have only the most tenuous connection with Unity '08.

Which doesn’t mean a Unity '08 ticket can’t play a spoiler role – in all likelihood, drawing off more Pub than Dem votes.

I do not foresee any serious left-of-the-Dems bid, like Nader in 2000, this time around.

[Marley23]

I’ve said a few times that I think a third-party candidate could grab a few percentage points on the right this year - I think the popularity of Ron Paul shows there’s some ground to be gained there; it’ll be hard for the GOP to strike a middle ground between its unhappy religious right and its unhappy “old-style conversative” members. But I’m thinking a few percentage points and that’s it. Americans don’t believe in the viability of third parties and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

@palepeony

I even think we could possibly have runners-up from the RNC/DNC defect and run on the Unity08 platform.

For better or worse, that’s not going to happen. Politicians don’t like to burn their bridges, and most of the candidates right now would still be in office even if they don’t get the nomination.

[marshmallow]

@palepeony

This is one of the most crucial elections in our history.

Isn’t every election categorized as such?

As an alternative to Lemur866’s position, a third party IMO should build from the grass roots up. Start off small. Once you start to put your people in as mayors and governors you can entertain the idea of running for POTUS. Otherwise, running without setting up the infrastructure is a pointless masturbatory fantasy.

Of course, if a third party followed such a path and started to become powerful enough where it threatened the balance of power it would probably be made illegal, especially if it had any social democratic underpinnings.

Voting third party can certainly help change the major parties’ views on narrow issues. There are enough historical examples. But changing the broader picture, the very reason they exist and operate as they do, is impossible. You can’t vote for a third party in the hopes of convincing a major party to be less of an authoritarian imperialist bloc. Ask the Nader voters about it, they’ll tell you all the grisly details.

[BrainGlutton]

@marshmallow

Isn’t every election categorized as such?

The 2000 presidential election appeared at the time, to most people, to be the least important in living memory.

In hindsight, it appears very different.

[RTFirefly]

The WSJ says Lou Dobbs is considering a run.

[Jonathan_Chance]

That’s fucking ludicrous. I hope he runs and we can just call him ‘Mr Irrelevant’ in TWO ways.

marshmallow has it right. The way for a third party to gain ground is NOT to start at the top with a charismatic leader with no foundation. Start at the county level. Win some commissionerships and mayorships. Maybe City Council positions in some small to medium towns without large active machines. Then build from there.

[What_Exit]

Mike Bloomberg the honorable Mayor of New York City gets mentioned. He can fun his own campaign easily and could probably end up on two parties as an independent of some sort and the Green Party would probably be overjoyed to have him. It is even possible Al Gore would join him as a running mate. If they ran it would throw a huge monkey wrench into a Clinton vs. Giuliani campaign.

He was touring New Orleans this week, fueling the speculation that he might run.

Jim

[Lamar_Mundane]

If Guliani wins the Republican nomination, I think it is likely that we will see a third party emerge. It will be a evangelical christian party, and will draw more than an insignifigant number of voters.

Giuliani Inspires Threat of a Third-Party Run (Published 2007)

This would be a disaster for the Republican Party, and probably the Religious Right as well.

[BrainGlutton]

@Lamar Mundane

If Guliani wins the Republican nomination, I think it is likely that we will see a third party emerge. It will be a evangelical christian party, and will draw more than an insignifigant number of voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/us/politics/01evangelicals.html

This would be a disaster for the Republican Party, and probably the Religious Right as well.

What if Romney gets the nomination?

[BrainGlutton]

@marshmallow

As an alternative to Lemur866’s position, a third party IMO should build from the grass roots up. Start off small. Once you start to put your people in as mayors and governors you can entertain the idea of running for POTUS. Otherwise, running without setting up the infrastructure is a pointless masturbatory fantasy.

Of course, if a third party followed such a path and started to become powerful enough where it threatened the balance of power it would probably be made illegal, especially if it had any social democratic underpinnings.

The social-democratic New Party of the '90s tried the ground-up organizing strategy you suggest. The party was never actually made illegal – but it pinned its hopes on a strategy of “ballot fusion” or “cross-endorsement”: The party would run its own candidates only where it could be reasonably sure to win; otherwise it would exert indirect influence over the mainstream parties by granting its nomination to the most progressive major-party candidate in the race. Fusion, however, has been illegal in most U.S. states since the 1890s. From Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, by Micah Sifry:

Neither man [Daniel Cantor and Joel Rogers, founders of the New Party] wanted to repeat the failures of third-party experiments, but at the same time they both felt a real frustration with the limits of the two-party duopoly. And so they set out to revive an old political practice that had been prevalent in America since the dawn of the Republic until the 1890s: fusion. Also known as cross-endorsement, fusion had given minor parties a substantial role in winner-take-all elections all through the nineteenth century. Under this system, a candidate could be endorsed by more than one party, with the votes for that person counted separately under each party’s name and then tallied together. Rather than ask their supporters to “waste their votes” on candidates with little chance of winning, fusion allowed minor parties to maintain a separate existence while contributing to a major party candidate’s victory. But it existed because it served the needs of at least one of the major parties, who often initiated fusions to shore up a weak position vis-a-vis the other major party. According to historian Peter Argersinger,

“If fusion sometimes helped destroy individual third parties, it helped maintain a significant third party tradition by guaranteeing that dissenters’ votes could be more than symbolic protest, that their leaders could gain office, and that their demands might be heard. Most of the election victories normally attributed to the Grangers, Independents, or Greenbackers in the 1870s and 1880s were a result of fusion between those third party groups and Democrats. That some politicians regarded fusion as a mechanism for proportional representation is not surprising.”

Argesinger added that minor parties regularly “received at least 20 percent in one or more elections from 1874 to 1892 in more than half the southern states,” thanks to fusion. And between 1878 and 1892, they held the balance of power at least once in every state but Vermont, “culminating in 1892 when neither major party secured a majority of the electorate in nearly three-quarters of the states.”

Unfortunately for third-party supporters, the fusion laws worked too well for the comfort of the major parties. Starting after the 1892 election, when the Populist “People’s Party” made extensive use of fusion with the Democrats, threatening to become a major party in its own right, Republican-dominated state legislatures moved to ban the practice. One Republican Minnesota state senator made clear exactly what his party was doing, saying, “We don’t propose to allow the Democrats to make allies of the Populists, Prohibitionists, or any other party, and get up combination tickets against us. We can whip them single-handed, but don’t intend to fight all creation.”

The fusion bans and ballot access restrictions that followed effectively smothered the existing third parties. At the same time, the major parties also were imposing a myriad of new voter registration rules (literacy tests, poll taxes) that effectively shut out millions of blacks, the rural poor, and working class city-dwellers and immigrants. Voter turnout among people of lower incomes – which used to be as high as any other social group, thanks to political parties (major and minor) that were rooted in their neighborhoods and articulated their concerns – dropped significantly, never to recover.

The New Party filed a lawsuit in Minnesota to force the state to allow fusion based on the “freedom of association” clause of the First Amendment. It went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected the argument in Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, 520 U.S. 351, April 28, 1997.

After the Timmons decision, the New Party gradually faded away as a national organization. (There’s still a New party website, but it hasn’t been updated in years.) But some state-level branches of it survived in states where fusion is legal, e.g., the Working Families Party in New York.

[Jonathan_Chance]

I’ve always thought that was a losing strategy. No one wins in most anything by claiming how they’ve got a plan to deal with losing. Better by far to say you’re trying to win and build support that way. Even if you lose several times in a row you’re drawing attention and, if you’re not off the rails, support for your cause.

Too many of these third party attempts fall into that ‘we know we’re not going to win’ mentality for me to take them seriously.

[jackdavinci]

As much as I’d love to see a third party run, I don’t think it will happen this time. Well, in will - there’s always third party candidates in presidential elections, but usually they fail to make it on the ballot in every state and become at all feasible. I think the major obstacle to this is people being afraid to “waste their vote” which would be somewhat compensated for if we could switch over to the instant runoff system. In any case, the Republicans and Bush have been in power so long that the Democratic party is enough of an underdog for this election to satisfy the majority of people seeking change. Added to that is the other unique aspects of this election with the Democrats potentially having a woman and/or black candidate.

[BrainGlutton]

@jackdavinci

As much as I’d love to see a third party run, I don’t think it will happen this time. Well, in will - there’s always third party candidates in presidential elections, but usually they fail to make it on the ballot in every state and become at all feasible.

Which does not make a third-party bid pointless. Nader’s supporters in 2000 can have had no serious hope he would win the presidency; the purpose of the campaign was, rather, to impress on the center-right leadership of the Democrats, and on the electorate, that the left wing that the Dems had disregarded throughout the Clinton administration was still around and must not be ignored – and was willing to risk “spoiling” the election and enduring a Pub administration to make that point. If Giuliani wins the Pub nomination and the Christian right mounts an independent challenge, it will have a similar purpose. Whereas if Unity ‘08 nominates a “centrist” ticket, the point of that would be . . . I have no frickin’ clue.

@jackdavinci

I think the major obstacle to this is people being afraid to “waste their vote” which would be somewhat compensated for if we could switch over to the instant runoff system.

Actually, there is a movement for that purpose. And a change to IRV was just approved in a ballot measure in Sarasota, Florida. Watch for further developments.

[RTFirefly]

@Jonathan Chance

Too many of these third party attempts fall into that ‘we know we’re not going to win’ mentality for me to take them seriously.

Every third-party Presidential run is fundamentally a protest candidacy, trying to make noise and upset applecarts rather than win. The last one to do better than 20% was Teddy Roosevelt in his Bull Moose Party run in 1912.

@Jonathan Chance

The way for a third party to gain ground is NOT to start at the top with a charismatic leader with no foundation. Start at the county level. Win some commissionerships and mayorships. Maybe City Council positions in some small to medium towns without large active machines. Then build from there.

This doesn’t make sense to me, JC. If one’s aim is to create a third party that will have widespread influence, one needs to find some sort of widespread but unmet political need. And that’s just not going to happen at the local level in a whole bunch of different localities at about the same time. Whatever unmet political needs there are in one place just aren’t going to the same as those that you have two counties over.

State legislatures have a similar problem, just one level up. There are underserved political markets at the state legislature level fairly frequently, but they’ll be very different in Maryland than in Virginia. You can’t build a party out of a whole bunch of differing niche markets.

OTOH, starting off by running a candidate for President may get some attention, but nobody’s really managed to use that as a starting point for building a party.

So what’s left? Congress. And how would you do it? Depends on whether you’re starting a third party of the center or of the extremes.

Personally, I think starting a third party of the center is a waste of time. One decent Presidential run by a centrist candidate usually suffices to get at least one of the two major parties to either moderate its stances, or pretend to, in order to meet the underserved political market and grab those votes. There is never going to be a longstanding opening for a third party in between the other two parties.

So that leaves the extremes. Then comes the question, do you care about the welfare of the party nearer you on the left-right spectrum? IOW, if you’re a left-wing third party, do you want to avoid harming the Dems so much that you put the GOP in power? (Vice-versa for a right-wing third party.)

If the answer is no, you’re free to run Congressional candidates anywhere you want. Just be aware that if you tip some elections the wrong way, you’re going to alienate a bunch of slightly more moderate people who might have otherwise been sympathetic to your cause. That will be a self-limiting factor on the growth of your party. (See Nader, 2000.)

If the answer is yes, then your focus needs to be on ‘safe’ districts - of both parties.

For instance, a left-wing third party would run candidates in districts where it was rare for a Republican to get more than 30%. If you split the left-of-center vote, either you or the Dem wins. No harm, no foul.

And it would run against Republicans in districts where the Dems didn’t run anyone, or where the Dem candidate didn’t have much chance of winning anyway. Why? Because it’s a chance to get your message out, build your party’s brand.

It probably wouldn’t work anyway, for one of several reasons.

One is that you might be imagining the unmet need, kinda the way Broder et al. keep drooling over Unity '08.

Second is that if the need is really there - that is, if the Dems/GOP has moved so far to the center that there’s a whole lot of frustrated voters to their left/right, respectively, you still need good candidates to get your message across, to convince people to vote for your party even in the safest of districts. And good candidates are hard to find, especially when you’re just starting up.

And finally, of course, the major party nearest you may move to co-opt your movement before you get a chance to get very far along with it. If people feel that one of the two major parties is advocating their positions, they’re gonna go with a major party, rather than a third party. That’s just life. If you’re attempting to organize a third party, you need to be prepared to define ‘success’ as pulling one of the major parties closer to where you stand.

[RTFirefly]

@jackdavinci

I think the major obstacle to this is people being afraid to “waste their vote” which would be somewhat compensated for if we could switch over to the instant runoff system.

I’m familiar with IRV, but I worry that it’s just gimmicky enough that it won’t make much headway most places. Why not just go with regular runoffs, like Louisiana has?

[BrainGlutton]

@RTFirefly

I’m familiar with IRV, but I worry that it’s just gimmicky enough that it won’t make much headway most places. Why not just go with regular runoffs, like Louisiana has?

IRV:

1. Saves the cost of a second election; and

2. Gives the voters an opportunity to rank their choices in a 2+ field by preference, which is a potentially rich and valuable way for them to express their political voice even when their first-choice candidate loses.

[foolsguinea]

It occurs to me that Unity 08 is no way to build a national party, if an actual new party is what you want. The Independence Party is a better start.

But that’s not what Unity 08 is about. It’s about finding a third choice in one particular race, not from the sort of “fringe” people that are thought to populate small parties, but from the mainstream. By threatening the major parties from the moderate side, they can either pull the majors toward the center or create a three-way race for President.

I’m a pretty safe Democratic vote down the line right now. But I’m not ruling out a vote for Unity 08; & if, say, Sam Nunn & Christie Whitman became the ticket, it could even become my first choice–depending on the other choices & a lot of game theory (I live in a swing state).