Nitpick: A pariamentary political system, like the UK’s, still freezes out third parties and produces minority “winners,” if it is based on the single-member-district first-past-the-post plurality electoral system. The alternative (whether under a parliamentary system or a U.S.-style separation of powers system) would be some kind of proportional representation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
All he accomplished was to split the opposition to the Democrats and give the election to Clinton.
The way to avoid that problem would be instant-runoff voting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
This is too simplistic a viewpoint, IMO.
In the last twenty-five years, the Republicans have moved rightward on most issues, while moderating their stance (too much IMO) on spending. Democrats in the meantime moved rightward on economic policy and taxation. They did not move appreciably rightward on social policy.
The big gap remains military policy and foreign affairs policy, and the Democrats today remain overly influenced by the McGovern wing of the party. The old Scoop Jackson and Truman Democrats, the ones who could outhawk the Republicans, are gone.
They’ve essentially abandoned gun control as an issue, and they’re much less vocal in their defense of abortion rights than they were a decade or two ago. That’s two pretty big issues right there.
Who would want to out-hawk the GOP?! That would be freakin’ insane. Especially when we don’t have any military capability left over to realistically out-hawk our current posture. To out-hawk where we are now is to leave reality behind.
The Dems have moved rightward on defense issues in the past decade and a half. Fifteen years ago, all but a few Congressional Democrats voted against a war for a very limited and defensible objective: kicking Saddam out of Kuwait. But three years ago, about half the Democrats in Congress voted to give Bush the authority to take us into a much larger, much more potentially open-ended, and much less defensible objective in Iraq. And while some of the Dems who voted for the Iraq war have changed their minds on its wisdom, most haven’t.
Meanwhile, the War on Terror, as distinct from the War In Iraq, has the support of essentially the entire Democratic Party.
I can’t see how that can be characterized as anything but a move to the right. And it’s hardly indicative of a party in thrall to some hypothetical McGovernites.
After thinking about this during the board outage, I’m not sure they ever did out-hawk the GOP, except for brief, transitory moments.
My recollection of the GOP from the 1960s to the 1980s of a party that was frequently willing to flirt a bit with the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and was also chronically willing to rattle our nukes at recalcitrant third-world countries. And my understanding is that this was true in the 1950s as well.
This was not a party one would have wanted to out-hawk, even if one could have.
Suppose we have a candidate who’s fed up with the two major parties, but has a reasonable shot at the presidency nevertheless.
Why would this candidate form or agree to lead a third party? They would be far better off hijacking the apparatus of one of the existing parties and recreating it.
It is much more likely for the two major parties to have a political realignment than it is for a third party to replace one of the two majors. If there is a major unsolved political problem that isn’t address by members of either party it is much more likely for the already existing political strategists to recognize that vacuum and position their candidates to address it than it is for an independent candidate to seize the issue.
The only way a third party can form is for one of the two major parties to collapse, with one wing of the party leaving en masse to form a third party. Then either the reform or orthodox version of the party will become the new major party. But it isn’t an accident that the Democratic-Republican (now the Democratic party) has been around for 200 years, even though the issues and policies they represent have essentially nothing to do with the policies of the original party 200 years ago. The party has completely changed from top to bottom even though it maintained continuity with the party as it first formed. The second party has been variously the Federalists, the Whigs, or the Republicans, but today’s Republican party only shares a name with the Republican party of Lincoln’s day.
A powerful president can remake an existing political party in their own image, Roosevelt transformed the Democrats, Reagan transformed the Republicans. Just 30 years ago the Democrats were the party of the rural conservative South while the Republicans were the party of the urban north, now they’ve switched constituencies. The Republicans used to be the party of abolition and black civil rights, now, well, not so much.
Third party candidacies usually spring up from the extremes, from the ‘base’ left unhappy when a party moves to the center. So you have your Naders, your Buchanans, etc.
The problem with these third party movements is simply that they are on the fringe and never pick up more than a few percent of the vote. They know it - their purpose for being isn’t to win an election, but to force the major party back in their direction to prevent a defection of the base.
The only way a third party could actually win an election would be if it attempted to occupy the center between the two parties at a time when the two parties have move too far from the center towards their respective bases, and/or when the parties have become too corrupt and there is a widespread voter revolt. The only two centrist third-party challengers in recent memory were John Anderson in the 80’s, and Ross Perot in the 90’s. Both of them started with significant support, but faded fast. Anderson due to inept organization and a lack of funds, and Perot because it turned out he was batshit crazy.
But here’s the problem with a centrist party - It has no natural constituency. The Democrats raise big money from trade unions, a motivated grassroots base, and corporate interests like Trial Lawyers. The Republicans raise money from big business, big agriculture, the ‘base’, and well-heeled insiders.
A successful third party that opposes pork, opposes business subsidies, is moderate on social policy and fiscally conservative would have a hell of a time raising funds, espeically under the egregious campaign finance rules that stack the deck in favor of the ruling parties. And gerrymandering means a third party would have an almost impossible time trying to build up a party from the bottom up by winning congressional districts and slowly building representation.
Previous attempts at a third party president were driven from the top down. Ross Perot, Oprah, Jesse Ventura, etc are all interesting personalities that don’t fit into the mold of either party. They are charismatic, rich and interesting enough to get enough votes to be taken seriously so they don’t need a party.
I’d like to see a third party that is grown from the bottom up instead. The Libertarians have been trying to do this. They try and win lots of local elections. They know they won’t win a presidency any time soon so they try and win smaller races and build up a party from the bottom.
However, the Lib’s won’t ever be a major force to challenge the two party system because they have a message that most people don’t agree with.
I’d like to see a new party emerge that starts from the bottom up, and is based on a message that most Americans would agree with. Socially moderate and fiscally conservative. Drop conservative issues such as abortion and religion, but grab on to fiscal issues like controlling spending. A party with this message would clean house, IMO. Govern responsibly with balanced budgets, low taxes, and less entitlements but keep the government out of bedrooms and the business of religion. You could take half the democrats and half the republicans, (leaving them with liberals, and the religous right repectively, which they can both keep, IMHO) and you might just also pick up lots of independants and non-voters.
Yes, but isn’t it much more likely for some charismatic and popular Democrat to win the presidency and take the issue of fiscal discipline away from the Republicans?
In my opinion this is highly likely to happen. In 2008 the Democrats are very likely to put up a hawkish, socially moderate fiscal conservative governor who will run on a platform that the Republicans can’t balance the budget, have mismanaged the war, and are out of step with the American people on social issues.
That is, if the Republican’s don’t beat them to it.
Over time, meaning over a couple of election cycles, the political parties tend to discover that their long-held policies have magically changed to match those of the majority of voters. Majority of voters, not majority of Americans. Yes, things are politically polarized right now…which is why one party or the other is due for a major crackup to seize the center and dominate government for another generation.
Yes, us conservatives on the SDMB have been saying this for a while now. The problem is that the democratic party is made up of extremists nowadays. The DNC chair Dean is a bombthrower who sounds like he gets his talking points off of the BBQ pit Bush bashing threads. The leaders of the party are ultra liberals like Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy.
If the Democrats were smart they would move towards the middle and clean house in the next election. However, I see no signs that they are doing this. I’m displeased with the way the Republicans have been running things, but I’m downright terrified of what the Democrats would be doing if they had power now.
I do agree with much of what Sam says in his post above mine. I admit that my idea for a moderate party that swoops in to take voters from the others is mostly wishful thinking. However, what better time than now? Opinion polls are very low on approval for both parties right now. Most people are independents, not members of an existing party. Voter turnout is low.
All you need do is get some of those non-voters to join you, get many of those independants to sign up, and get some disenfranchized voters from either party on board. It is possible, just not likely.
Both parties have democratized their nominating procedures since the 1960’s. Any candidate popular enough to win the presidency as a third party candidate is more than popular enough to win one party or the other’s nomination.
The only exception, mathematically, would be a candidate preferred by about 40% of each party–not popular enough to win either party’s nomination, but capable of winning a 40-30-30 split in a three-way election. I can’t imagine who such a person would be or what possible platform they could espouse. Just announce your position on abortion or the war in Iraq, and you’ve made it tough to appeal to 40% of both parties.
The only exception? This isn’t true. What about these possibilities:
Someone who gets 100% of the non-voters to vote for them.
Someone who gets 100% of the independants to vote for them.
Someone who gets 20% of each party and 50% of the independants to vote for them?
There are plenty of possibilities, some more likely than others. But, you seem to only be using the members of both parties as potential voters. You forget that there are more independents than there are members of either party.
I was classifying independents by the party they would vote for in the absence of a third party candidacy. In an ordinary election between 97% and 99% of the voters will vote D or R, and I was using that as the basis for my math.
It’s true that in any election there is a huge mass of non-voters who could have swung the election for either or neither of the candidates had they participated. The problem is that they fail to do so for a bewildering variety of reasons. Some don’t vote because life sucks so much that it doesn’t matter; others because life is so good that it doesn’t matter. Some are so dumb that they can’t spell the candidates’ names; others are so smart that they’ve figured out that voting is irrational. It’s awfully tough to make a bloc appeal to such a group.
It’s also tough to argue that if only non-voters would get off their asses they would vote much differently than likely voters. I don’t think there’s much evidence of that, it seems to me that most non-voters would vote in similar patterns to current voters. Some people have this fantasy that there’s a huge reserve of left-wing populists, or religious conservatives, or libertarians, and if only someone could appeal to them they’d reshape politics.
But for every potential left-wing voter who today doesn’t bother to vote, there’s another potential right-wing voter who doesn’t vote. And for every disgruntled non-voting libertarian there are ten non-voting statists. Increasing political participation might shift things a bit, but non-voters aren’t a monolithic bloc that just so happen to share the exact politics of the person arguing for increased voter participation.
And you come to that conclusion based on Dean, Kennedy and Pelosi? Three people, even if you insist that Kennedy has some stature beyond “old liberal magnet who won’t go away,” does not a party make. The eventual Democratic nominee may be somebody like what you describe.
I wouldn’t say the Democratic party is full of extremists. What I’d say is that the internet has created a huge new Democratic movement typified by the MoveOn/Daily KOS wing of the party.
This new power bloc has awesome powers of organization, fund-raising, and much influence. In addition, campaign finance reform has pushed the Democrats away from their traditional funding bases and towards this activist grass roots. This is pulling the Democrats well over to the left.
An additional influence is the radicalizing nature of the Iraq war. It has re-kindled the anti-Vietnam, McGovernesque wing of the party, which is also pulling the Democrats to the left.
When Dean is replaced by Bernie Sanders, and Pelosi by Dennis Kucinich, then, maybe, just maybe, you’ll have something approaching a point there.
Uh, right. 48% of the popular vote for the Presidential candidate, 44% of the Senate, 46% of House seats, and the Democrats are “extremists”. Debaser, are you actually trying to convince anyone else of anything?
True - but there’s a couple of strategies for a third party. One is to take on a regional issue that separates that region from the rest of the country, a la Wallace in 1968. A third-party candidacy can win electoral votes that way, but it’s limited by the lack of its issue’s appeal outside its core region.
Or it can appeal to a decent portion of the electorate from coast to coast - more in some areas, less in others, just like pretty much any candidate, party, or philosophy - but still without having a particular region that constitutes its stronghold. This was the case for Perot in 1992.
For such a third party, the question is, how strong does it have to be before it starts picking up electoral votes? And the answer is, pretty damned strong. For instance, a third party that pulls down 25% of the vote nationwide, with between 15% and 35% in each state, is going to win how many states? Probably none; maybe one or two, if the two major parties’ vote is split evenly in the one or two states where the third party scores more than 1/3 of the vote.
Quite simply, by the time a broad-based third party starts picking up electoral votes, it would have to be drawing close to 30% of the vote nationwide - IOW, on the verge of supplanting one of the existing majors as a major party. Perot didn’t reach that level, of course. But that failure, in and of itself, is no reason to call his 1992 candidacy unimpressive.
Well, we’re certainly in mostly “opinion land” when we’re debating whether or not his candidacy was impressive or not. But don’t forget that Perot’s party was too tied to him, personally, and has failed to maintain even a reasonable fraction of the momuntum he developed in '92. Where is the Reform Party now, in terms of presidential politics? Nader ran as that party’s candidate in '04 and got .4% of the popular vote (4/10ths of 1%).
I had forgotten about Wallace, but one might argue that his candidacy was at least as “impressive” as the number of states he carried-- 5-- even though he got less of the popular vote than Perot did (about 14%). But that was a time of intense social change, and he was riding a wave of resentment about that change that no longer exists in any significant form.
Maybe another time of intense social change will spawn a new 3rd party movement. What might that social change be? The only one that comes immediately to mind would be the collapse of the entitlement programs (like medicare and social security) as the population ages.