Possible 3rd Party Forming on the Right?

There’s a very interesting race going on in New York right now. The Republicans have put up a very moderate candidate to run against the Democrat. A third party, the Conservative Party of New York, put up a challenger, Doug Hoffman, who was way behind the other two in voting.

This week, Hoffman received endorsements from Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and Michelle Bachmann. Speculation is that Tim Pawlenty will endorse him as well.

This is a pretty big thumb in the eye of the GOP. The Conservative Party candidate is surging and is now trailing the other two by single digits.

I wonder if we aren’t seeing the start of a new national Conservative party? I don’t have any other evidence of this, but if this guy does win in New York, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a national movement start to form. And I notice that five of the people above are not really associated with the Republican party right now.

Whether it’s good for the right or not is a completely different question. Newt Gingrich certainly doesn’t think it’s good. He thinks they are vote-splitting away from the Republican - and they are. But if Hoffman wins, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Comments? Is this plausible? Is it good or bad for Republicans? For the right in general?

Ummm, given that The Conservative Party of New York State is a year older than me (founded in 1962) … I’d say no.

CMC fnord!

Short term or long term? Short term, I don’t see the far right and farther right fighting among themselves doing much but help them lose elections. In the longer term; as has been pointed out, the traditional extremist, true believer base is shrinking over time, and turns off a lot of potential Republicans ( socially conservative minorities come to mind ). Basically, their base has become an anchor that make it harder to win elections; but at the same time they are so dependent upon them that tossing them out would in the short term make things even worse. Assuming they CAN toss them out.

Having the extreme right undercut Republican candidates is one of the few things that might convince the Republican leadership they need to try to push them out or marginalize them. So if this sort of thing becomes common I could see it in the long run be good for the Republican party by forcing them to try to sever the devil’s bargain they made and dump the fanatics. If they can.

Well, that’s an interesting take.

I doubt a new party will happen and it certainly wouldn’t be good for the right. The Republican coalition is being eroded by demographic changes and party identification at around 25% is ten points behind the Democrats. This means that they need to win independents in a big way to to win elections. Hard to see how they do this with a new party formed out of the crazy wing of the old party. Secondly the current two-party system is a very stable feature of US politics which has existed for 150 years. Breaking out of it will be very difficult. It will be tough for a new party to replicate the fund-raising apparatus of the GOP. Media coverage also revolves around the two parties.

Well, if the crazy wing goes off on its own ( something I consider unlikely but possible ), the Republicans who remain can try to win over those independents with a plausible claim that “We aren’t like that anymore! Those guys left!” Not to mention all the Republicans who might come back if the crazies went away. Variations on “I used to be a Republican before the crazies took over” is something I hear a lot. It would hurt the party in the short run, but it would be rather like having a tumor removed. Painful in the short run, but allowing strength to be regained in the long term.

Third parties do one of four things:

1. Die or remain irrelevant. Hello, Libertarian Party!

2. Kill an existing party. You don’t see the Whigs around anymore.

3. Vote-split and re-merge, the obvious example being the Canadian schism of the Reform wing from the Progressive Conservative party in 1993, which was re-formed twelve years later into the new Conservative Party, or

4. Permanently shift the other parties.

The question is which of these 4 the new Conservative Party would do. Obviously, the LIKELIEST answer is 1.

But if this gains any traction, I think Der Trihs is right, and it’ll be 3. They’ll vote-split with the Republican Party for awhile until a resolution is finally come to and they re-form as a unified conservative party.

What I think is less likely, but would be inteesting nonetheless, is Option 4; the Conservative party assumes a stance on the right wing, leaving moderate Republicans to shift to the centre, and pushing Democrats off the centre and into the left. In all likelihood that would mean that in the long term the Republican Party would become the preeminent party, after a period of a few decades in the wilderness. Unlikely, but the scenario’s possible.

It’s interesting to note what happened in Canada. The NDP aside, going into 1993 you basically had two parties that could win a national election; the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. You can consider them Democrats and Repubpicans for the purpose of this exercise, although that’s not really a very accurate comparison in terms of the issues. The PC party had the Reform Party, a more socially conservative (but institutionally very willing to change things, as their name indicates) wing, split off. The result was vote split and total Liberal domination for a decade. But when the Reform and PC parties got back together to become the Conservative Party, the combined party started trouncing the Liberals. Now, this might be coincidence - it is certainly true that the Liberals have had unimpressive leaders at the same time the Conservative Party re-formed - but there’s no doubt a unified party was a more attractive voting option.

The new Conservative Party, of course, is a party of compromises; it maintains is popularity and election-winninjg capability by conceding a lot of issues to appeal to moderate voters. (Their unwillingness to even allow their memebrs to say anything about gay marriage or abortion being obvious cases; the party’s leader is personally opposed to both but politically will touch neither with a fifty-foot pole.) This pisses off the party’s very socially conservative members, but the party has enough political capital to do it and still win their votes. Who else they gonna vote for?

A Republican schism would likely result in the same thing; for awhile the Democrats will clean up. If the parties eventually merge, doing so will require compromising away at least some of their more extreme positions on things like abortion and gay marriage and obsession with Christianity, and the unified party will suddenly become a viable voting option for many who previously would not have voted for them.

Option 2 is so unlikely as to be impossible, I suspect.

William F. Buckley ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket. His campaign was most notable for his remark that if he won, he would ask for a recount.

As mentioned above, the New York Conservative Party is a strong third party in that state, a longstanding institution which has among other things elected a senator (Buckley) over the two major parties’ candidates, a difficult feat for a third party. Normally what they do is to influence the selection of major party candidates by granting or withholding their cross-endorsement according to how conservative the candidate is.

I am fascinated by your idea of who constitutes strong, newsworthy endorsements, though.

[ul]
[li]Fred Thompsaon – well, okay. [/li][li]Dick Armey – you mean the House Majority Leader that left Congress in disgrace owing to a major political scandal?. In Texas. It takes some serious doing to create that kind of unelectability as a Texas politician.[/li][li]Sarah Palin – “I can see Russia from here”? Faux outrage over people being offended by her own stupid remarks? Thjat Sarah Palin?[/li][li]Rick Santorum – Well, l;et’s see. His attitude that we should enact into law the conservative Catholic moral code? His trying to get storm warning from NOAA sold exclusively to Weather.com? The guy who defines ‘venal hypocrite’?[/li][li]Michelle Bachmann – See dozens of Pit threads for reasons why your advancing her endorsement seriously would be the next thing to trolling to get a rise out of people.[/li][/ul]

Are you serious, Sam? These are mainstream Republicans in your view?

Re-read the OP. He’s explicitly denying that, and the point of his post depends on that denial.

The candidate for Vice President in the previous election is by definition a mainstream figure in the party. I will grant you Bachman, but Armey was hardly an whacko fringe Republican himself. The problem I have here is that the party is splitting in the wrong direction. I would love to see a fiscally conservative, self reliance party split off. Jettisoning the social issues and Jesse Helms / Pat Robertson baggage would be more than welcome.

Cite? I’m pretty sure he’s been down at least 11 points in every poll, though his support has been increasing a bit.

No. Usually, but not necessarily.

I don’t. When they start fielding candidates in multiple states, call me.

The long-term evolution of the Republican Party is going to be in more libertarian direction. When the majority of the people are/were cultural conservatives, the Reagan coalition (marrying Friedman with Falwell) made sense, politically if not always ideologically. but now cultural conservatives who have tried to use government to advance their values are starting to realize that a lot of their causes are lost. They’re going to have to move from offense to defense, and that will entail a small-government approach.

Might just be wishful thinking, but that’s my hunch.

It is bad for the right, but good for America. Which, in my liberal world, are the same thing.

Demographics are rapidly shifting from the GOP. The base of the GOP (evangelical whites) make up about 25% of the electorate. The base of the democratic party (non-white voters in general combined with white liberals) made up about 29% of voters in the early 90s, but are now up to almost 40% of the electorate (about 25% is non-whites, and another 15% is white liberals). Plus those numbers are growing. White liberals made up about 6-8% of the electorate in 2000, but are now about 15% (Liberals are the fastest growing electorate group out of the 9 identified by Pew, and most liberals are white). Non-whites were about 13% in 1992, now they are about 25%.

At the same time, evangelical whites have stabalized, and will likely start going down as all the older evangelicals die off and are replaced with liberal, secular young people.

So if the GOP wants to create a 3rd party that will alienate the other 75% of the nation even further, then I am all for it. I’d even help fund the movement.

Let them go out in a blaze of glory.

Maybe I’m misconstruing him, but he seems to be looking on these endorsements, not as from lunatic fringe or discredited pols, butr as reflecting the more rightist elements of the Republicans moving toward a third, right-wing party, effectively splitting and hence vitiating what survives of the G.O.P. as an effective opposition to the Democrats.

Go splitters go.

I doubt it’s the start of a national trend, though.

First, I’m aware of the history of the New York Conservative party. I wasn’t suggesting that the existence of this party or a candidate from it was in itself news. The news is that so many former Republicans broke ranks to endorse the Conservative Party candidate ovrer the one from their own party.

And I never said any of the endorsers were ‘mainstream’ Republicans, although Fred Thompson and Dick Armey definitely were, and they were heavyweights in their party. Sarah Palin was of course the VP candidate in the last election.

Really, I was just trying to answer the question of why these particular politicians are doing this at this time. Palin is said to be grooming for a shot at the Presidential nomination, so she’s got little to gain in bucking the party leadership like this - if she’s staying in the Republican party.

This is not a gaggle of social conservatives, btw. They’re far more libertarian than social conservative. Steve Forbes is a libertarian. Dick Armey is more libertarian than social conservative. Sarah Palin was hammered as a social conservative, but she’s always had a libertarian side to her. Fred Thompson is fairly socially conservative I guess, and I believe Rick Santorum definitely is.

But all of them are very much limited-government conservatives. And no, they don’t currently have any power in the Rupublican party - I made that point in the OP. But each one of them has his or her own substantial following, and together they could put up a pretty big grassroots movement, I think. Thompson and Palin both ignited the Republican base, then crashed due to their own failings. But there’s no doubt that both can energize the grassroots. Michelle Bachmann is a rising star in her state. Steve Forbes has the ability to unite the increasingly aggravated business community and raise gobs of cash.

I don’t know about Rick Santorum. I’ve never much liked the guy. And he’s as close to an establishment Republican as the group has. But other than him, if I were trying to start a 3rd party on the right, I’d have a hard time thinking of a better collection to start it with. They’re not necessarily the people best suited to actual governing, but in sheer grassroots appeal and fundraising ability, which is what really matters when starting a new party, you couldn’t do much better.

The question of whether it’s good or bad for the right is different, and I think Rickjay makes a whole lot of good points. The right fractured in Canada, and gave Liberals complete dominance for a long, long time. But I do think the U.S. political system is sufficiently different that it doesn’t necessarily have to play out that way.

The fact is, the Republican ‘brand’ is extremely damaged - so much so that even with Democrat’s approval ratings dropping like flies, the Republicans aren’t picking up any new support. Congress as a whole has an approval rating down in the 20’s. There’s a widely held belief that both parties are corrupt, beholden to special interests, and ruled by idiots. Conditions are certainly better for a 3rd party today than they’ve been since Perot dropped on the scene.

I worked for the Conservative Party in 1966 and 1968, and Jim Buckley, who lost in 1968, was elected Senator as a Conservative Party candidate in 1970. In 1966 they moved to the third spot on the ballot when a candidate named Adams, with zero charisma, outpolled the Liberal spot. Typically the Liberal and Conservative parties in NY endorse a Democratic or Republican candidate, but can help draw them to the left or right by threatening to withhold the extra votes they’d get.

I don’t think that, given this history, a close race or even a win in one district is going to spread nationally. That the Far Right will endorse a conservative over a hated Eastern Liberal Republican is hardly earth shattering political news.

Trouncing? They’ve eked out two minority governments in three elections

Largely due to the non-play of Quebec seats, which go Bloc and hence make a majority nearly impossible when the rest of Canada is running the old two-and-a-half party system.

If you just look, though, at Conservative versus Liberal votes, which right now is what decides who runs the minority government, the Conservatives are beating them by solid margins.

As I said, though, this might not be a systemic feature of the current system (as Liberal dominance was under a two-conservative-party system) but simply a reflection of the Liberals running out some bad leaders and bad campaigns.