What we have now is two parties slightly left and right of center, fighting for the center. It seems that every time some rich guy decides to run as a third party, he can never scrounge up more than 5% of the votes and never wins a single state.
Does anyone think that a grassroots campaign from a third party would have any traction? It would start with city council positions and then build up into mayoral, state congressional, gubernatorial, and national congressional campaigns. But what would be the distinct unifying platform that could siphon off a significant amount of Dems and/or Repubs? It’s hard to imagine such a party with a fairly coherent platform that can appeal from coast to coast.
What about if one of the two main parties now ended up controlling a vast majority of the states? Let’s say the Dems manage to get 75% of the states under their belt; since the constituents would likely have major differences with each other, would that provide the impetus for a split in the ranks and the creation of a third, nationally significant party?
Your best chance for a viable third party would be a regional party that represents a region who’s interests are ignored by the major parties. If you look at the modern third party candidates, the ones who got presidential electoral votes were in that position (Thurmond in '48 and Wallace in '68).
It would take a total revision of the system we have now. We would have to alter our system to proportional representation, which would require a Constitutional amendment. This amendment would never pass, of course, because the parties have too much to lose by letting someone else into the process.
The other alternative, one that I hope you don’t wish for, is an issue that is so divisive that it threatens to dissolve the Republic. That is the origin of the Republican Party, after all. In the end I think we can say that the Civil War was worth it, but I doubt they were thinking that in 1860. It would require that same kind of thinking for a viable third party, and if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with what we have if that is the next best option, thanks.
Third parties can have a significant effect on politics even without getting anyone into office. If there’s some issue that you feel is not being adequately addressed by the two major parties, you can form a party based on that issue. For example, suppose you think that the most important issue facing America is a shortage of cute fuzzy puppies, and so you establish the Fuzzy Puppy Party, which has as its platform a commitment to increase the number of American puppies. If you then get, say, 3% of the vote, you’re nowhere near winning, but you’ve sent a clear message to the two major parties that there are three percentage points to be gained by addressing the Puppy Issue. At least one of the two parties, and possibly both, is likely to think that those three points are worth it, and will include the puppy agenda in their platforms in the next election. So even though your candidate loses, your issue wins.
A good start would be to have congressional districts remapped into sensible geographic patterns with boundaries determined by a bipartisan panel, like most other countries do. The Republicans and Democrats have, over the decades, rigged the deck. Gerrymandering is the incumbency full-employment program, heartily endorsed by both sides.
The public financing rules have to be changed. By establishing a threshold by which a party can suddenly get huge federal dollars, they help freeze out competition from smaller parties, denying them a chance to grow. Public financing should be abolished. Even for Democrats and Republicans. And most political speech restrictions like McCain-Feingold should be ended.
It’s still a huge uphill climb, but short of actually changing the structure of American politics, there are steps you could take to at least strengthen third parties.
There should be lower support thresholds for Presidential debates. I see nothing wrong with letting the Greens and the Libertarians in on the debates. Both parties clearly represent a fairly large swath of Americans, and even many in the Democratic and Republican parties are close in affiliation with them, and would like their viewpoint heard. But it’s obviously diminishing for a Republican or Democrat to be just two people in a a group of four or five, so they don’t want it. But you can’t tell me the Republic wouldn’t be better served by allowing more diverse political viewpoints into the formal debates.
It depends on the issue though, right? Consider the reasons why an existing party doesn’t address an issue:
It is incompatible with their philosophy.
They think focusing on it would lose more votes than it would gain.
They are ignorant of the issue and don’t realize the free votes out there to take.
Special interests keep them from addressing the issue.
1 & 2 are clearly cases where no amount of third party agitation will affect the main parties’ discourse. 3 works with your logic, but I doubt there are many issues like this with all the polling and research that is done. So we’re really left with just 4, I think. So, for example, a third party might rally support for nuclear power because both parties are hamstrung by Nevada politics, coal interests, environmentalists, etc. But the institutional structure preventing major parties from addressing the issue remains in place. To be effective, the third party would have to do more than just garner some percentage of the votes, but fundamentally alter the self-interest calculus made in scenarios 2 and 3. I think that takes a lot more than most third parties are capable of.
Are there any historical examples of third parties raising issues which then become part of a major party platform? I can see how this kind of thing happens at the margins, perhaps. Maybe the Dems emphasize environmental issues more when Nader is in the race. But I doubt it affects their governance or ever alters anything fundamental about their platform.
We have a multi-party system in Canada, but only two parties have ever governed federally: The Conservatives, or the Liberals.
The fringe parties tend to rob votes from one or the other of the two main parties. There’s been a lot of talk here about changing the system to one of representation: if party “C” receives 20% of the popular vote then party “C” should have a 20% representation in either the provincial legislature or house of commons. This idea was put to a vote in Ontario in the last provincial election and shot down in flames by the people.
A two party system is not such a bad thing. (Although I love seeing the Ross Perot’s of the world coming forward!)
I actually agree with **mswas **here, in that I think the most likely practical scenario right now involves the Republican Party bifurcating, the culture-warriors over here, the policy wonks over here, duking it out.
If McCain got 47% or so of the vote just now, a divided Party could probably get well over 50%–put together. Something like 30% for one faction, and 25% for the other, meaning that Barack 2012 would pull in 45% and cream them both. But in terms of long term viability it may take longer for the two fractions to stabilize, and since the Pubbies may (depending on events of course) decide that 2012 is a long shot anyway, by 2016 it may be a good gambit for them to decide to bifurcate and maybe get one of the factions over 33%.
Perot actually got 19 percent of the vote in 1992. And if he hadn’t dropped out of the race in July and not campaigned for two months, he might’ve done better than that. I’m not sure what other rich guys your thinking of, but I don’t think Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan are comparable to Perot that way.
The game is rigged for the Democrats and Republicans for a lot of reasons, and while many people are not in love with either party or the entire system, they do cover most of the mainstream options, and would move to co-opt any big proposals from a third party. It’s hard to see a major third party forming and lasting in this system as it currently exists. Usually they form, have one peak year (1992 for the Reform Party, 2000 for the Greens), and then fade.
I think a party could make inroads by first cracking state legislatures and then hacking away at the Senate caucuses. If they just stopped contesting Presidential elections that they’re not going to win in the next few tries anyway, a party like the Green Party or the Peace & Freedom Party could pour all of its money into a handful of races in California or Oregon or Vermont or Massachusetts and start gaining some power, slowly but surely. After cracking the first egg, they can use the strength of their policies to gain more and more seats at the state level, then make a run at a couple of Senate seats occupied by people who the left wing sees as too conciliatory. Grab two or three Senate seats and all of a sudden people start paying attention to you–and that, without having to deal with the issue of gerrymandered Congressional districts.
Of course, in order to get any of this done, the party has to reach out to its winnable states, find out what those electorates want, and give it to them. If the national Peace & Freedom Party can do for Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon and California what the one-state Progressive Party has done for Vermont, they can link those efforts together and begin forming a cohesive party structure to be reckoned with. Now they can start challenging Democrats in their own Congressional districts, and even swoop in when a Republican leaves his office in disgrace. They can caucus with the Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman do, and suddenly they’ve got a voice on the national level.
Now this party can team up with the other ideologically similar third parties and field a single Presidential candidate who could really do some damage. Hopefully the righties would be doing all this too, although it scares me to think that parties to the right of the Republicans could actually get real power in this country. That’s one of the problems with this whole thing: you can’t go too far right from the Republicans, who tend to have more party unity and bring in righties of all stripes, but you can sure as hell go left from the Democrats, who could actually be described as right-of-center.
That said, I agree that Ron Paul could cause a serious upheaval in the two-party system if he split off from the Pubbies right now. I hope he does; I think he’s a nutter, myself, but anything that breaks the unitary Republican voice is OK by me.
Look, politically, here’s what it would take: A broad movement, not for any particular third party, but for the idea that a multiparty system, as such, is better than a two-party system, and the electoral laws should be reformed (in ways already mentioned in this thread) to facilitate its emergence. Such a movement would potentially have the grassroots support of all the existing third parties even if they can agree with each other on nothing else – a transpartisan, transideological alliance for electoral reform.
That’s the only way to put the horse before the cart. Otherwise – under the existing system, no I repeat no third party is going to repeat the trick the Republicans pulled off in 1854 of making itself relevant overnight.
In terms of truth-tracking, papers I’ve read on the subject show that it doesn’t really matter what voting system is in place, so long as the electorate has a better than average shot of being right. In a system with three parties, for instance, they need only to be smart enough to pick the right thing >1/3 of the time. For these results, the number of voters need only be about n > 50. So the real question is what a third party adds to the table that is so attractive. Chronos’s comment is interesting in that regard: a viable third party doesn’t actually need to exist, so long as the spoiler effect is large enough.
I think ultrafilter is right, however. First past the post exhibits a strong tendency towards a two-party system. Swtiching to something like IRV or approval voting (my favorite) would help third parties immensely.
With the exception of the Reform Party and Greens of previous years, in the Untied States it seems like most third parties are too far outside of the mainstream; either hardcore anti-tax gun-lovin’ wingnuts on the right with names like the “Constitution Freedom Liberty Party”, or parties bearing monikers like “People’s Worker’s Socialist Party” and “Socialist People’s Worker’s Party” and “Worker’s Socialist People’s Party” on the left, along with the latest “kill whitey and free Mumia!” incarnation of the Greens, that make regular left-of-Democrat progressives seem like Rush Limbaugh-listening dittoheads in comparison.
There’s really no other third parties appealing to mainstream voters.
The Presidential “debates” are nothing of the sort. They are a joint commercial agreed to by the Democratic and Republican candidates. They have absolutely no reason to share the stage with any other person. The Greens and Libertarians and Socialist Workers are perfectly entitled to hold their own debates and invite the Republicans and Democrats, but the problem with this is that they have absolutely no reason to come.
As for the notion that a third party could form due to a split in a major party, that doesn’t make sense. Either one wing or the other of the two new parties would push the other wing into irrelevancy. The only way we’re going to get a third party is if one of the major parties disintegrates, but this doesn’t leave us with three major parties, it leaves us with two major parties.