It’s unlikely you’ll get a whole third party any time soon.
The two current parties are well-entrenched.
What is possible is a single candidate from a third party who is successful at a high leadership position–President, say.
This would require someone already well-known and charismatic, and preferably with enough personal wealth to seed the start of a campaign. Such an individual would have to be willing to turn away the two current parties. Mr Perot and that weird Nader guy with the funny eye don’t count as charismatic.
With the advent of the Internet and more viral spread of fame (as opposed to relying on the existing parties) I think it’s possible.
There will never again be viable third parties in the United States. We nominate candidates in wide-open primary elections, open to everybody. Maverick candidates can get elected far more easily by running and winning in a major-party primary than by running under an unfamiliar third-party label.
And this is a critical point. Suppose you’re that charismatic, well-known, rich Knight on a White Horse that Chief Pedant postulated.
What would this White Knight gain by running on a third party ticket? If the White Knight really wants to gain political office, they can just declare themselves a Democrat or Republican and win the primary. If they can’t win the primary for one of the major parties, then how in the world can they expect to win the general? And once the White Knight has won the primary they will be able to take advantage of the vast apparatus of the major party to get out the vote, raise money, bring in consultants, and on and on.
Any person who seriously wants to win an election is going to join one of the major parties and work within that party. And this means that the third parties are all filled with cranks who are more interested in playing games than winning office. It’s a vicious cycle. No candidate with anything on the ball would join a third party because the third parties are filled with cranks and losers, which means that the only people left in third parties are cranks and losers.
So you’re never going to find an effective White Knight willing to run on a third party ticket, because a moment of thought would convince a rational White Knight to hijack the apparatus of a major party instead. And only cranks like Ross Perot are going to go through the pointless waste of effort of trying to create a third party out of nothing. If Ross Perot really wanted to be president, why couldn’t he have joined the Democratic party, and turned the Democratic party into the little-r reform party?
Remember, Ross Perot had a solid lead in the polls for a while. He could very well have won if he hadn’t done a couple of stupid things in the general election.
That’s why Third Parties **don’t ** make it; people associate with the single issue, not the party.
My shaky memory of American history indicates that the only way a third party has survived is when a major party lost big and divided.
Third parties run presidential candidates just for press; the focus should be on developing a limited platform that can garner multi-sub-cultural grass-roots support.
But suppose the Pubbies had nominated a maverick like John McCain in 2008? I mean, of course, a real maverick who would have backed off some of the positions he took to win the primaries, made nice-nice to the moderates by nominating pro-choicers Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge for his VP, and generally enraged his party regulars at his convention to the point that, I don’t know, Huckabee and Sarah Palin were chosen to run a hard-core religious right creationist splinter campaign. Assuming this would have happened, how would each splinter party have done in the 2008 election?
It wouldn’t have to be IRV specifically. IRV is actually a pretty bad system, and AFAICT when compared to other, similar systems, its only redeeming quality is that it’s easy to explain to people who aren’t voting-system geeks. In fact, IRV has the same “spoiler” problem as our current system; it just takes longer to appear.
For example, look at approval voting, which uses the same ballots we have now, or Condorcet methods, which use the same ballots as IRV but allow more voter flexibility and take advantage of all the information available on each ballot.
Right now is the best time for a new party. The repubs have splintered into the religious right and the rest. It is possible the religious right has hurt their electability. They may not want the Palin right wingers to decide their fate. It is not likely Palin can get national traction. But it may be messy getting rid of her from the inside.
Perhaps not quite yet… but if Mr Obama turns out to be a starry-eyed liberal as far left as Mr Bush was to the Right, and if he makes all the Left mistake equivalents to what Mr Bush did, THEN the Center Party can arise!!
ok not really but I had myself going there for a moment
Make that a Center Candidate; maybe not a whole party. But it’s true that unless both parties end up picking extreme wingers early on, only a very well funded and already-known Center candidate would have a chance for the Presidency, and then only with a very lucky viral campaign. Perhaps aided by the wingers on each side rabidly attacking one another. And I agree it’s more likely such a candidate would end up winning a standard primary if he or she so chose.
The one labeled “R” would have done much better, but they both would have lost, so it wouldn’t have mattered.
There is no possible way for a third party to stably arise in the current electoral system. I’m tired of Libertarians (and I am one myself) saying they voted Bob Barr because they want to make a point, unless they truly had no preference at all between the other two, which I doubt. That’s why I think that the most important political issue is adopting a Condorcet method-based electoral system. The problem is that it’s hard enough to explain it to people, let alone get them exited about it.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: I’m also tired of the obsession with the “center”. I want the candidates that are elected to the things I want them to do, not half the things I want them to do. I can accept that sometimes it has to be that way, but it’s not optimal.