EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
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How to Make Third Parties Matter
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Most politicians, Republicans and Democrats anyway, take a dim view of the very idea of third party and independent candidates. Republicans are pretty sure that H. Ross Perot cost George Bush the first reelection in 1992.
Democrats believe they know that if Ralph Nader hadn’t been on the ballot in Florida as the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2000, Al Gore would have won. These things both might be true … but so what?
Voters are not children. Those who voted for Nader or Perot or for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein clearly had their reasons, and under the Constitution, their reasons are as valid as those of anyone else for voting for whomever.
Third parties have, throughout our history, often been the incubators of ideas that were later adopted by one of the other of the major parties. But the fact is that our system does work to discriminate against other parties.
This happens in two ways. First, many people who might be inclined to vote for a Libertarian or Green or other candidate change their mind at the end, because they fear if they do, the worse of the two major party choices may win.
So they hold their noses, and vote for what they believe is the lesser of two evils. My educated guess is that Bill Gelineau and Jennifer Kurland would have gotten far more votes for governor two years ago, except for this:
Liberal voters wanted, come hell or high water, to prevent Republican Bill Schuette from being elected. Some anti-abortion conservatives, on the other hand, wanted to stop Gretchen Whitmer, and both sides thought the election would be close. Well, it wasn’t. Whitmer won by 400,000 votes.
I think if voters had known that, a lot more would have been inclined to escape the two-party straitjacket. There’s another problem any third-party candidate for statewide or national office would face, if somehow they won:
Let’s say Ross Perot had been elected President in 1992, something that for a time actually seemed possible. He would have faced a Congress full of Democrats and Republicans, all of whom wanted to bring him down.
Unless he affiliated with one party or the other, or somehow managed to build a coalition, he would have had little power to get anything done.
Creating a true new national party capable of contending for seats in Congress and the legislatures would take more money than even Michael Bloomberg has. The only way I can see around that would be to change the system to allow proportional representation.
But there is an easy way to allow more people to vote third party that shouldn’t get the major parties in too much of a tizzy: Ranked Choice Voting,
In its simplest form, voters would be allowed to designate a first and a second choice. If no candidate got a majority of the popular vote, the second choice votes would be counted. Let’s say Whitmer had gotten 45 percent of first-choice votes and 9 percent second choice – she would be declared the winner.
But the politicians would see the true number of voters who preferred Libertarian policies, say, and might adjust their behavior accordingly.
We’d also have more of a true democracy. This is Jack Lessenberry. Thanks for watching and listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
