DETROIT –Mike Norris wrote to tell me how frustrated he is with our entire political system. “Very few of us are actually represented in the legislature,” he said. “It is most certainly time for a third and fourth party,” he said.
Norris is hardly naïve – he has degrees in political science and political management, plus a law degree, and has worked for candidates of both parties. And he is far from alone. Last year, a Gallup poll found that half of all Americans identify themselves as independent, not Republicans or Democrats.
That’s the highest number since polls on the subject have been taken. What’s more, nearly two-thirds of us – 62 percent – said they would like to see a new party. Some politicians feel the same way: Two years ago, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York said “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.”
No doubt Wyoming’s Liz Cheney feels the same way about Donald Trump. So why isn’t there a viable third party?
The answer is simple: Whether by accident or design, the entire system is set up to prevent one from ever happening.
Here’s why starting a new party might be beyond even Bill Gates’s wealth: From time to time, we’ve had third-party presidential candidates who got a significant chunk of the vote, though none has carried a single state since George Wallace won five states in 1968.
Now, it is quite possible that an independent or third-party candidate could be elected President one day. The late H. Ross Perot came the closest, in 1992, and for a time, was even leading both Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush in the polls.
Then he bizarrely withdrew from the race, then later got back in, claiming he had dropped out because of fears the Bush campaign would falsely smear his daughter. Despite that, and other erratic behavior, he won nearly 20 million votes.
But even if he had won, it would have done little or nothing for third parties in this country. Here’s why: While Perot ran on the “Reform Party” ticket, there was no real party, just him.
Had he become President, he would have had to immediately affiliate with the Republicans or the Democrats, or he wouldn’t have been able to get anything done. This is why U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed independent socialist, caucuses with the Democrats.
Any viable third party would have to have a nationwide infrastructure and run candidates and win elections for Congress and state legislatures nationwide, plus governorships and other offices.
Building such a party would take billions, and vast organizing skills. There are, of course, third parties, like the Libertarians and the Greens, and a few Libertarians have been elected to state legislatures.
But they haven’t gotten further than that. Bill Gelineau, who owns a title company in Grand Rapids, was Michigan’s Libertarian candidate for governor in 2018. He is thoughtful, reasonable and well-informed, and a good debater. But on Election Day, he got only 56,606 votes out of more than four million, about 1.3 percent.
“What happens is that they want to vote for us, but at the end they don’t, because they know we can’t win, and are worried that whichever one of the major parties they hate most will,” he told me.
So, many of those who are tempted to vote for third parties vote for what they think is the lesser of two evils.
Third, fourth and even fifth parties do well in most European countries, where there is proportional representation and a political culture where building multiparty coalitions is the norm.
But the United States has winner-take-all elections, and a culture in which power has oscillated between two major parties for nearly two hundred years. (While it is sometimes said that the Republican Party was a successful third party, that isn’t really true. The Whigs completely collapsed in the 1850s, and the Republicans formed and quickly took their place.)
Third party movements have frequently sprung up throughout American history, but traditionally they were soon absorbed by one or another of the big parties. The 19th century Populists, for example, were largely absorbed by the Democrats; those who voted for George Wallace’s American Independent Party mostly became Republicans.
However, until recently both the Democratic and Republican parties were relatively “bigger tents” than today, with room for a variety of views across the ideological spectrum. That’s no longer the case. There are few pro-choice Republicans, for example, and few Democrats who want to see abortion made illegal.
That has added to voters’ discontent. There is a movement that is designed to help all factions have more of a say: Ranked Choice Voting, also sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting.
There are variations, but in general it works this way: Voters don’t simply cast a vote, but rank the candidates in order of preference. If nobody gets a majority, the lowest candidates are eliminated, and their voters’ second choices get those votes.
That system was used last year in the New York mayoral race, and will be used in the next presidential election in Alaska and Maine. But so far, it hasn’t been adopted anywhere in Ohio, and is only in use in a couple small Michigan communities.
RCV may not be the best answer to voter discontent, but it does give people a chance to cast a vote for a third party without fear that their vote will be thrown away. Nobody knows if it will catch on. But it is very clear that citizens are becoming more and more discontented with the political process – and that is truly scary.
-30- (Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade)
