Third Parties
Third Parties and the Smarter Voter
The Democrats and the Republicans have a stranglehold on American politics. Congress is paralyzed by partisan warfare. The deficit is out of control. Corruption scandals rock both parties. Yet in every election, just about every voter casts a ballot for a Republican or a Democrat. How can we break out of this stalemate?
The United States is the only democracy where only two political parties contend. In Canada, in Britain, in France, in Germany, voters have more than two choices. Why only two parties in the United States?
Our electoral system is one problem. The Electoral College is out-of-date. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where the candidate who wins more votes can lose the election. This is what happened to Al Gore in 2000. The Electoral College also hurts minor parties and independent candidates. In 1992, Ross Perot won about 19 million votes across the country. But he got nothing to show for it. He did not win a single electoral vote.
Campaign finance is another problem. Some believe that the laws governing campaign finance are nothing but a major party protection act. In 2004, the Democrats and Republicans each got a federal government subsidy of $75 million to run their general election campaign. This was on top of millions more that each party raised in soft money. Minor parties got nothing.
And then there’s the media. They lavish attention on the major party candidates and more or less ignore the minor party candidates. In 2004, minor party candidates—including those from the Green Party, the Constitution Party, the Libertarian Party, and the Reform Party—won over 1 million votes. But they got virtually no coverage. And they were also excluded from the televised debates. The League of Women Voters used to run the debates. Now they’re run by the major parties themselves. And the major parties have decided that only candidates who are at 15% in pre-debate polls can participate in the debates. Of course this almost always restricts participation to the major party candidates. And this is the kiss of death for minor party candidates. Unless they can share a televised platform with the Democrats and Republicans, voters don’t get to know them and won’t vote for them.
Why should we care? For one, when we continually choose only between Democrats and Republicans, our choice is pretty limited. There may be some important differences between the parties right now, but that hasn’t always been the case. George Wallace, who ran as a third party presidential candidate in 1968, once said, “There ain't a dime's worth of difference” between the Democrats and Republicans. In some respects that’s still true today.
Third parties also bring new ideas into politics. Ross Perot, for better or for worse, was largely responsible for raising the nation’s awareness of the budget deficit. The Green Party is the only party running on an unabashedly pro-environmental platform. It’s safe to predict that in 2008 neither the Democratic nor the Republican candidate will advocate an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. But some third party candidate will.
Many people do not want to waste their vote on a minor candidate that has no chance of winning. But some third party candidates have done quite well. Perot won almost 20% of the vote in 1992. And in other elections, minor party candidates have actually won. Lowell Weicker was elected Governor of Connecticut in 1990 on a third party ticket. Angus King was elected Governor of Maine as an Independent in 1994, and was re-elected in 1998. And former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was the Reform Party candidate when he was elected Governor of Minnesota in 1998. What did these candidates have in common, besides their partisan independence? Each was very well known in his state and so the media paid a lot of attention to them. And more important, all three candidates were fiscal conservatives and social liberals. They supported balanced budgets and limited government spending, and they also supported gay rights and a woman’s right to choose. In fact, both Weicker and King won a high proportion of women’s votes.
Ralph Nader has long argued that the major parties act as if they own your vote. In a sense, he’s right. The Democrats and Republicans campaign against each other, pass laws that benefit the two parties, and still typically win 99% of the vote.
Informed voters need to at least consider the possibility of supporting other candidates. You may decide in the end that a vote for a minor party candidate is too risky—that it might deliver the election to the major party candidate you least prefer. But being informed about alternatives can only make you a smarter voter, and make the United States a healthier democracy.
Professor Howard Gold
Department of Government, Smith College
Northampton, MA
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