The Third-Party Problem
Longshot Presidential candidates can't win, but they can make a major candidate lose.
I’ve saw this 1980 editorial cartoon in one of my university political science textbooks, all those years ago, and never forgot it:
John Anderson was a former Republican Congressman who saw an opening for a third-party Presidential bid as a moderate alternative to incumbent Jimmy Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan. He actually did better than people remember, winning 6.6% of the vote, which along with two dollars might get you a small coffee at Tim Hortons.
Ross Perot won even larger shares of the vote in 1992 and 1996, but it still equalled big fat zeroes in the electoral college. George Wallace actually did win some states in 1968, in the region of the country one would expect,1 but never came close to the Presidency that year. (He kind of made it to the White House in spirit in 2016, but that’s anther post.)
It has been over a century since a Third Party candidate had a real shot at winning a Presidential election - and even that one just happened to be a former President - and while enthusiasm for a Trump-Biden rematch in 2024 is decidedly muted, I’m not holding my breath for anyone to come up the middle next year, either.
In fact, according to Nick “Don’t Call Me Allahpundit” Cattogio, it could be a bad year for a third-party candidate precisely because the major party candidates are so widely disliked:
…the supposedly straightforward logic of third-party viability isn’t just wrong, it’s backward. Third parties don’t thrive when voters strongly disapprove of their choices. They thrive when voters don’t feel strongly about those choices either way.
The best performance by an independent candidate in recent American history came from Ross Perot, of course, who managed to win almost 19 percent of the vote in 1992. He did that at the expense of two squishy establishmentarians, Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton. By comparison, given a choice in 2016 between two despised figures in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Americans handed a mere 5 percent or so of their votes cumulatively to upstarts like Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
If third parties perform better when the major-party candidates are hated, 2016 should have been the year that an independent broke out. But it wasn’t, because hatred isn’t the soil in which successful independents grow. To say that Clinton and Trump were “hated” is true but really just another way of saying that voters on each side had strong feelings about not letting the other party’s candidate become president.
And voters with strong feelings don’t throw away their votes on longshot candidates. They vote strategically, which means holding their nose and sticking with their own party’s nominee. It’s when they don’t have strong preferences, as in the case of Bush and Clinton, that they might feel comfortable rolling the dice on a longshot.
This is the third-party paradox. When voters are most disgusted with the Democratic and Republican nominees, that’s when independents are least viable.
And, potentially, most dangerous.
Democratic partisans insist that longshot Green Party candidates cost them victory in 2000 and 2016, by taking away votes in extremely close races. Ross Perot might have affected the outcome in 1992, though it’s less clear whom his supporters would have backed if stuck to his withdrawal from the race.2
And I can barely begin to imagine the ungodly shitshow that will emerge if “No Labels” goes through with a 2024 campaign:
The No Labels theory of the case is that Manchin or Hogan would run up the middle, capturing the broad disaffected center while Biden and Trump slavishly pander to their respective bases. For that to work, though, there would need to be a roughly equal share of persuadable moderates in each party willing to abandon their nominee for the independent challenger. There isn’t. Strong support for Trump on the right and tepid support for Biden on the left ensures that most votes for Manchin would come out of the Democratic column.
Numerous observers have run the numbers on this point and politely informed No Labels that you imbeciles are going to get Trump reelected…
[…]
An analyst at Third Way, another centrist group, buttressed the argument against a No Labels run in a piece published in December. The enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden is real, she noted: Whereas 56 percent of those who viewed Biden favorably before the last election described themselves as “very favorable,” 69 percent of those favorable to Trump described themselves the same way.
And among voters who didn’t like either candidate in 2020, Biden cleaned up. In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost the “double hater” bloc to Trump by 17 points. That group swung the other way four years later, with Biden winning them by 15. Analysts Al From and Craig Fuller note that a recent Wall Street Journal poll found Biden currently ahead by 39 points among voters who disapprove of how both he and Trump handled the presidency.
Offer those “double haters” a palatable third-party choice in 2024 and instead of holding their noses to vote for Biden they might switch to Joe Manchin instead. “In all [five key 2020 swing states], at least 1 in 3 Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump; in Wisconsin, that number was 38 percent; in Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot) a whopping 45 percent,” From and Fuller go on to say. Subtracting those voters from Biden’s total would almost surely guarantee a Trump victory, bearing in mind that just 44,000 votes across three states prevented a 269-269 deadlock in the Electoral College last time.
No Labels is going to turn an election that should be a referendum on Trump’s fitness among undecided voters into a choice. Jittery Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are already wargaming ways to try to stop them, including filing lawsuits to try to have them thrown off the ballot in swing states.
What are they thinking?
I’m skeptical that No Labels is a stalking horse for the Trump campaign, as some suggest. If they really want to back The Donald, this strikes me as a really roundabout, expensive way to do it.
And, honestly, a few polling shifts here or there (or one or both of Trump or Biden breaking a hip and getting replaced) and it could be Republicans screaming about No Labels playing spoiler.
No, I think they’re serious, and completely delusional.
The frustrating thing is, I agree that a centrist party is badly needed in America, as a home for disaffected Republicans who watched the GOP fly off the rails into flat-earther territory - literally - but don’t really belong in the same tent as Bernie and AOC.
I’d be on board with No Labels if they tried to build a new party from the bottom up, instead of the top down.
Even if they found a high-profile nominee for President, they won’t win. But I can see an opening for a centrist third party at the state level in places like California, a de facto one-party state in which the Republican label has as much brand equity as Ayds weight-loss supplements.
I can’t imagine everyone in San Francisco is happy with how their Democratic-controlled city is doing these days, but actually voting for a same political party as Donald Trump come municipal election time - assuming the GOP runs candidates in the Bay Area at all - remains a bridge too far.
In the same way that supporting professional sports teams is kind of like “rooting for laundry,” many voters are absolutely fixated on the party brand. Sadly, that’s why so many Republicans who despise Trump fall back into line, because voting for a D-d-d-democrat?!? is unthinkable even when the GOP candidate is pathologically insane.
It would be great if they all supported Joe Biden next year, but in some parts of the country -especially in major cities and ultra-deep-blue states - there are Democrats it most certainly isn’t worth supporting. Show me a centrist alternative there, and I’d listen with interest.
This tweet shocked me, and not just because I didn’t know Time magazine was being published.
Chernobyl was located in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Russians locating their crappy nuclear power plants there still ranks pretty high on Ukrainians’ long list of grievances.
The Soviet Union wasn’t completely controlled by Russians - the guy with the moustache was from Georgia, and several Soviet rulers and top officials were Ukrainian or had Ukrainian ancestry - but there’s no question about which nation dominated it. Indeed, the country was synonymous with “Russia” for many Westerners, and decades after the USSR mercifully collapsed, Ukraine is still seen as a kind of extension of Russia, the way all of the Scandinavian, Baltic and Benelux countries are lumped together.
As strongly as I disagree with demands to “cancel” Russian culture in response to the invasion of Ukraine, I can at least understand where it’s coming from. Since early 2022, Ukrainians have sent a clear message that they’re very much their own nation.
An upstart political party can do well if its support is heavily concentrated in certain states, while winning an even larger share of the vote from coast-to-coast might win you nothing at all.
The same applies for Canada and the UK, where the Bloc Quebecois and Scottish National Party are heavily overrepresented in Parliament, while the Canadian NDP and British Liberal Democratic Party have far fewer seats than their popular vote totals would suggest.
Of course, we don’t know for sure how these presumably disaffected voters would have voted, if at all. But people who blame Susan Sarandon’s endorsement of Jill Stein for costing Hillary Clinton the Presidency aren’t in a mood to hear that.