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Third party voting woes
teddywolf: "I also finally got to properly put into words why not voting for third-party candidates hurts the electorate in the long term."
First, as they said in Spaceballs: The Movie, here's the short short version:
When you play chicken with politicians and blink first, they win.
Now, the short version:
Politicians are, by their nature, trying to get elected into public office. The two major parties in the United States, Democratic and Republican, are both major players in the political system. With exceedingly rare exceptions, if you don't belong to one of those two parties or have some other major ace up your sleeve, such as universal respected name recognition like General Colin Powell or large sums of cash like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, you will not get elected into office. This does not have anything to do with your platform or even how charismatic you are. It has to do with the two major parties engaging in staredowns with the voters and the voters blinking first.
Part of this is a meta-narrative that only the big parties can get people in to office. It is rare for people to successfully fight this meta-narrative, like Bernie Sanders in Vermont. Once you have a common consensus that somebody can't win, the consensus has the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy no matter how much the electorate agrees with the candidate. This even happens in the two big parties. For example, in 2008 we had a Democratic candidate who wanted to institute single-payer universal health care, institute an immediate full-scale withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, rein in the power of Wall Street and improve legislation and enforcement for clean air and water. All of these policies were and are the favored positions of over half the population of the nation. However, the actual nominee and eventual president stopped short of promising to work on any of those. Kucinich was viewed as 'unelectable' despite having the platform most Democrats favored.
In the case of third-party candidates, there is a common phenomenon: they might poll in the double-digits before the election, though commonly in third place - second if they're lucky - but come election day they get considerably fewer votes than the polls would have indicated. The struggle at the voting booth for the voter is this: do they vote for the candidate they like the most, whom they think is unelectable, or should they instead vote for the major party candidate who is closest to their position even if they aren't anywhere near as close as the third party candidate?
While most of the time an individual vote will not make the difference in an election, voters are aware that there's a margin of only a few points going into the election - common in lots of elections at the state and federal level. They don't want to risk the candidate they least like getting into office because they are rightly worried about the damage that candidate will do as a politician, so they vote for their second-most favorite candidate.
Unfortunately, this has two lasting effects, potentially three, all of them bad for the electorate. First, these voters don't get what they want in a candidate. They may have, for example, wanted a Libertarian who would cut taxes, reduce government, not worry about who they have sex with or what they smoke; but instead they voted for a Republican who promised to cut taxes and government but talks tough about marijuana and frowns upon gay sex and threesomes.
Second, related but more subtle, the candidate has no real desire to do the will of that segment of the electorate. The politician received their plurality one minority Democratic candidate in the 2008 Democratic primaries, lots of people voted for Barack Obama but seemed to feel he would wholeheartedly work on Kucinich's platform. However, they gave him no reason to do so - barely anybody voted for Kucinich.
Potentially third, in the case of a single election going to a candidate who received a plurality of the vote without a majority because a third-party candidate drew off enough support from one of the two major-party candidates, it commonly ends up with the people vowing not to let this candidate stay in office because they don't like how they run their politics. In short, they have buyers' remorse for their third party vote. Some people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 felt some of this in regards to Al Gore versus George Bush and vowed not to vote for him again in 2004. Sure enough, Ralph Nader got considerably fewer votes in 2004.
To expand the previous example with something totally hypothetical, let's give an example of an electorate that is 30% GOP, 35% Democratic, 20% Libertarian and 15% independent. Hey, I did say hypothetical. The Libertarian Party has never put forward a successful candidate for Congress. They usually get in the mid-to-high teens in support before the election, maybe even very low twenties, but by election day they seldom get into the double digits. The GOP almost always carries this district. Each party keeps its voters. The independents vary their vote, some years breaking more for the GOP candidate, some years the Democratic candidate. The Libertarians are not cohesive either, with anywhere from 25-90% of their voters instead casting their votes reliably for the GOP, usually at least 60%. The rare times the Democratic party has gotten somebody into office, they have gotten a large percentage of the independent vote and the GOP has gotten a very small percentage of the Libertarian vote.
The result of those elections, when a Democrat comes in, is that a Republican candidate comes along who appeals to a larger percentage of independent and Libertarian voters. Combine this with buyers' remorse for letting the Democrat into office and you end up with the GOP re-taking the seat. However, since the Libertarians reliably vote Republican far more often than not, the GOP does not have a major incentive to do anything for the Libertarians. What's more, since the Libertarians never manage to withhold their support from the GOP for longer than one election cycle, they have no real leverage to move the GOP any closer to the Libertarian platform.
Now is this all the fault of the electorate blinking in a game of political chicken? No. Don't get me wrong, the voters do blink first. However, the way the political system is set up is a huge driver for how elections end up. We have winner-take-all elections, meaning whoever garners the most votes wins; this favors a two-party system. We don't have any sort of multiple-representation districts, meaning it goes to a single candidate instead of possibly having multiple candidates representing an area and having more third-party representation. The system is heavily driven by money and organization, which most third-party candidates can't manage anywhere near as well as a major-party candidate. Finally, we don't have any sort of preferential voting, which would give third-party candidates more chance to come in and upset the two party applecart. This doesn't even include the media-driven meta-narrative of the Serious Candidate versus Unserious Dreamers.
If the electorate had the fortitude to vote for their long-term conscience instead of short-term compromises, then we might see some difference in how third-parties work in the United States. Unfortunately, the deck is heavily stacked against that.
The two major parties do not necessarily collude with each other to maintain power; likely they don't. However, neither of them are willing to loose the reins on their own power to the benefit of the other party. If we had more people willing to vote like adults who can handle long-term planning we might not have this problem. We don't. Without a major groundswell from the electorate for serious reform, or a significant percentage willing to accept short-term real losses for long-term potential gains, this is the system we will maintain; and vast numbers of voters will continue to grumble that neither of the big parties properly represent or help them.
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What we need is instant runoff voting in elections, so you could vote for your first party of choice, and then a second party if your first one doesn't get enough votes. My state rep, who is a Democrat, actually favors an IRV system, but he can't get many people to agree with him.
I have two counter-arguments to your post that I usually propose, although only one of them directly hits your discussion (and maybe even not that directly).
1. While it is true that voting for a party that has a chance of winning rather than for the party whose platform you most agree with hurts your party, there are times I would rather know that some of my platform is going to be implemented. Going into example-land, let's say you prefer the Green platform, but the Democratic platform is the next closest, and you reject the Republican and Libertarian platform. Voting for a Green candidate who has no chance of winning could yield a Republican winner, and then you'd see even less of what you want on the short term. In truth, all political parties are compromises for everyone in them; party members will flock with others who are mostly going their way in order to get some of what they want accomplished done.
2. There's a piece of advice I always give to people inclined to vote for a third party on the big ticket offices (such as president or governor). While doing so might make some sort of statement, it doesn't really create effective change in the long run (from what I can see). On the other hand, if a third party began by placing candidates in lower-level offices, the electorate can get to know and like them without considering party affiliation. If Selectman Bob goes to his constituents one day and says he's running for state rep, but by the way I'm a Green, they might say, well, we don't know the Greens very well, but we know Bob and we like him. And thus, though grassroots movements, a third party starts to take local stage...and eventually, the national stage.
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