« Supreme Dissent | Main | Jawa Report Back Online »

June 28, 2006

The One State Strategy

Third parties don't fare well in the US, because of the ruthless mathematics of our electoral system. In some ways, this is a good thing. It means that periods of tumult and discontent — particularly periods where there is no national consensus on the way forward — result in very hard feelings; but it also means that there is a way to resolve those feelings towards a consensus that does not involve armed gangs roaming the streets.

Nonetheless, there is also the huge downside that people are compelled to pick someone with whom they disagree on many things, or allow someone with whom they disagree on even more things to win. This in turn means that voting for third parties is always a losing game: your choice is so unlikely to get elected that there is simply no point in voting for him; better to vote for your preference among candidates likely to win. But how, then, does a group that by and large agrees with a particular party, but not on everything, ever gain the leverage to move a party? Are the Greens and the Libertarians doomed to howl in the wilderness forever? Probably, because they're loons, but there is a way that minor parties or cohesive interest groups could break out of the wilderness and actually become the kingmakers. The Democrats are trying a "50 state strategy", where they contest every election. A third party would need the opposite approach: contest one big election.

While third party candidates could conceivably win (have in fact won) House and maybe even Senate races from time to time, those positions are powerful largely by partisan alignment. A member of any party other than that holding the majority can only affect the body at large when there is essentially a tie in the rolls, as happened with Jim Jeffords' defection. Otherwise, their votes would be courted, but their views given no real power to shape the outcome of legislation (less power, even, than the power of the minority party, which at least has the numbers to force some changes in what is passed). But there is an election where this does not hold as true: the Presidential election.

The problem with the Presidential elections, besides the difficulty of getting on all the State ballots as a third-party candidate, is money. Without hundreds of millions of dollars, you have no hope of making an impact, and thus you will barely be mentioned in the press, and will certainly not be part of most debates, candidate questionnaires, and other such tools of influencing the process. If you cannot be heard, you will not be voted for. The one advantage of having Ross Perot run for President was that he had the money to be heard. If he wasn't going to be invited in, he could just buy 30 minutes of prime time TV to get his message out. This is not, to put it mildly, usually an option for third parties, and campaign financing rules make it essentially impossible for all except billionaires to even try.

But, and this is a huge but, that rule only applies if you are trying to win, and a third party doesn't have to do that. Instead, a third party could work to make itself the kingmaker, and this would take notably less assets. Consider the Greens in California or the Libertarians in Texas. By and large those states' populations are friendly to the message of those parties, and so there is a certain amount of resonance that their message would get. On top of that, winning in one state is much much cheaper than competing in all of them, or even in the ones needed for an electoral college majority, which means that enough money probably could be found to win one state, if the party's message was good enough.

So how does winning one state translate into becoming kingmaker? To be elected President, a person has to win the votes of 270 electors. California has 55 votes; Texas has 34. In both the 2000 and 2004 elections, Texas would have prevented George Bush from winning. California could have thrown the 1976 election to Ford. Consider this: had the Libertarians won Texas in 2000 or 2004, they could have essentially determined the outcome of the election, by instructing their delegation to vote for whichever candidate was going to offer them the most concessions. (In fact, any of several states could have fulfilled this role in either of those two elections.)

So it seems to me that if you want to be successful as a third party, your best bet would be to gain influence by trying to win just one state, and so to control the margin of victory. While this would be difficult, it's considerably less difficult than the traditional approach of trying to win the Presidency outright.

Posted by jeff at June 28, 2006 11:23 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/1041

Comments

Posted by: Karl Gallagher at June 29, 2006 9:30 AM