Originally printed in the Batesville Daily Guard
If there’s something that has become
pretty obvious this election it’s that many, many Americans are not
happy with their choices.
First, you have the major parties, the
Republicans and Democrats, running two of the most unpopular candidates in history. According to RealClearPolitics.com, which
averages several different polls, Democratic presidential nominee
Hillary Clinton is averaging 52.4 percent as far as unfavorability and
Republican nominee Donald Trump averages 60.8 unfavorable.
That isn’t
a good sign for the winner of this election, as the 2018 midterm
elections will probably see their party lose seats in both the House
and Senate.
Sure, there are options that aren’t
Democrat or Republican, the most prominent being Gary Johnson of the
Libertarian Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party. The thing with
them is that winning the presidency just isn’t that realistic.
Of course, a lot of that can be blamed
on our electoral system. Unlike most modern democracies, the U.S.
uses the electoral college, which means we don’t directly vote for
president, instead we vote for electors to cast a vote for us on
behalf of the winner, who takes all the electoral points in a given
state. The winner doesn’t need to have a majority of the popular
vote, which is 50 percent-plus one, they just need an 269 electoral
votes, which means they’ll get all of the state’s electors
whether they win with 90 percent of the vote or with 43 percent of
the vote.
But the lack of success of third
parties can’t be blamed solely on the electoral college. Instead,
they can also be partially blamed on the nature of the parties
themselves.
You see, many of the third-parties are
ideologically based, like the Libertarians and Greens. That means
that they don’t have as much room to wiggle around and stay true to
their base at the same time, unlike big-tent parties like the
Republicans and Democrats, which are each made up of a variety of
different stripes but remain flexible enough to target the
all-important moderate voter in the general election.
This is hard to do for parties based on
ideological principles instead of vote-winning. Expanding the tent
can mean bringing on new members but also alienating old members who
demand a certain level of purity. It’s also a challenge to reach
out to moderate voters who tend to be less-focused on ideology and
more concerned with issues that require a certain flexibility that
many parties can’t provide.
And of course, the presidential
debates, or in reality joint press conferences, also shut out other
voices. You can thank the Commission on Presidential Debates for
that.
The most successful third-parties in
the U.S. have had the “big tent” potential, like the Bull Moose
Party of the 1910s and the Reform Party of the 1990s. But those
parties, which had opportunity to grow, quickly fizzled out when the
strong personalities, like Theodore Roosevelt and Ross Perot, that
founded them were no longer the driving force.
Now it seems more people want to
support a third party more than ever. Unfortunately, you also have a
polarizing election where people are willing to go the “lesser of
two evils” routes because they know who they don’t want in
office. It’s an election where many people are voting against
someone instead of for them.
The problem is then not people desiring
a choice, but often a lack of what they see as viable choices. That’s
not a good way to inspire faith in our democracy.
So what’s it take for a third party
to get somewhere? Probably a big tent that won’t blow over after
one election. But it’s also got to have resilience to fight the
establishment, whether it be the two-party system, electoral college
or lack of coverage from the national media.
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