Changes – Politics move like a see-saw

Originally published in the Batesville Daily Guard

We are going to see a lot of changes in 2017 — changes that are going to make some people very happy, some very unhappy and others just frustrated with the process in general.

Over the last few decades, our government has become a see-saw of sorts as the two big parties, Democrats and Republicans, move away from the middle and embrace more narrow ideals of what is considered “liberal” and “conservative.” The election of 2016 drove that home with two huge personalities, President-elect Donald Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, essentially becoming the human embodiments of the bases, or at least the most enthusiastic, of their respective parties.

People who live and breathe politics, particularly those who think in terms of “right vs. left” don’t have a problem with this. For them, it’s more a battle of good vs. evil and shaping the government to fit a vision instead of filling the potholes and making sure the trains run on time. It’s sort of like the “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” cliché, except instead of throwing the baby out, the argument is to either give the kid a bath in a frozen lake or a boiling kettle.

That sounds a little extreme, but we seem to be in pretty extreme times, at least politically. It seems we are rapidly approaching a chaotic time when we are going to see things built up in one election thrown out in the next and then the things built during that government are thrown out with the next. That’s not what anyone would call stability. It’s just a mess.

There’s always the talk about the need of people to support a third party, but the minor parties of the U.S. tend to have even more extreme philosophies. Americans constantly poll that they do want a third party, but none that exist really seem to offer what they want.

What do they want?

Probably some sort of calming influence, a balance of sorts.

In most democracies, there are two major parties like ours, usually center-left and center-right and a lot of fringe parties. But there are also often third parties who may not be the same size as the big two, but not as small as the fringe, that take more moderate positions and make themselves necessary for the larger parties to form a governing coalition. In a way, acting as sort of a middle weight that slides slightly to balance the board and keep it from becoming a seesaw of back and forth policies — stability you could say.

Right now, it would seem an opportune time for such a thing. The 2016 election saw the lowest voter turnout since 1996. In 1996, only 53.5 percent of voter-age Americans turned out for the election. In 2016 that number was 55 percent, much lower than 64 percent of voter-age Americans who cast ballots in 2008. Those numbers say people are either indifferent or just turned off by the current offerings.

And really, who can blame them? With people on both sides of the political aisle more interested in making pronouncements or condemnations, those who want to be outside of partisan fights are either ignored or attacked. That does not get them interested in turning out for the polls.

Of course, a viable third-party probably won’t happen anytime soon. In the U.S., third parties have a habit of not going for modest goals — like running for local, state and congressional offices — but instead seem to center around capturing the presidency.

Sure, capturing the presidency is probably the ultimate goal of any political party, but sometimes four or five people in Congress can make as big of a difference when it comes to things that affect people’s lives as well as balancing partisan ideology.

It may only be a pipe dream, but I do hope to one day see a government where there are some adults in the room.

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A table just for two

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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