Casting a third-party vote is either protest or a lapse in basic reasoning
It’s that time again.
Ballots are appearing in mailboxes like little paper promises that this dismal, toxic election season will soon end and we’ll be able to reinvest our time and brain capacity in more useful things, like learning a new language or counting individual grains of sand on Alki Beach.
Chances are that either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be the next president.
That leaves unhappy voters with an unsatisfying choice: hold their collective noses and vote for the least-bad option between the major-party candidates, or follow Ted Cruz’s original advice before he took his seat at the Trump Tower phone bank and “vote your conscience,” which may mean voting for a candidate from a third party.
The Seattle branch of the organizing group Radical Women hosted a meeting in early October to discuss the tightrope walk between ideological purity and pragmatism. Though opinions varied, there was tension between voting for the first woman president or rejecting the two-party system, said Gina Petry, an organizer with the group.
Even a protest vote gives some kind of voice, Petry said.
“It does show people are protesting. It counts in showing that people want an alternative,” Petry said.
Jody Grage balks at calling it a protest vote. After all, her candidate is on the ballot.
Grage is an 80-year-old spitfire who organizes with Washington’s Green Party. Her party courts the disaffected voter, siphoning off people who might otherwise have voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the general election.
Grage argues that it’s safe to vote your values in Washington, whose Electoral College votes traditionally go to the Democrats. Here, a vote for Stein is not a vote for the Republican ticket, the refrain chanted by the Left who remember Al Gore’s presidential hopes dashed by either hanging chads or Ralph Nader, depending who you ask.
Dr. Jill Stein, the two-time Green Party candidate with a penchant for folksy protest music, and Gary Johnson, the eyebrow-less former governor of New Mexico, are polling at 2.2 and 6 percent respectively according to Real Clear Politics.
Despite months on the campaign trail and actual name recognition, neither candidate has as good a shot at the Oval Office as ex-spook Evan McMullin, the closest thing that the Republicans have to a white horse as they try to wrest their party back from the flaming Cheeto himself, Donald Trump. Through some political jujutsu, McMullin could win the presidency in the unlikely scenario that a vote falls to Congress, a process not invoked since 1837.
Clinton led Trump by almost 160 votes in an Electoral College predictor when Real Change spoke to Grage, a healthy margin and more than enough to get the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., she noted.
“So there’s a big gap there,” Grage said. “To my mind, the most important thing is to vote how you really feel.”
Howard Curzer has an issue with that logic.
Curzer teaches philosophy at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, a state that traditionally bleeds Red. He doesn’t like to get political in his classroom, reserving that space for less prickly topics such as abortion and gun control.
However, he couldn’t resist wading into the fray with an article on Huffington Post, not to take a stand on a particular candidate, but to correct what he views as a miscarriage of reason.
The professor breaks it down like this: Sometimes doing the right thing means getting your hands dirty.
Imagine that you’re walking and you see a child struggling in a river, in danger of drowning. Morality dictates that you save the child if you can, but to get to the stream you’ll have to trespass on private property, which is a crime.
Most people consider saving the child to be the greater good and would do so, but not every situation is so clear.
“A lot of times people are very uncomfortable doing things that they perceive to be getting their hands dirty, doing things that are morally uncomfortable,” Curzer said. “On the one hand, it’s nice to have those types of feelings. It keeps us from doing wrong a lot. In some situations, you have to get your hands dirty and do something repugnant.”
By this reasoning, casting a ballot for an imperfect major-party candidate — particularly in swing states where it makes a difference — is the morally correct choice, given that striving for purity would not achieve the goal of getting your ideal candidate into office.
That holds, as long as your political timeline ends on Nov. 8.
Breaking through in national politics requires name recognition and a party platform that a large swath of the country can get behind. But politics is an expensive hobby. Because neither the Green Party nor any brand of socialist candidate would take money from corporations, it has to come from somewhere.
One important source: the federal government.
Parties that achieve 5 percent of the popular vote in a national election get a range of benefits, including money in the next general election cycle. Break 15 percent and your candidate gets onstage in the national debates.
That positions a fringe party to win without actually winning.
Unfortunately for alternative parties, the current state of polling, political science and history aren’t bullish on such an outcome.
Polling for alternative-party candidates held steady throughout the election, said Rob Griffin, an elections expert with the progressive think tank Center for American Progress. Support for Johnson and Stein rose for several months, but peaked at 11 percent.
“We tend to see those numbers shrink as we get closer to Election Day,” Griffin said, noting that people who say they will vote for an alternative candidate often change their mind on the day.
As it stands, Johnson’s candidacy will lock in campaign cash for the next cycle and Stein’s will not. But no alternative party has crossed the 15 percent threshold in modern electoral history except Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who won 19 percent of the popular vote and nothing from the Electoral College in 1992.
Ronald Rapoport, the John Marshall Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, cowrote the definitive book on Perot’s candidacy, “Three’s a Crowd: The Dynamic of Third Parties, Ross Perot and Republican Resurgence.”
Perot “succeeded,” in alternative party terms, because he brought an idea to the campaign that neither the incumbent George H.W. Bush nor the Democratic governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, had raised, Rapoport said.
“Neither party had been serious about balancing the budget,” Rapoport said. “Republicans had given it lip service, and the Democrats hadn’t even done that. They didn’t want to make the hard choices.”
Enter Perot, a new breed of politician: The deficit hawk.
Perot and his millions of dedicated supporters wanted to cut spending and raise taxes. Those millions made the major parties pay attention.
Historian Richard Hofstadter once described third parties like bees, “Once they have stung, they die.”
“I think that’s a very helpful way to look at it,” said Margaret O’Mara, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington.
No third-party candidate has won the presidency, but when they can attract enough popular support they leave a mark on one of the two majors, shifting policies to respond to popular sentiment.
“Surfacing enough to make ripples, if not waves, is something. It’s where third parties come into play,” O’Mara said.
The last party to ascend into prominence was the Republican Party that grew out of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-1800s. The two institutions owe their durability as political brands to their flexibility, O’Mara said.
“Who a Republican was 100 years ago was entirely different than who a Republican is now,” she said.
Third parties, often headed by a flashy front man, represent causes that are then subsumed into one of the majors. Theodore Roosevelt, unhappy with incumbent President William Howard Taft, ran in the 1912 election as the head of the Progressive Party, pushing for government regulation of corporations. He stole enough votes from Taft to defeat him, putting Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office.
That incarnation of the Progressive Party and Perot’s United We Stand party have since died out, but the issues that they advanced live on. Third parties can move the needle, just not by themselves.
“What political scientists say is that there have been instances in history that have forced fairly dramatic changes in a coalition,” said George Lovell, a political science professor at the University of Washington. “That can happen when the third party is a threat.”
When a major party cannibalizes the third party, it theoretically retains the voting bloc along with new issues. That makes the existing parties more like coalitions than a monolith. Under a parliamentary system of government, they’d likely break up into smaller parties, Lovell said.
Not in the U.S.
The winner-takes-all system tends toward a two-party outcome. Political scientists call this Duverger’s Law, and it’s what they point to when they say that the best way to change the Democratic or Republican parties is from within.
The 2016 election has been a case study in that form of insurgency.
When the race began in 2014, it was assumed the ticket would look like a reprint of 1992, with a Bush running against a Clinton. Then Bernie arrived on the scene.
The septuagenarian senator from Vermont gave Clinton a race no one expected, energizing the populist Left and leaving burn marks on what was supposed to be a walk to the coronation.
His ideas gained traction.
“The great thing about Bernie running is that you don’t have to explain what single-payer health care is,” said Jody Grage, the Green Party organizer.
Sanders’ influence shows in the party platform adopted at the Democratic National Convention. His free college tuition proposal is now a Clinton talking point. Seattle won its $15 minimum wage, and as of July the Democrats want it for the rest of the country. The list goes on.
“What the Bernie candidacy did was show the Democrats that this isn’t some fringy thing,” O’Mara of the University of Washington said. “The Progressive movement, only the Democrats will be able to capture these voters.”
The Republican Party didn’t have the same experience when it tried to contend with its own populist dark horse.
“Trump is the insurgent, bomb-throwing candidate who is in the tradition of George Wallace and gets a decent chunk of voters,” O’Mara said. “This is a dilemma we haven’t seen in modern memory, certainly not in the modern era of campaigning. Someone who would be, in an ordinary season, the third party candidate is now the Republican candidate. That changes the equation.”
Trump’s popularity among segments of the Republican voter base is problematic for the Grand Old Party, something that has become increasingly clear as Republicans jump ship and House leader Paul Ryan counsels his flock to concentrate on down-ballot races.
“I think the Republicans have a real coalition problem,” Lovell said. “People who care primarily about cutting taxes and the welfare state, they’re not the Trump voters. The problem is if they kick the White nationalists out of the party, they’re in Gary Johnson territory.”
Trump is the boogeyman that the Democrats use to convince people not to go with Stein or another write-in candidate. Gina Petry, the organizer with Radical Women and a socialist feminist, doesn’t like that dichotomy.
“I’m tired of being told, ‘Just one more time,’” Petry said.
Petry knows that the work to get better options on the ballot doesn’t start with the presidential race. It will take organization and a well-crafted sales pitch to demonstrate the appeal of the socialist message.
And, though she knows the Republican nominee won’t win in Washington and that her lesser of two evils will take the state’s electoral votes, Petry says that personal and political calculus wouldn’t change the way she cast her ballot even if she lived in a swing state.
“Honestly, I would vote the same,” Petry said.