Third parties never win, because they can’t

19 July 2023

It bears repeating that the Democratic Party, as the party that represents a majority of the people of the United States, also represents the full continuum of legitimate politics. The moderate middle is somewhere between US Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative from West Virginia, and US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a liberal from New York.

The real moderate middle exists between the poles of one party, the majority party. It does not exist between the parties, which are not poles at all but spectrums unto themselves. This is the way things are. Indeed, things can’t be otherwise. Our system is winner-take-all, not proportional. If it were proportional, we’d have more than two parties. It’s not. So we don’t.

That we continue to talk about a moderate middle as if it were an actual thing that exists between the Democrats and the Republicans – and that we continue to talk about the parties as if they were poles, not continuums – is an outcome of the words that we affix to things, not the things themselves.

That brings me to No Labels. It’s a “bipartisan” group that has lately gotten a lot of attention for advancing the fantastical notion that the majority of the people of the United States want neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump to campaign for president, and instead want a truly independent third choice.

According to the Times, the organization released Monday a “centrist manifesto” – or “what it calls a ‘common sense’ proposal for a centrist White House, in hopes of shifting the conversation from the politics of its potential presidential bid to the actual policies that it believes can unite the country and temper the partisanship of the major party nominees.”

The group says it won’t field a candidate unless victory is possible.

It’s not possible.

But people are making too much of No Labels.

Bruce Bartlett is indicative. “I still think that No Labels is essentially a Republican front,” he wrote. “Although some of its proposals appear to be progressive, I think on net a No Labels candidate would pull more votes from a Democrat than a Republican. Sadly, the marketing is very good.”

Josh Marshall added to Bartlett’s thinking. “Always important to remember that ‘No Labels’ is owned and operated by the husband and wife team of Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson, former players in the Democratic political world now working for Republicans,” he wrote Tuesday. “It's ‘No Labels” in the same sense that a spy or undercover agent also has ‘no labels.’”

It’s not that either of them is wrong. It’s wise to be informed and careful. It’s that the attention that’s being given to No Labels right now is of the same caliber as the polls on which its argument is based – which is to say, trash.

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos said Sunday that 70 percent of Americans say they don’t want Biden to run while 60 percent say they don’t want Trump to run. One of his guests was former US Senator Doug Jones. “Polls a year and a half out mean nothing,” he said. The same can and should be said of the attention that’s being given to No Labels right now. A year and a half out – midsummer, no less – means that attention is trash.

Remember, too, that longing for a third party is cyclical. Every election features polling that reflects a desire for more than two choices, and every election, as Doug Jones said, features results from just those two choices. Why doesn’t a third party candidate ever win? Because, as Jones said, “there is no way on God’s green Earth that they can get to 270 electoral votes.”

Why is there so much longing for more choices? I think it springs from a tension between fundamentals that can’t be resolved without fundamental change. The fundamentals are: one, the already mentioned desire for choices, and two, a system that was expressly designed to limit choices.

Nothing can be done about the desire for more choices. This is a consumer society, after all. (Choices may be the one true American creed.) So the only way to resolve this tension is by changing the system, fundamentally. That means moving from a winner-take-all system to one that’s proportional.

In 2020, more than 2,473,630 people in the state of Georgia voted for Biden. More than 2,461,850 people voted for Trump. Biden won 49.47 percent. Trump won 49.24. Trump did well, in fact, nearly tied Biden’s share. But he got nothing for his trouble. He lost all of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.

That’s winner-take-all.

There’s no room for third parties.

A proportional system might make room, because the share of a candidate’s electoral vote would be proportional to the share of the total vote that each candidate won in each state. In Georgia’s case, Biden would get his share of the electoral votes, Trump would get his and (theoretically) the Libertarian Party’s Jo Jorgensen, who won 1.24 percent of the total, would get hers.

But third-party candidates never win, because a winner-take-all system guarantees they can’t. Because they can’t win any power, they are impotent and, therefore, meaningless. So they are completely ignored post-election.

All they can do, as Doug Jones again reminded us, is spoil things. “One way or another, they’ll be a spoiler. And as (ABC News’) Rich Klein said, it looks like they will be a spoiler in favor of Donald Trump.” Indeed, if it were not for Jo Jorgensen’s 1.24 percent victory in 2020, he might have won Georgia.

A proportional system might provide the potential for coalition-building, which is to say, for true political compromise, because the smallest parties could force the biggest parties to bargain with them to form governments.

If No Labels actually wanted a unity ticket, as it claims to, it would spend more time – indeed, all of its time – raising hell about the need to fundamentally change a system expressly designed to limit choices.

But, as I said, the problem isn’t the things we have. It’s the words that we affix to them. We talk about the parties as if they were poles, rather than what they truly are, which is political spectrums. Proportional systems produce parties that are narrow ideologically. (Think of the Greens in the UK.) A winner-take-all system, however, produces parties that are broad ideologically. Even the Republicans, as extreme as they are, represent a range of views. (Historically, they even represented varieties of liberalism.)

It’s because the Republicans have become so extreme that the Democrats have become the party that represents a majority of the people of the United States. And somewhere in the center of the continuum of political views that makes up the Democratic Party is the real moderate middle.

Our winner-take-all system is deeply flawed. Most systems are. That’s not the problem though. The problem is how we talk about it. If we understood our system better, we might stop with these silly debates over third parties.

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