Can You Vote for a Third Party? Take the Test.

            The idea that third parties are spoilers is a baseless conspiracy theory on par with the Loch Ness monster, the man on the grassy knoll, and Pizzagate. But what if you’re worried, like many Democrats, that voting for a third party like the Greens’ Cornel West or, if they ever get their act together, someone from the No Labels Party, might improve Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House next year?

            Given just how bizarre, manic and exhausting Trump’s four years were, I don’t blame you for being paranoid. It was a rough time for Democrats, more so than under previous Republican administrations. You’re traumatized. You’ll do just about anything to stop that from happening again!

(Those of us on the Actual Left, not Democrats, found Trump’s time in the White House more amusing than dispiriting. Sure, he mostly did stuff that we didn’t like. But so did Biden. Anyway, it’s not about us…not this week.)

Don’t worry.

We’ve got this.

You may very well be able to vote your actual conscience, assuming that you have one, and vote third party without increasing the odds of a Trump restoration by one iota. Take my hand and let’s find the answer to your burning question: can you safely vote third party?


            First Filter: Do you live in a swing state?

In 48 states, the victor in the popular vote wins all that states’s electoral votes. Coupled with the fact that many states are lopsidedly either majority Republican or majority Democrat—by a lot—the electoral college’s winner-takes-all scheme ensures that votes for a small minority third party can only (theoretically) change the outcome in a “swing state” where the vote could go either way.

For example, the Democratic presidential nominee, whether it’s Joe Biden or RFK Jr. or a rutabaga, will win New York, where I live. New Yorkers like me, therefore, can happily vote for Dr. West or my cat or No Labels secure in the knowledge that they will not be doing anything to help Trump.

There will be four swing states in 2024: Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. If you are one of the 92% of American voters who do not live one of these four swing states, your vote is 100% guaranteed to have no impact whatsoever on the election. Vote, don’t vote, vote red, vote blue, vote green, makes no difference—your state will fall into either the red or blue column. We already know which. Nothing can change the result.

Maine and Nebraska assign their electors proportionally. In one of these two low-population proportional-voting states, you could theoretically affect the assignment of a single electoral vote. However, the closest legitimate electoral-college margin was 23 votes, in 1916. (Bush beat Gore by 5 but that followed the Supreme Court’s awarding of Florida to Bush. The 1876 Tilden vs. Hayes race is officially listed as having been won by 1 elector, but was decided by Congress in an insanely racist corrupt deal and is universally considered to have been illegitimate.)

If you’re in the 8% of the population who live in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, please continue below.

If not, stop here. CONGRATULATIONS! You can vote third party!

Second Filter: OK, you’re a resident of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada. What is the likely margin between the Republican and Democratic votes for president?

Note this number.

Third Filter: As a resident of Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada, how many votes do you personally control?

If you are a political power broker like Democratic Party boss James Clyburn of South Carolina (but not actually him since South Carolina is not a swing state), this number may be high—in the thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. Otherwise, because you can only control your one single vote when you go into the voting booth, this number is one. Note your number.

Fourth Filter: Subtract the answer in the Third Filter Question from the answer in the Second Filter Question.

If the answer is greater than zero, CONGRATULATIONS! You can vote third party!

            If the answer is zero or less, STOP. You may not vote for a third party. As a Richard Daley-style political boss, or election machine hacker, or whatever scary person you are that allows you to control zillions of other people’s votes, it would be reckless and irresponsible for you to cast your many votes for a third party instead of Joe Biden, since your swing state might fall into the Trump column as a result.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

If If If, If If, You Never Know

Once again, Democrats are agitated about the possibility that their candidate, President Joe Biden, might lose because of a third-party spoiler. This time we are talking about Green Party candidate Dr. Cornel West, and something called No Labels. When you break down the cause for their concern, however, it’s easy to see that they are paranoid.

Democrats and Republicans “Stole” Over 35,000,000 Votes From the Greens and Libertarians in 2020

Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true.

Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because their statement’s obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true).

Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green because they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change the outcome, people who don’t live in swing states have no reason to worry about tipping an election, parties ought to have to earn votes, voting for a lesser evil is still voting for evil, a little party will never become bigger until we stop overthinking our tactical voting and simply support that candidate and the party we like best.

But—are small parties really electoral succubi? First, a look at Republican losers who blamed third parties for their losses.

Running as a Progressive in 1912, a vengeful Teddy Roosevelt out to punish his former protege for deviating from progressive Republicanism is alleged to have sucked away votes from William Howard Taft. We did wind up with President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat—a result cited as the ultimate example of a third-party candidate splitting a party. But historians forget to mention that 1912 was a four-way race. Wilson faced his own “spoiler,” from his left: Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, who got six percent of the popular vote. Taft was such a weak candidate that neither Teddy nor Debs made a difference; Wilson would have won no matter what.

Pundits say Ross Perot created a big enough sucking sound of votes from George H.W. Bush in 1992 to hand the race to Bill Clinton. Pundits are mistaken: Perot pulled equally from the Ds and the Rs. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen is unfairly blamed for contributing to Trump’s win in 2020.

Similarly, left-leaning third-parties—since 2000, this has meant the Greens—have never poached from Democrats in big enough numbers to change the outcome. Green Party supporters tend to be leftists like me, who would otherwise not vote at all. If the only two parties on the ballot were the Democrats and Republicans, we’d sit on our hands.

Greens can’t steal my vote from the Democrats. This is because Democrats didn’t have my vote in the first place.

The Greens are not a purer, more liberal version of the Democrats. Greens’ progressivism, which criticizes the economic class divide and prioritizes programs to reduce income and wealth inequality, and opposes militarism, is a different ideology than the Democrats’ corporate identity-politics liberalism of tokenism and forever wars. Democratic voters who care more about abortion, affirmative action and transgender rights than class issues are not likely to abandon them for the Greens, who are most interested in economic problems like the minimum wage and Medicare For All.

At the same time, progressives don’t think of the Democratic Party as a watered-version of Green progressivism. Progressives hardly see any difference between Democrats and Republicans. There’s little to no daylight between the Big Two on the matters progressives worry most about: economic unfairness and militarism.

The real spoilers are the two major parties who “steal” votes—from small parties like the Greens and the Libertarians. Unlike the little organizations, who count themselves lucky if they pull in three percent of the vote in a presidential race, Democrats and Republicans steal massive numbers of votes from their rivals.

I’m talking, of course, about the phenomenon of “strategic voting.”

“I’m a Democrat who loves Joe Biden but I’m voting for Howie Hawkins (or Cornel West),” said no one ever. On the other hand, a lot of people who would otherwise go Green instead vote Democratic because they are afraid of “wasting” their vote. Many “Democrats” are actually progressive, falling significantly to the left of the Democratic Party. If they thought the Greens could win, they would vote for them.

A 2019 Hill-HarrisX survey sums up the strategic-voting mentality: 65% of Democratic voters said they would prefer to vote for a primary candidate with the best chance to beat Trump than one who agreed with them on their top issue. What if Americans voted their opinions? What if “wasting your vote” wasn’t a consideration?

A 2021 Pew Research analysis found that six percent of voters belong to the “progressive left.” They tend to be young and highly-educated; they’re the “largest Democratic group to say it backed Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primaries (though members of this group broke heavily for Biden in the general election versus Trump).” An additional 10% are what Pew calls the “outsider left”: very young and “not thrilled with the Democratic or Republican parties—or the country writ large, for that matter.”

            If the Green Party had full access to the political process, and we voted our opinions, it could expect to get all (or close to all) of the 16% of the vote who are progressives and alienated leftists. Full access to the system would include:

  • Placement on ballots without having to overcome onerous ballot-access requirements and nuisance lawsuits by the Democratic Party
  • Invitations to televised debates
  • Media coverage at the same level of exposure as either of the two major parties
  • Donations to finance advertising and data research at the same level as either of the two major parties
  • No more attack pieces in the media characterizing third-party votes as “wasting your vote” for a “spoiler” who “can’t possibly win”

(I don’t have space to address other institutional advantages enjoyed by the Democrats over the Greens, like a big rich party’s ability to attract more high-quality candidates and the fact that Americans have been propagandized by their parents and teachers since childhood to believe that the two-party system is inherent to our political system.)

The Greens are so marginalized that it’s hard to imagine this alternative reality in which they were seen as a true “third party” on par with the Ds and the Rs—not kooks or weirdos, simply a third option. Even so, it’s safe to say they’d be closer to 16.0% of the vote than the 0.2% garnered by presidential nominee Howie Hawkins in 2020.

            Pew also found that 12.0% of voters belong to what it calls the “ambivalent right”—irreligious, young, prefer smaller government and are “more moderate than other Republicans on immigration, abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization.” There’s a word for that orientation: libertarians. Yet, due to the same barriers faced by the Greens, the Libertarian Party only got 1.2% of the vote in 2020.

            By my back-of-the-envelope calculus, Democrats and Republicans are poaching over a fourth of the overall vote—over 35 million—from the Greens and Libertarians.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Voter Suppression? You’re Soaking in It

Democrats rightly criticize Republicans for efforts to suppress the Democratic vote. But both parties suppress third parties like the Greens and Libertarians. If you doubt that, look for the third parties next time you cast a ballot. Any country with just two parties can’t reasonably call itself a democracy.

The Only Wasted Vote Is a Vote Not for a Third Party

What would be the totem animal for a third-party?

Jesus, Ted. All you ever do, some people tell me, is complain. We get it—you hate both the Republicans and the Democrats. We don’t like them either. But those are the only two parties that have a chance of winning an election. Stop telling us what not to do. Tell us what you think we should do instead.

That criticism is fair. If you don’t like something, it stands to reason you think something else is better and you ought to say what it is.

In my defense, people will never build a new political system until the old one is dead to them. Che Guevara said that the masses would not risk the violent upheaval of revolution as long as they still believed the old regime capable of addressing their needs and grievances to any significant degree. Although the elimination of the two-party duopoly in U.S. electoral politics does not necessitate violence, the same inertial principle applies: as long as progressives and other leftists continue to think that they can express their political will through the Democratic Party, they won’t create the space for what comes next.

So job one is to drive a stake through the corpse of the Democratic Party. Much of my work these days is dedicated to my belief that the Democratic Party is where progressivism and liberalism go to die. I am out to convince as many people as possible to get real, dump the Dems and move on. Articulating the platform of a new third-party or revolutionary movement before enough progressives and leftists have given up on the Democrats would put the cart before the horse.

It would also be arrogantly undemocratic. No one person, certainly not a 57-year-old cis white male political cartoonist, can or should write a programme for the future of an entire society. We all have to do that together.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know that I think that nothing short of revolution is adequate to address the radical problems faced by Americans and by humanity, beginning with the climate crisis. The profit imperative of capitalism is inherently corrupting; it hobbles all efforts to move toward a sustainable relationship with the planet. But no one can make revolution. It happens or it doesn’t. What to do in the meantime? Specifically, for us now, what if anything should we do with our vote this November?

The most compelling argument for electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is harm mitigation, with a view toward preventing a second Donald Trump administration, cleaning up the mess from the last four years and governing better than Trump would have.

I don’t find this argument compelling. History shows that presidents rarely accomplish anything of substance during their second terms. Trump would probably be the same.

Not only did Barack Obama fail to clean up the mess he inherited from George W. Bush, he codified and expanded it: he told CIA torturers not to worry about being prosecuted, he expanded the assassination drone program, he sent more troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and he continued Bush’s policy of austerity for distressed homeowners and the unemployed with giant cash giveaways to the big banks. Likewise, Bill Clinton didn’t do anything to reverse the Reagan revolution; he went further right than the Republicans dared with “welfare reform,” Joe Biden’s devastating crime bill targeted at minority communities, NAFTA and the WTO. Given Biden’s half-century record of neoliberalism and his refusal to apologize for any of his crimes, it would be ridiculous to assume he would govern as anything other than a Republican.

After you accept the reality that a Biden administration would probably be even worse than keeping Trump, the question becomeas, should one vote and if so for whom?

There is a long and honorable tradition of voter boycotts throughout the world. This is especially true in countries without vibrant functioning democracies, like the United States. (In a European-style parliamentary democracy, most voters can find a party close to their personal ideological alignment. A two-party monopoly cannot possibly serve 330 million people.)

However, there is a relative dearth of data studying the motivations for people who stay home on Election Day. There is a cultural assumption in the U.S. that non-voters are lazy, apathetic or both. So it’s hard to ask intelligent progressives and other people disgusted with the two major parties to sit it out on November 3rd, knowing that they will be shamed.

Which leaves the third-party option.

There are two relatively notable third-party candidates this year. Clemson University professor Jo Jorgensen is the Libertarian Party nominee for president. On the left, the Green Party standard-bearer is unionist and environmentalist Howie Hawkins.

Given that neither candidate is likely to be elected, the main reasons to cast a vote for Jorgensen, Hawkins or another minor party candidate are to register a protest—I’m not apathetic, look, I vote—and to build an organization for the future. You can’t keep saying every two or four years, I would love to vote for a party other than the Democrats or the Republicans but the other parties are too small unless you actually do something to make one of those other parties bigger. That means voting for them. That means contributing money. Not two years from now, not four years from now, but now.

I have not yet decided whether to vote for Hawkins or someone else. I do know that I won’t be voting Democratic or Republican. I’m against both parties. Both parties kill innocent foreigners with abandon. Both parties neglect the poor. Neither party cares about the planet.

Why should I vote for a party I disagree with on almost every fundamental issue?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the biography “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

If We Did Other Things The Way That We Vote

A lot of people don’t want to vote for a third-party candidate like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson because they believe their vote will be “wasted.” But they don’t apply the same logic to most other things in life, many of which involve setting yourself apart from the herd.

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