How Third Parties Could Win

The question came up on social media recently what it would take to see significant victories by third parties — political parties in the U.S. other than the Democrats and Republicans, including the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and Andrew Yang’s new Forward Party, among others. While I’ve long since moved on to try to make positive change in the world through other means, I used to follow third party politics pretty closely, so this is something I’ve thought about in idle moments for some time.

Some U.S. states have a process called “ballot initiative”. This process allows citizens to circumvent their legislatures and simply by gathering enough petition signatures, cause a piece of legislation or an amendment to the state’s constitution to be enacted or rejected directly by majority vote at the next election.

Using this process, third party activists could push for a state constitutional amendment that changes the process by which the state legislature and Congressional delegation are chosen from single member districts specifically to a system of statewide, no threshold D’Hondt method, party list proportional representation.

That means (roughly) in a chamber with 100 seats, when a party gets 3% of the votes, it get three of the seats. It immediate demolishes the “wasted vote” problem, in which people don’t vote for a third party or independent candidate even when they prefer that candidate because they perceive no chance that candidate can win. And in a state like California or Texas with a large Congressional delegation, the vote percentages that a minor party can realistically achieve even mean a few seats in Congress.

What good are a few state legislative seats or a handful of seats in Congress? Well, in chambers that are nearly evenly divided, it doesn’t take many seats to make the difference between whether a bill passes or doesn’t. A recent example is that of moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who by withholding his support for legislation supported by other Democrats was able to wield disproportionate influence on that legislation (much to the consternation of many in his party).

While not as recent, a more salient example might be that of Lacey Putney, an independent (not affiliate with any political party) member of Virginia’s House of Delegates for most of the last fifty years. He was the only independent in the lower house of the state legislature, but so important would his support have been that when it seemed the chamber might otherwise not have a majority party, not only was he guaranteed an influential committee chairmanship by whichever party he would support, some pundits even suggested he might be able to negotiate his way into becoming Speaker of the House of Delegates.

But as helpful as those short term concerns might be, having a few legislative members might be even more important in the long run, because one of the reasons people don’t consider third party and independent candidates is that news media routinely blackout coverage of them. Consider the 2016 presidential race. Everyone knew who Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were because the media covered their every word and action. But there were other candidates in that race, including Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who as a successful two term Republican governor of New Mexico who managed to cooperate with a Democratic-led state legislature was arguably the most qualified of the three. And yet, the only major coverage he received was when he misheard a question about Aleppo, Syria and answered it poorly. For some reason, of all the things he had said on the campaign trail, that was the only one the news media deemed worthy to play, and on repeat, no less. But it’s one thing to ignore or make fun of candidates who never win. It’s quite another to brazenly refuse to cover sitting legislators.

Unique among strategies available to third parties, this ballot initiative approach is something that’s actually possible to do right now. If there’s anything third parties have shown they can actually accomplish, it’s ballot access. This process has also been proven to bring structural change that people want and politicians don’t. Those states that have term limits put them in place because of exactly this sort of initiative: libertarian activists used their expertise with ballot access signature gathering to get term limits legislation on the ballot, bypassing legislators who never would have enacted such a thing in a million years. And this proposal is very similar to term limits in that it’s a challenge to the systemic power of the duopoly, which has to be brought where they are weakest, not strongest.

And while to have the best chance for this to succeed third parties that may otherwise not have a lot in common would want to cooperate, if there’s anything on which they could all agree it’s that any chance for meaningful reform would beat being stuck under either the Democrats or the Republicans for the rest of their lives.

Those familiar with electoral reform proposals may notice that that I haven’t mentioned RCV, or ranked choice voting. That’s on purpose. I think it’s a pipe dream that RCV could actually lead to significant victories for marginalized candidates. It still requires that a majority of voters think positively about one’s party before it can lead to seats, and in an environment of systemic deterrence and conspicuous media blackouts that simply isn’t going to happen. Because of that, pushing for RCV is actually a huge mistake for minor party activists, because it mean they’re taking their one shot at electoral reform at the wrong target.