Are Third Parties Really the Problem?

Campaigning for the next general election in 2024 has already entered into full swing, with vibrant discussions on who Americans will elect for president taking place across the entire country. We in the American Solidarity Party have been heartened by several endorsements and pledges of support for our nominee, Peter Sonski. However, the slew of anti-minor party opinions has also begun in earnest. There are many Solidarists who left the Republican Party after the rise of Donald Trump, who have already addressed why their conscience won’t allow them to support him again. This duopolist rhetoric has also emerged on the left, though, positing that independents and minor party voters need to rally behind Joe Biden because democracy itself is at stake. This line of thinking may seem convincing, but in practice holds little weight. Americans should cast a vote with pride come November, not reluctance.

The most prevalent argument among Democrats and their supporters is that minor party candidates will split the vote of the anti-Trump bloc and inadvertently hand him the presidency. They say this is a uniquely important election, where freedom and democracy themselves are on the line, so pro-democracy voters need to rally together behind Joe Biden so we can all vote freely in the future. A vote for the Libertarian, or the Green, or the Solidarist, they say, is an implicit vote for Donald Trump, and the only way not to elect Trump is to vote for the Democratic Party. This is, on its face, ridiculous. A vote for any of the minor parties is a vote against much of what Donald Trump stands for. Inconveniently for the Democrats, however, it’s also a vote against much of what Biden supports. A significant majority of Americans are unsatisfied with both Trump and Joe Biden for various reasons. In a well-functioning democratic system, the Democrats would at least attempt to rectify these issues, either by nominating someone else, or at least encouraging Biden to change certain positions; i.e., things that would convince voters. The Democratic Party thinks itself too good to try to convince you though, and really, it’s your fault for voting your conscience, because that vote should have gone to Joe Biden and you were just too selfish to do what you should have. It’s fifteen months before the election, but somehow, it’s already accepted as fact in some circles that the reason Biden didn’t get “x amount” of support is not because he wasn’t convincing, nor because the Biden campaign didn’t do a good enough job at outreach; no, it’s the fault of the unconvinced voter for voting their conscience. Make no mistake, this attitude is undemocratic, and if a party is trying to essentially coerce voters with such rhetoric, it is the one who does not uphold democracy and value it as much as it should. If the Democrats truly believed Donald Trump was a fascist threat, and that voters should stop him by any means possible, they would lead by example, and push to reform the voting system so independent-minded voters could mark their support both for their preferred party and Joe Biden. They certainly wouldn’t spend millions of dollars supporting the far-right in Republican primary elections.

Many Democrat voters aren’t filled with such pseudo-righteous indignation, however. Quite the opposite, they feel apathy. “Why vote for a candidate who has no chance?” they say. They note that there are only two candidates with a chance of winning nationally, so they might as well vote for the one they dislike less and have a part in that person’s potential victory. Better that than voting for a candidate who has no chance, and consequently throwing your vote away, right? This argument is common among people of all political persuasions, and it is used to argue for either party. It also makes little sense. How is it that your vote only counts if it comes within a certain margin of victory? Votes only obtain value ex post facto? The clearest debunking of this thought process is to remember that a presidential election is actually 50 different state elections. Of those, there are only around 10 states that have a foreseeable chance of going to either party at all. In dozens of states, it’s all but guaranteed that Joe Biden will lose the presidential election. It’s just as much a reality that a Democrat will lose as a minor party will in that state, yet no Democrat-leaning voter is apathetically throwing up their hands in resignation and voting for Donald Trump as he’s the only candidate with a chance of winning. At this point, many reluctant major party voters will point out that since their argument is based on supporting the less bad candidate with the chance of winning, it doesn’t apply in safe red or blue states. If they lived in one of those states, they would vote third party, but alas, they live in a swing state, necessitating a duopoly vote. 

This does make their argument much more compelling, but it also introduces several problems. Firstly, voting your conscience should be both a right and a thing to be encouraged in a democracy, not a privilege based on where you live. Second, if a major party fears losing a swing state on the basis that minor parties are gaining more support there, that is good. That is the situation in which minor party voters have the most influence, because they’re making a genuine difference in a national race, even if their own candidate isn’t winning. It makes all too real the danger of ignoring these voters. It’s a situation where minor party votes exercise greater power than average, not less. In fact, most minor party votes have a greater proportional influence. Rallying, say, 10,000 votes to a major party candidate is in the vast majority of states a drop in the bucket. But a small party making a 10,000 vote improvement is quite noticeable. Or, in a more lighthearted sense, both duopoly parties accuse minor party voters of implicitly voting for the other. Following that logic, a minor party vote is both a vote for that candidate, a “secret” Republican vote, and a “secret” Democrat vote. That vote has three times the power as a duopoly one!

Republicans of course, use this rhetoric too, claiming minor party votes help re-elect Biden. Instead of asserting Biden is uniquely capable of saving America from fascism, they claim the Republican candidate will be uniquely poised to stop the alleged communist threat posed by the Democratic Party. The flaw with that argument is the same: if they genuinely believed Joe Biden is somehow leading us into Stalinist tyranny, red state governments wouldn’t write laws that solidify Democrats’ status as the only opposition party. For both parties, their claims that the other are would-be dictators align well with their actions that solidify the other as the only alternative choice, thus tricking voters into thinking their options are either freedom or tyranny. In reality, this strategy is nothing more than Republicans and Democrats colluding to chip away at American democracy for their own benefit.

By this point, I’m sure many readers have been considering that I haven’t mentioned in detail the effects that our first-past-the-post voting system plays in all these issues, so fear not. The reason Americans are stuck in this lesser-of-two-evils predicament election after election is due in large part to our voting system; because a voter can only select one candidate, vote splitting is a very real phenomenon. This is by design. This is why the assertions I’m arguing against have become so prevalent. If we had a better voting system, like STAR voting or approval voting, both methods for single-winner races, or some form of proportional representation, or both, most of these problems would go away. So why don’t we have a system like this? Because it’s in the duopoly’s interest to keep these problems in place. The arguments above that they deploy have been effective; no matter that they’re not logically sound. The major parties benefit from this democratic deficit. Further, in most states, governments impose draconian ballot access restrictions, making it extremely difficult for minor party opposition to even be listed on the ballot. And, even when small parties and independents push through, collecting the many thousands of necessary signatures, election boards arbitrarily disqualify thousands of them. In North Carolina, the state’s Democratic Party falsely accused the local Green Party of signature fraud, despite the fact that even with the invalidated signatures removed they were still well over the signature requirement. They had to sue to remain on the ballot. In Montana, the Republican-dominated state Senate attempted to pass a bill that would replace partisan primaries with a two-round system—for solely the 2024 US Senate election and no others, fearing that a Libertarian candidate would “steal” their votes in a general election (it died in the state House). In Maryland, the Libertarian Party noted that the signature which Governor Larry Hogan used to sign bills into law would not be considered valid for a ballot access petition (even if the Board of Elections verified all the necessary information for the signature, including address and identity, only “Lawrence J. Hogan Jr.”, not “Larry Hogan”, would be considered valid. 

So to the many Americans who truly want to vote for a minor party, but are unwilling as long as first-past-the-post is reality, I ask you, how do you think the voting system will change? How will we improve democracy by voting for those who are working tirelessly to weaken it? The only way we will get the majority of Democrat and Republican politicians to support voting reform is to vote en masse for minor party candidates. They clearly won’t change the system out of love for democracy, but they will change it when vote splitting threatens their own electoral prospects. Indeed, a reform like STAR voting stands to benefit all parties, not just small ones, by ending vote splitting and incentivizing people to vote their conscience. Over the past 250 years, the American people have worked tirelessly to make our country more democratic. If you want a true multi-party system, where a diversity of voices compete for a citizen’s vote, let voting reform be the next step.