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A Three-Way Fight: Third Parties in US Politics
From: Columbia University
| By:
Robert S. Erikson |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Republican Party, 150 years ago, was an upstart third party that took up issues not being dealt with by the two dominant parties at the time, the Democrats and the Whigs. In this interview with Fathom, Robert S. Erikson (right), professor of political science at Columbia University, describes the effects of Ralph Nader's Green Party in the 2000 US presidential election and looks back in history to the Republican Party's successful rise as a major party in the 1850s. |
Fathom: Have we always had a two-party system? |
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| Robert S. Erikson describes how the third-party vote can hurt the Democratic Party in a dead-heat race such as the 2000 presidential election. | |
Robert S. Erikson: The United States has always had a two-party system. We have third parties on the scene, and what happens to them typically is that the third parties contest once or twice, maybe for president, and then they dissipate rather fast. Look at the Reform Party. It's clear that Ross Perot was serious about developing a Reform Party at one time, but obviously the Reform Party got away from him and the Reform Party became a joke and largely extinct. The Green Party, Nader, of course had similar goals. |
One thing they wanted to do was to get 5 percent of the vote so they could compete for federal funds next time, but they didn't get that threshold, so they'll still be around, they will still be a thorn in the side of other parties, particularly the Democrats. The extent that Ralph Nader continues to serve as that symbol, I don't know, but third parties face a real problem, because in American elections you have to win first place or nothing at all. |
Basically, we have a system sometimes called "first past the post." It seems to be the natural way of running elections. If you come in first, you win; you come in second or third, you don't. And so third parties can get 20 percent of the vote, let's say, but you can't win an office with 20 percent of the vote. Then you get nothing for it. So there's an incentive for voters to not vote for third parties. "Ralph Nader is the wasted vote" was a saying for Nader voters or would-be Nader voters, and that detracts from their support and creates a downward spiral of support. |
So if the third party wants to be successful, I think the way they have to do it is to first of all, in the short term, become competitive with the other two parties. They have to go up to 33 percent, let's say, which would make you competitive with the other two parties. And for a while, for example, Perot was doing that in 1992, which was a remarkable achievement. |
There were polls in the summer or spring of 1992 showing Perot leading as a third-party candidate. To get to that point, if you zoomed from 0 to 33 percent very fast, you can be competitive, just like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, who did the same thing in his race for governor. But then, to maintain yourself, you've got to maintain that strength and basically replace or eclipse one of the other two parties. Some people thought, for instance, that what Perot really wanted to do was to take the Reform Party and replace the Republican Party somehow down the road. |
That might be the goal of the parties. Maybe if you ask a Green Party supporter who wanted to think great thoughts about the future of their party, you might think, well, the Greens would someday become one of the two dominant parties and somehow the Republicans and Democrats would both seem similar to each other. Certainly Democrats and Republicans don't see it that way. But somehow the Republicans and Democrats blur into some kind of opposition to the Greens. That's probably a fanciful expectation, but I think that's what they think. |
Fathom: So the result is that third-party candidates really do influence the outcome? |
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| Robert S. Erikson describes the effect that third-party voters had on the 2000 presidential election. | |
Erikson: Yes. I think that's right. I think that third-party candidates influence the swing vote. In this case, Nader, in just taking a few votes away from Gore, and of course threatening to take away more, meant that Gore always had to be conscious of the Nader voters on the left. And he also had to win voters in the center who might otherwise be attracted to Bush, who was running what appeared to be a centrist campaign. This represented a dual front, which meant he couldn't run quite as much as a centrist as he might have wanted to if Nader didn't exist as a candidate. |
Fathom: What conditions do you think are necessary for a third party to rise and become one of the major parties? Under what conditions did the Republican Party rise in the 1850s? |
Erikson: There can be a third-party success scenario. What it takes probably would be to have a third party rise under the circumstances when it either vanquishes one of the two parties or one of the two parties has become weak so there is a vacuum to exploit by the more successful of the minor parties. That latter is the scenario for the Republicans in the 1850s, the one successful third party in the US. |
In the early 1850s, there was a two-party system. You had the Democratic Party and the Whig Party. Well, of course, there is no more Whig Party. The Whig Party became extinct or weakened to the point of near extinction very fast in the 1850s, and there were other parties around that wanted to exploit that vacuum. There was the Republican Party, there was a so-called nativist party called the Know-Nothings that was active, and still other parties around. Each one had its own key issues. |
The Know-Nothings, for example, wanted to ban immigration. They were fearful of immigrants, fearful of Catholics, but many people saw them as a potent political force back then. The Republicans, of course, had the issue of the expansion of slavery, but the Republicans became a dominant party very fast not just because of the slavery issue but other issues as well. They exploited things like homesteading in the West and issues that would attract voter support. Their only key opposition was the Democrats who had been around for a while and were stalled because they were very divided on the slavery issue themselves. |
They were a minor party, and there was a vacuum of leadership where it wasn't clear what other political parties would compete with the Democrats, so the Republicans started out as a very minor movement and became one of the two parties of the two-party system. |
Fathom: But Democrats have been around for a long time, and we probably shouldn't expect them to disappear anytime soon? |
Erikson: The Democrats have been around for a long time. They are the oldest continuous political party in the world and also--probably technically, by most definitions--the first political party of a modern sort. |
Fathom: During a dead-heat race between Democrats and the Republicans, such as the 2000 presidential election, should voters be more aware of the power of the third-party vote and the implications of voting for a third party, such as Ralph Nader's Green Party? |
Erikson: The two parties are so evenly balanced that if you bring in a third party from the outside, like the Nader party, even if they get only a sliver of support they can make a difference. Right now they only make a difference in presidential races, because Ralph Nader ran for president--as far as we know, 3 percent of the people voted for Ralph and that helped to tip the balance of the election, otherwise Gore clearly would have been the electoral and popular vote winner. |
But so far the Greens have not been much of a factor in congressional races for the House and the Senate. Perhaps they will be in the future, with the consequence probably of helping Republicans. This has happened in a few cases where Greens have run serious races for Congress, particularly in the mountain West, where they might get a significant chunk of the vote, which is taken away from Democrats. That means that it helps elect Republicans to the House. So in the short run, obviously, the Greens are the Republicans' best friend. |
Fathom: So what lessons can voters draw from this election? |
Erikson: Well, voters have to realize that their votes are conditional on what other people do. I think they do realize that. Would-be Nader voters, for example, could, if they lived in a state where they knew the vote was going to go for Gore in any case and they felt inclined to vote for Nader, could do so realizing that their one vote was not going to increase the risk of electing George Bush, if they didn't like that outcome. |
In states like Massachusetts and New York, the Nader voters could cast a free Nader vote without guilt. In a close state, then, of course many Nader voters ended up voting for Gore, because they figured him as the preferable candidate to Bush, but of course not the best from their perspective. |
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