Third Party

I really should be working on my blog for class over at huckcrowley.wordpress.com, especially since I need to post this week's assignment there in the next few hours. However I have something on the brain that has nothing to do with my Communication coursework and I need to get that out of my brain before I can effectively work on something else. The thing that's on my brain is political party affiliation and the lack thereof.

My father is nearly ready to leave the Republican party out of frustration with its insistence on exercising its ability to vote as a single, unified block. I, meanwhile, am nearly ready to leave the Democratic party out of frustration with its inability to vote as a single, unified block. The question for both of us, then, is where do we go? What political party speaks to us?

And the answer, of course, is that we're already affiliated with the parties that most closely represent our views, so there's absolutely no chance of us each switching to the other party.

What about the various third-party parties? Really I don't know enough about them. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know...) there were 4 third-party candidates in the 2008 US Presidential election. Those candidates represented:

The Constitution Party
The Green Party
The Libertarian Party
Independent

There were actually more candidates than the big two and the additional four listed, but these four actually appeared on the ballots in enough states to get 270 electoral votes, so they were legitimate candidates.

Look at that list again. You'll notice that the last party isn't a party. It's just a category of voter: Independent. And that Independent candidate - Ralph "I Used To Be A Good Man" Nader - actually got more votes than any other third party candidate. That's actually pretty impressive. How do you get votes for the office of president without a party apparatus behind you? Heck, how do you get on the ballot?

In Ralph's case the answer to these questions is, in his own case, fanatical devotion to his cause. For his followers the answer is fanatical devotion to Ralph Nader.

Regardless, this is fascinating. Especially when you consider what appears to be the growing power of Unaffiliated Voters. The information below is from a Washington Post article that's over 5 years old, so its behind the curve. Here's a convenient chart that Wikipedia has taken from that article. States are ranked in order of percentage of unaffiliated voters registered:


AK 60.0%

NJ 59.1%

MA 49.8%

CT 44.4%

NH 42.1%

ME 40.8%

IA 38.0%

CO 33.4%

KS 27.2%

NY 26.1%

OR 25.7%

AZ 25.5%

DE 23.4%

CA 22.3%

FL 20.8%

LA 20.7%

NV 19.3%

NC 18.7%

NM 17.7%

NE 16.2%

MD 15.4%

SD 14.4%

WV 11.9%

PA 11.7%

OK 10.5%

WY 10.2%

KY 6.5%

Astute readers will notice that there are only 27 states listed. That's because there are only 27 states that register voters by party. In the other 23 states there is no way of knowing how many independent / unaffiliated voters there are, really.

According to a more recent piece by Marc Ambinder - also in the Washington Post - about 30% of voters nationwide "tell pollsters they don't belong to a party." This means that Independent voters are officially the deciding votes when it comes to Presidential elections.

Do these independent voters agree on anything? Or are they too heterogeneous to define by anything other than their lack of party affiliation?

I don't know Ambinder's source for information, but he says "these non-affiliated voters tend to be less fiscally liberal than the Democratic mean and less socially conservative than the Republican mean." That's interesting. In general, then, we're talking about people who aren't going to be pushed around by wedge issues like the ongoing debates about abortion and gay rights. And we're also talking about people who are at least somewhat realistic when it comes to government spending.

I can get behind that. Basically it's a loose collection of practical people who, at the moment, lack an effective voice to speak for them.

Do they need a party? Do I need a party? These are the questions. By being a silent party that is also, effectively, the deciding party then these voters will pull candidates to a pragmatist center. They may do so very slowly, however, over time. It may take a while for political candidates to Get It.

Would a new party help candidates to Get It faster? Probably, but it might also weaken the unaffiliated voters at the same time. A new party would have to come up with a party platform, and it's very possible that a Practical Party (or whatever) wouldn't be able to come up with a platform that would attract enough voters to make it a viable force in American politics. In fact such a party might only succeed in splitting the vote in a crucial election in a Naderesque manner.

Basically a Practical People's Party probably would help candidates Get It and then become instantly obsolete as the two big parties move to the center. Unless a Practical People's Party possibly proves popular enough to purloin an impressive percentage of people from the presently popular parties. That would be perfect, but then we'd effectively have a one-party system, which might actually be worse than the present two-party system.

It seems then that the best thing for a voter that is disenchanted with his present party to do is to become unaffiliated, thereby effectively becoming a member of the silent, deciding party. Both parties are already trying to figure out why voters are leaving. More voters leaving will hopefully make then try harder.