Toss the Vote: Why Not Vote Third Party?

Let’s be honest, you didn’t vote at the last elections. You’re too old to believe in the democratic process, you took a sociology class last semester, and you’ve got it all figured out. You’re too smart and cynical to think that voting either way will bring any real institutional change, and besides, you know your vote doesn’t really matter because the system is broken.

I’m not here to convince you otherwise: the Electoral College is archaic, the two-party system is a joke, and campaign finance is code for money laundering. So why not vote third party?

Now, I know that some of you who remember the 2000 election felt a bit of bile at the base of your throat. I understand your reaction because I remember Bush, and it made a lot of sense to say that a vote for Ralph Nader was a vote for Bush. But if the 2000 election were to happen again, I would vote Nader. Gore would have lost, but my conscience would have been completely clean because he still would have carried my state.

Historically, third parties have been instrumental in changing the political landscape of America. Teddy Roosevelt ran for president as a progressive in the Bull Moose Party, and took in 27% of the vote, calling for reforms that we now take for granted, such as the direct election of Senators, women’s suffrage, and disclosure of lobbyists and campaign contributions. Although Roosevelt collected more votes than William Taft, the Progressive Party soon dissolved. But the two remaining parties adopted many of the ideas endorsed in his platform.

Having the resources and money of an institutionalized power gives the two parties the ability to outlast any challengers by adapting their platforms to draw in voters lost to the third party, thereby turning the third party’s finest hour into a recipe for that party’s ultimate downfall. In 1972, when Nixon was up for reelection, he used segregationist candidate George Wallace’s failed 1968 campaign as the key to victory among southern voters. By incorporating the idea of “the Silent Majority” into the Republican Party’s campaign strategy, Nixon surfed Wallace’s dead campaign to the largest landslide victory in the history of the White House. Ever since then, greater data collection methods and more direct means of connecting with voters have made states more and more polarized; changing strategies to focus on victories from a list of a few key swing states—a list that only gets shorter as the election drags on.

I’m sure, if you caught the debate the other night and were paying attention, you’re probably confused because both candidates seemed to be agreeing with one another, even though they both swore they weren’t; and if you weren’t paying attention, you were confused because all you heard was “I like Big Bird” and “Mitt Romney won.” In fairness, if the candidates don’t perpetuate the campaign narratives, and the media just gives up on the “horse-race” narrative at the first debate, it would mean that over a quarter-billion dollars and the past year were just wasted saying nothing.

In fact, more was said during the ten-minute NPR third party candidate debate on “All Things Considered” than the 90-minute exercise in lying and lethargy that 53 million people watched last Thursday. Third-party participation in the presidential election has been extremely limited in recent years by rules that require candidates to poll at least 15% before they can participate in the debates; under this rule, self-funded candidate Ross Perot would have been excluded from the 1992 debates.

And now, in an age of yearlong primary campaigns, decided by few other factors besides money and polling data, how are undecided voters supposed to feel, except less involved?

Despite both major candidates’ objections to the contrary, the choices offered by a two-party system aren’t especially binary, rather, they both represent entrenched interests and the status quo, which are arbitrarily divided over a few issues. In their NPR debate, Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gov. Gary Johnson disagreed on ideologies, suggesting wildly different policies, but both agreed that the two-party system is at the heart of the gridlock in Washington, a theory curiously absent from the major debates.

Rather than having two candidates bickering and grandstanding about semantics for 90 minutes, why not require the two major candidates to answer to the two grassroots parties in ways that major candidates are rarely challenged? This is one of the problems with viewing campaigns as horseraces with constant action and winners and losers is that it plays into something strongly competitive. Instead of voting for the candidate that best expresses their views, most people vote to be on the winning team or against a candidate that they just hate.

These days, greater pools of information and more direct veins of communication allow for a greater flow of knowledge compared to 20 years ago. Young people seem to identify more as “progressive” or “libertarian” than Democrat or Republican, with finely developed political opinions built more on critical thought than tradition. Shouldn’t the political process adapt accordingly?