Why Do Third-Party “Dreams” Keep Turning Into Republican Power?

A warning to every progressive voter: In America’s election system, your third-party vote can be a gift-wrapped victory for the GOP…

Here we go again, only this time it appears to be the Working Families Party that’s fixing to help elect Republicans. They’re proudly proclaiming that by the 2028 presidential election they hope to have candidates on the ballot in 18 states. The party’s national director, rapper/musician Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, told The Guardian:

“Less and less (sic) people are identifying as being a Democrat or Republican. The brand of the Democratic and the Republican parties are underwater consistently. I don’t think there’s been a better and more right time for a third party to emerge in this country that speaks to the interest of everyday working people. I believe that our time has come.”

You’d think by now we would have learned that having progressives seize control of the Democratic Party is a hell of a lot more successful strategy for rebuilding our democracy and our middle class than running against it. In Florida in 2000, for example, Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s ticket got 97,488 votes, while George W. Bush “won” Florida — and thus the White House — by 537 votes.

It strains credulity to assert that the majority of Nader’s voters would have either voted for Bush or not voted at all, which is why when David Cobb ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2004, he explicitly told people in swing states like Florida not to vote for him but to cast their ballots for the Democratic candidate John Kerry instead.

Vanity candidate Jill Stein had no such moral compunction with her Green Party candidacy in 2016. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin provided Trump’s margin of victory in the Electoral College over Hillary Clinton that year, and, in each of those states, Stein pulled more votes than Trump’s margin.

(In Michigan she got 51,463 votes and Trump won by 10,704; in Pennsylvania she won 49,678 versus Trump’s margin of 46,765; and in Wisconsin Stein carried 31,006 votes but Trump only won by 22,177.)

In other words, had progressives not voted for Ralph Nader in Florida in 2000, Al Gore would have become president, and we never would have been lied into two illegal wars, given trillions in tax breaks to billionaires, or gotten John Roberts and Sam Alito on the Supreme Court.

Had progressives in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin not voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have become president and America would have been spared the trauma of 500,000 unnecessary Covid deaths; Barret, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch on the Court; another $5 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires; and the ongoing DOGE assault to our democracy.

America would be a very, very different country with a progressive Supreme Court and an expansion, rather than the destruction, of New Deal and Great Society programs that built and sustained the middle class. In other words, ironically, we’d be a lot closer to the goals of the Green Party today if they’d never run a presidential candidate in those elections.

This is not to say the Democratic Party is perfect. DNC Chairman Ken Martin is now hiding an autopsy of the 2024 election, there are still on-the-take Democrats in the neoliberal Problem Solvers’ Caucus and taking piles of cash from AIPAC and corporate PACs, and in many states genuine progressives in the mold of FDR and LBJ are still viewed by the party’s bosses with a jaundiced eye.

But America — with our 250-year-old operating system — is one of only a handful of democracies worldwide with first-past-the-post (FPTP) winner-take-all election systems, which pretty much force a nation into a two-party system. Under those circumstances, a third party will always pull votes (and, thus, victories) away from the main party it’s most closely aligned with philosophically.

This is why Republican donors have historically been so enthusiastic about supporting the Green Party and Democratic donors occasionally pitch in for the Libertarians.

Reporting from AP, CBS, and others document a broad 2024 GOP-linked network that helped Stein and Cornel West with ballot access and legal support in swing states including Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and others, often using Republican-aligned lawyers and consultants who have also worked for Donald Trump or state GOP organizations.

In 2016, so many Republican donors and politicians had helped fund Jill Stein’s effort that the federal election commission forced her to return a fraction of it, almost a quarter million dollars.

Most likely they’re now courting the Working Families Party, following Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular win running on both the Democratic and Working Families tickets in New York (Mamdani voted for himself on the Working Families ballot.)

But while the synergy of Working Families and Democrats worked in New York, that was only because it’s one of a tiny handful of states (including Oregon, Mississippi, Connecticut, and Vermont) that has fusion voting or its equivalent, allowing a single candidate to appear on the ballot under multiple parties.

Whether New Yorkers voted for Mamdani on the Democratic ticket or the line for the Working Families Party, the result was the same: a vote for Mamdani.

Anywhere else in the country, though, it would have been a vote drawn away from the Democratic Party because when the Founders put our system of voting together our form of democracy was a new thing. Voting was a novel experiment, by and large, after Europe had been ruled for almost two millennia by kings and queens.

It wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party “parliamentary democracies” in his book Considerations On Representative Government.

It was so widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today — every one of them countries that became a democracy after the late 1860s — use variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.

In Mill’s system, if a political party gets, say, 12 percent of the vote then they also get 12 percent of the seats in that country’s congress or parliament. A party that pulls 34 percent of the vote gets 34 percent of the seats, and so on.

The result is a plethora of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut out.

Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy.

Most European countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or immigration.

The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted debate among only two parties.

It’s how the Greens became part of today’s governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the politics and lifestyles in most European nations.

In our system, though, if a party gets 12 percent of the vote — or anything short of 50 percent plus one — they get nothing. Whoever gets 50-percent-plus-one wins everything and everybody else gets nothing, which is why we always end up with two parties battling for the higher end of that 50/50 teeter-totter.

Australia and New Zealand have diminished the damage third parties can do to the main, established parties, by using a voting system called ranked choice voting. In a system like that I could have voted for Ralph Nader as my first choice in 2000, with Al Gore as my second choice. When it becomes apparent that Nader isn’t going to make it, my first choice is discarded by the system and my vote for Gore becomes the one that gets counted.

Over 300 communities in America are now using ranked choice voting (including my hometown of Portland, Oregon) and it works great. Moving from FPTP to proportional representation at the federal level would require amending the Constitution, though, so that’s not going to happen any day soon: ranked choice voting is a nearly-as-good alternative.

At the national level, though, the best way to solve the problem of some Democratic politicians not being as progressive as we’d like is to get active by joining the Democratic Party and becoming a force for positive change within it. To stand up for public office and actually elect more progressives to office, something that can only be done within the Democratic Party.

To not “throw away your vote,” but to help rebuild the party that brought America Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, regulatory agencies that defend and protect the environment and working class people, support for people in poverty, the end of legal apartheid, and that built the world’s first real middle class.

Yes, there are corrupt and bought-off politicians within the Democratic Party. Ever since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with their Citizens United decision and its predecessors, there have been more than a few Democrats who have enthusiastically put their hands out. The most obvious and cynical ones call themselves corporate “Problem Solvers” or, to a lesser extent, the neoliberal “New Democrats.”

But voting for a third-party candidate and thus handing elections to Republicans won’t solve that problem: if anything it will make it worse, because the entire GOP has committed itself to being on the take and, as we saw with Nader and Stein, third-party candidacies often simply hand more power to the GOP.

Try to find, for example, even one Republican who isn’t benefiting from the billions in oil dollars that have flowed through the Koch network over the years and is thus willing to do something about climate change. Republican governance and their fealty to the fossil fuel industry is literally destroying our planet.

This is why real progressives like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna, Mark Pocan, Zohran Mamdani, and Pramila Jayapal stay and work within the Democratic Party. For progressives to take over the country, they know we must first take over the DNC. (Yes, Bernie is an independent and Zohran prefers the Working Families party, but both ran as Democrats.)

In other words, every one of us should be working to get inside the Democratic Party and take it over! It’s what hard-core conservatives did with the GOP over the past 20 years, starting with the Tea Party and the MAGA movements, and it’s what progressives must do today with the Democratic Party.

No third-party candidate has ever won the White House, and none ever will until we have nationwide ranked choice voting. And this is not a small or incidental issue: the stakes for 2028 may well include the continued survival of America as a democratic republic.

So, the next time somebody tells you how they’re going to only vote for “the best candidate,” you may want to give them this little Civics 101 lesson, along with the phone number, website, or email address for their local Democratic Party. And get behind the movement to bring ranked choice voting to national elections.

And, hopefully, the Working Families Party folks will turn down all the Republican money that will be dangled in front of them and choose not to run candidates in places where there isn’t either fusion voting or instant runoff voting.

We can’t afford any more George W. Bush’s or Donald Trump’s, who were both brought to us, in part, by Democratic-leaning voters thinking they were doing the right thing by voting for third party candidates.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Why Do Third Party Dreams Turn Into GOP Victories?”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social