Third Party Poopers
Unsafe at any historical moment.
I. Fool Me Once
In 2000, I was one of 2,882,955 Americans to vote for Ralph Nader for president. I was young, idealistic, and disillusioned with what I felt was a lack of progress by the national Democratic Party. I scoffed at the primary system, which had somehow managed, in both parties, to boot out the two exemplary candidates (Bill Bradley and John McCain) and keep the two ho-hum ones (Al Gore and George W. Bush). So I said “fuck it” and pulled the lever—back then, there was still an actual lever—for Ralph.
In my defense, I lived in solidly blue New York, and was thus afforded the luxury of casting what amounted to a meaningless protest vote. Were I registered in a swing state, I’d certainly have gone with Gore. (I have a friend who lived in Florida at the time and voted for—oh dear—John Hagelin, a sort of woo-woo precursor to Marianne Williamson. Let’s just say she came to regret her decision.)
Also in my defense: I was dumb. I didn’t fully understand the political system. In 1992, the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote, I wrote in Al Gore, because I liked him better than Bill Clinton. Eight years later, I didn’t vote for Tipper’s hubz even though he was the Democratic candidate. See? Dumb.
With that said, I had what I believed were good reasons for going with Nader. In a piece I published on my now-defunct blog on October 17, 2000, I explained that the Green Party candidate was for:
More regulation on large corporations. It’s a subject for another column, but it’s scary how few corporations own so many media outlets
Affordable universal health care, based on the Canadian and Western European model
Solving the public housing and public transportation problems (“The only public housing we're putting money into is the construction of more prisons.”)
Free public college education; improved public elementary and high schools
Minimum wage increase ($5.15 an hour is not enough to get drunk in New York City, even during Happy Hour; Nader would double it)
Investing in solar power, which would preserve the environment and eliminate our dependency on foreign oil in one fell swoop
I mean, those are all really good reasons. And they were talked about, again and again, at a rally I attended at Madison Square Garden, where a slew of celebrities came on stage to sing the praises of Ralph Nader:
The night began with the MC, Phil Donahue, lambasting Bush and Gore for not addressing key issues. Then came the speakers and presenters, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins (in the guise of faux Republican Senator Bob Roberts), Ani di Franco, Ben Harper, Patti Smith, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Murray, and Eddie Vedder among them.
The last speaker before the candidate himself was Michael Moore. I’ve long since pegged the disheveled filmmaker as a self-important, self-aggrandizing, rabble-rousing provocateur—and perhaps a Republican in disguise—but at the time, I thought he was sliced-bread great.
To a sold-out Garden, Moore presented his case. “If you don’t vote your conscience now, when will you?” he pleaded. “Don’t make a decision based on fear.” He also said this: “I’ve heard people say, ‘I’d vote for Nader, but I don’t want to waste my vote.’ Now I think we all agree that a Bush presidency would be hellaciously awful. But if you vote for the lesser of two evils, you’re still voting for evil.”
In the state of Florida, 97,488 people took his advice, voting for Nader instead of Gore. My friend was one of 2,281 to vote her conscience and go with Hagelin. Another 1,804 opted for Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party. A mere 562 Floridians abstained from deciding between two supposed evils, instead choosing Socialist Workers Party candidate James Harris.
Bush won Florida—and with it, the general election—by 537 votes.
II. The Art of Seduction
In American politics today, it doesn’t take courage to follow the party line. You don’t need a backbone to hurl pot shots at the other side. To stir up hate and recrimination. To gum up the works. To refuse to cooperate. This moment demands American leaders and citizens alike declare their freedom from the anger and divisiveness that are ruining our politics and most importantly, our country. A United Front. We must recommit to the fundamental beliefs that have historically united Americans and provided a common understanding of who we are and where we hope to go.
Doesn’t that sound lovely? It should. It’s verbiage from the website of No Labels, a well-funded political concern which, as far as I can tell, exists to ratfuck the 2024 election. They have done their research and determined that Americans don’t like all the squabbling in Washington. If people could only get along, and speak truth to power without fear, and focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, the country will finally be the United States of America! This is an idealistic vision that animates films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and TV programs like The West Wing. You know, works of fiction. It’s something we can all get behind—but for the pesky fact that it ignores reality.
A third party candidate has never won a presidential election. And because a two-party system is baked into the architecture of our government, a third party candidate will never win a presidential election (unless it supplants one of the two major-party slots, as the GOP did before the Civil War). So if you vote for a third party candidate, you are in effect voting for the major-party candidate you like less.
Third party candidates make the same appeals today that Ralph Nader did in 2000, and Ross Perot did in 1992, and Teddy Roosevelt did in 1912: common sense, common ground, common good, common man. It sounds fantastic, but as Bernie Sanders can well attest, talking about doing something and actually getting it done are two wildly different things.
Here are some particularly seductive third party talking points:
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
This is not the historical moment for an ethical purity test. In 2024, the Republican Party will likely run either twice-indicted, twice-impeached criminal con man Donald Trump or neo-fascist Florida governor Ron DeSantis. If you have the opportunity to vote against Nazis, vote against Nazis, because if they get to power, you won’t be voting again.
Too much money is allocated for defense.
This was a big talking point in 2000, one I totally agreed with. “We have no known enemy; why are we wasting all these resources on military spending?” I know better now. For one thing, not all the money allocated to defense is used to buy weapons. A lot of useful technology comes out of the DoD. For another, a lot of livelihoods of a lot of Americans is tied to that spending. And, most importantly, the Pax Americana exists because the United States is so unfathomably powerful. Many if not most of the military operations we’ve engaged in since 1945 were ill-advised; no argument there. But a strong U.S. military has created a relatively peaceful Western world for eight decades. That’s a good thing. We want to keep that going.
Stop the military-industrial complex.
This is a big talking point in conspiracy theory circles. Eisenhower warned against the burgeoning power of the “military-industrial complex” in his Farewell Address. Which, yes, for sure, be wary of that. But Biden withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan, guys. How was that not a giant “fuck you” to the military-industrial complex, such as it is? And while he, as the leader of the free world, has leant his support to Ukraine, there has been no talk of committing U.S. troops to the cause. As president, Biden is more interested in domestic stuff—infrastructure, factories, that kind of thing—than in making war.
Demand ceasefire in Ukraine now.
Putin invaded a sovereign nation. If the war stopped right now, even temporarily, Russia would keep all of the territory in Eastern Ukraine it has seized. We all want peace, but the way to achieve peace is not for the Ukrainians to surrender to a genocidal madman. And anyone saying otherwise—or blaming Biden for scuttling the end of the war, as RFK, Jr. did this week—is disseminating Kremlin propaganda, knowingly or not.
There is no centrist candidate who represents most Americans.
Yes there is, and his name is Joe Biden. Reality check: The GOP as currently constituted is slightly to the right of Hammurabi. Since 1980, the entire political landscape has shifted in that direction. The rank-and-file Democrats are centrists. The party really does represent what a majority of Americans want. Alas, they are really, really bad at communicating this to voters.
Progress isn’t happening fast enough.
It’s easy to talk about the progress that needs to happen. Any old grouch can stand on a soapbox and grouse about the minimum wage. Actually doing something about it is much, much harder—and generally, it takes the president working in lockstep with a House and Senate of the same political party. Bernie Sanders has been in Washington for over three decades. He talks a big game, but his track record of legislation is mortifyingly puny. As president, he would have zero ability to get things done, because he isn’t a member of the Democratic Party, and thus has no real sway over anyone. RFK, Jr. would be even worse. The surest way to achieve progress is to let Biden and Harris do what they’ve been doing, which is oversee the most progressive administration of my lifetime.
The existing political system is moribund and corrupt.
Oh, it needs a facelift for sure, if not reconstructive surgery. The Electoral College is a patently anti-democratic vestige from the days of slavery. So is the system of allocation of senators. And we need a lot more justices on the Supreme Court. But real changes to the political structures can only happen when vociferous popular opinion meshes with a president and Congress of the same party, who can then enact legislation to implement those tweaks. The time to reform the system is not during a presidential election, and even if it were, the way to achieve reform is not by casting a protest vote.
The two parties are the same.
Republicans in red states have criminalized a woman’s right to choose, while refusing to implement even the most anodyne gun regulations. Also, they are trying to eradicate the wall between church and state and eliminate trans people from public life. These people are actively fascists. Democrats are not.
III. Snowballs in Hell
A third party candidate has never won the White House. A third party candidate will never win the White House. A third party candidate can only siphon votes away from the mainstream candidate whose politics are closer to those of the third party candidate.
Ross Perot, the most successful third party candidate of my lifetime, got 19,743,821 votes in 1992, a whopping 19 percent. Guess how many electoral votes he got? I’ll give you a hint: it’s the number you can’t divide by. The Bull Moose Party’s Teddy Roosevelt banked the most electoral votes of any third party candidate: 88 of 531, back in 1912. That wasn’t nearly enough to win the White House. And, like, he was Teddy Roosevelt, one of the five best presidents ever. His bust is on Mount Fucking Rushmore. But without the backing of one of the two major parties, TR could only muster a paltry 27 percent of the vote.
Sizing up the potential third party candidates for 2024, I detect no Teddy Roosevelts, only an uninspired gaggle of crackpots, chaos agents, and grifters. To run from the left next year, a candidate must answer the question, “Do you really think you can do better than Joe Biden, the best president we’ve had since Eisenhower?” with “Yes, obviously, of course!” Some of these folks are Democrats now, but would likely run third party if courted:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Say what you will about Ralph Nader, but as a legal activist, he was instrumental in the 1966 passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which has saved countless lives. Kennedy is best known for promoting vaccine disinformation and debunked junk science, which does the opposite. If you went back in time to the 1880s and explained to parents of young children who just died from diphtheria that that horrific disease would be eradicated, safely and forever, by a simple jab, and then offered it to them and their remaining children, how many of those grief-stricken moms and dads do you think would refuse it? Vaccines are a miracle of modern medicine. RFK, Jr. is too dumb to see through the most obvious of Russian ops, which means he is hopeless against the more sophisticated ones.
Cornel West
West is a charismatic guy, but I seem to recall him going on Bill Maher in 2016 and telling the audience that there was no fundamental difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and therefore everyone should vote for Jill Stein. You know, Putin’s dinner guest. A vote for Jill Stein was a vote for Trump in 2016, and a vote for Cornel West is a vote for Trump in 2020. West is way too smart not to be aware of this.
Joe Manchin
Reportedly, the No Labels group is trying to get him to run under their banner in 2024. Fortunately, I’m not sure Manchin has much of a constituency outside of his immediate family, his Maserati dealer, and the board of directors for the company that makes the EpiPen.
Marianne Williamson
She was Oprah’s spiritual advisor. What could go wrong?
It’s easy to make fun of these people, and we should mock them to oblivion. But the third party threat to Biden is no laughing matter. As the investigative journalist Dave Troy and others have pointed out, the fascist playbook is to create a “red-brown alliance” of the far left and the far right, with the ultimate aim of undermining democracy.
The lesser of two evils is still evil, true. But what Michael Moore failed to disclose in 2000 is that supporting a third party candidate on the left is, in effect, a vote for the greater of two evils.
PROGRAMMING NOTE
Both the PREVAIL podcast and The Five 8 will be dark this week. New shows coming June 30.
Photo credit: Ragesoss. Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader speaking at a campaign event in Waterbury, CT, 2008.
Everyone who cares about the United States should read this piece.
Please never stop writing, please. 🙏