Justin Amash is running for … president?
On Tuesday, the congressman from Michigan — a former Republican who backed impeachment charges against President Trump — announced his campaign for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination. If he wins, he’ll be on the November ballot, a prominent third option for Americans who don’t want to re-elect Trump but don’t want to put Joe Biden in office either.
Or, as Amash said on Twitter after announcing his campaign:
This election is too important for Donald Trump or Joe Biden to be running for president. But they have the right to run like anyone else. The answer to bad candidates is not to keep others off the ballot, but rather to give the people honest, practical, and capable alternatives.
Amash says he believes that there are enough votes for him to win the White House. But while true in the abstract — in theory, there’s nothing to keep a third-party presidential candidate from winning an Electoral College majority — it’s absurd in the context of actually existing American politics. Although third-party candidates have affected the outcome of several presidential elections, no such candidate has ever won and only a handful have ever earned electoral votes.
Our politics are plainly inhospitable to third parties. But the usual answer — that this reflects a failure of will or imagination among voters, or that it’s the result of a constructed “duopoly” — is wrong. The reason for third-party failure is embedded in the structure of our politics. Americans who want more choice at the ballot box — to say nothing of Americans who want a European-style parliamentary democracy — have to change that structure.
The first and most important thing to understand about America’s two-party system is that it grows out of our electoral rules. In fact, that’s true of all party systems. How a democracy votes — as well as how it structures representation and office holding — determines the form and shape of political competition.
In the United States, we select officeholders through single-member districts where the winner only has to have the most votes. The more candidates, the lower the threshold for winning. A party can win office — meaning, it can win all the representation in a district — with a simple plurality of voters.
If you support the next largest party, you’re shut out of power completely. If you belong to the smallest parties, you’ll never win representation. The rational choice, if you want a supporter of your ideas to win office, is to back whichever of the two largest parties comes closest to your views and interests. And you’ll want to try to build a majority to ensure that your coalition always makes it first past the post.
But plurality voting alone doesn’t guarantee a two-party system. Both Canada and Britain vote in similar ways but sustain multiparty systems, albeit ones where two parties are usually dominant. What makes America different is the presidency. When control of the executive is independent of control of the Legislature — and when the election of the executive is also a winner-take-all contest (or, really, 50 different winner-take-all contests) — there is a strong incentive for political actors to channel their energy into one of the two largest parties, and campaign for outright majorities.
The framers of the Constitution didn’t intend a two-party system — or a party system at all — but American politics moved quickly in that direction. By 1796, in the first contested presidential election, American political elites had already sorted themselves into two distinct parties, the Federalists led by John Adams and the Democratic-Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson. From then on, the United States would retain this two-party equilibrium, even as the parties themselves changed.
The collapse of the Federalist Party in the wake of the War of 1812 and the 1816 election of James Monroe would produce a period of single-party dominance that would end, just over 10 years later, with the rise of Andrew Jackson and the splintering of the Democratic-Republican Party into the pro-Jackson Democratic Party and the anti-Jackson National Republican or “Whig” Party. Nearly 30 years later the Whig Party would collapse under the weight of sectional conflict, to be supplanted by the antislavery Republican Party.
Given the rules of our system, the collapse of a party is the only thing that opens the space for a new one. And while there have been party ruptures in every subsequent generation of American politics, they have always been resolved by one of the two major parties absorbing the emergent faction, whether it’s the Democrats and the Populist Party in the 1890s or the Republicans and the Dixiecrats in the 1960s and ’70s.
In practice, under the current system, the only way that Justin Amash — or any third-party candidate — becomes president is for a major party to collapse, and for a minor party to take its place as the other dominant coalition.
Barring that, you have to change the rules. To get to a viable multiparty system in the United States, the political scientist Lee Drutman argues in “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America,” you would have to introduce some version of ranked-choice voting and proportional representation where smaller parties get representation even when they don’t win the most votes. In presidential elections, ranked-choice voting would allow voters to choose a third-party candidate without fear of wasting a vote or “spoiling” the chances of their next-favored party.
In the absence of those changes, third-party candidates cannot win major office or build a durable presence in national political life. They serve a purpose, but it is less as a real vehicle for representation than as an outlet for discontented voters. It’s a kind of abstention, a way to signal contempt for the whole process.
Of course, there’s still an electoral impact. Third-party presidential candidates may not be able to win, but they can throw the election to one of the two parties. It is unclear how Justin Amash will affect the race if he wins the Libertarian Party nomination. But as a politician from a key swing state — Michigan, which Trump won by just under 11,000 votes in 2016 — he should probably take care to ensure that his campaign doesn’t end up giving the election to the president he says he opposes.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
