Several years ago, I was having lunch with an old friend from middle school. When I mentioned that in some political race I had voted Libertarian, he said with a scarcely veiled hint of sarcasm in his voice: “In other words, you voted for the Democrats.” And a couple of decades ago, when I told a colleague at a university in Texas (where we were both teaching) that I had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, he replied with a smile that contained an undercurrent of hostility: “In Texas it didn’t matter. But if you had lived in Florida, I’d punch you in the nose.”
The history of third parties in the United States is a lesson in futility. Historians and political commentators have argued endlessly about whether Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidency by siphoning off enough votes in Florida to give the election to George W. Bush; whether Jill Stein took enough votes away from Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016 to tip the scales to Donald Trump; whether Libertarian voters take more votes away from Republicans than Green Party voters do from Democrats; and so on ad infinitum. Probably the only presidential race on which historians and political scientists are in agreement is the one in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt, running on the Bull Moose Party ticket, took enough votes away from the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, to give the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. As a pundit recently said, third parties are like bees: they sting then die.
A case can be made both for and against third-party voting in a winner-take-all system such as the current one in the United States. In countries that have a parliamentary system (in fact, parliamentary democracies are much more common throughout the world than are two-party democracies), minor parties can form coalitions with major parties. Let us briefly examine the pros and cons of voting third party in the United States.
The most common argument for voting third-party is intangible: one should vote one’s conscience. In 2016, there were many voters who couldn’t stomach either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. These voters felt that there were just too many negatives attached to the Republican and Democratic candidates. To use an expression that has acquired cliché status, the choice offered to the American voter by both major parties was accompanied by too much “baggage” on both sides. I recall a discussion at a bar in Germany a year or so after the November election. A Danish citizen said “America is such a great country! Were Clinton and Trump the best you could do?”
I replied, “I have a clean conscience. I voted Green Party.”
Another argument for voting third-party is of a more practical nature. Third parties keep the two major parties on their toes, one might say, and lessen the chances of their watering down their philosophies so much that they in effect become barely indistinguishable one from the other. I recall a discussion with a colleague during the 2016 Democratic Party primary. My colleague hoped that Senator Bernie Sanders would gently tug Clinton a bit to the left, then withdraw before he hurt her candidacy. Although Sanders didn’t succeed in getting Clinton to moderate her positions, he did show the Democratic Party establishment that one can take progressive positions and still attract significant numbers of voters.
The main argument against third-party voting is a cynical one. Voting by its very nature is normally a question of choosing between the lesser of two evils. Very rarely are the voters offered a choice of two saints (on a humorous note, maybe not the best metaphor to use in a magazine devoted to secular humanism). All of us, politicians and voters alike, are simul justus et pecator (both saint and sinner).
Along these lines, allow me to present an admittedly far-fetched hypothetical scenario. Imagine an alternate universe in which three candidates are running for president in a winner-take-all race. Hitler and Mussolini are polling at 49.5 percent each; at the other end of the moral spectrum, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King is polling at one percent. Does one hold one’s nose and vote for Mussolini on the grounds that he’s slightly less odious than Hitler? This would be the utilitarian position—that is, the greatest good for the most people. Or does one vote one’s conscience and vote for the progressive?
I welcome your advice, my fellow humanists.