I recently formed a group on Facebook with the stated goals of uniting Democrats and progressive independents in order to win the congressional and presidential elections in 2018, 2020 and beyond.  My feelings about third parties are best illustrated in a message I wrote as the group’s administrator to one of the new group’s members who insisted in advocating voting third party in group posts:

Please do not continue to advocate voting third party in this group – such actions run counter to the group’s objectives.  I respect your views, but you are letting old grievances against your best potential allies get in the way of rational thinking and you thereby risk furthering the objectives of our real opponents.

Please note that the reason that you even know about “DNC plots against Sanders” Is because of Russian efforts to turn Sanders supporters against Hillary Clinton in order to bolster the election of Donald Trump.  That tactic obviously worked your case and that alone should give you pause.

In parliamentary democracies, third-party groups can often have a major impact on governmental policy because their small number of parliamentary votes are often necessary to form ruling coalitions. Not so in our form of government where embedded in our constitution is a “winner takes all” policy in our presidential elections.  

You give an example of how a third party can be relevant, but your example is flawed. If you really know your history, you know that in the early 1850’s the Whig Party tore itself apart in a major internal dispute over the question of abolition beginning with fights over 1850 Compromise. In 1852 the deaths of its main two leaders, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster further weakened the party.  In the years prior to the 1856 election most of the former Whig members in the north such as Abraham Lincoln joined other abolitionist to form the Republican Party while former Southern Wigs joined the short-lived American Party. The GOP was never a third party because by 1856 the Whig Party no longer existed, it had destroyed itself. It didn’t even nominate presidential candidates in either 1856 or in 1860 when Lincoln won the presidency.   

I guess it is at least conceivable, through unlikely,  that that sort of event could happen again.  However, if any lesson can be drawn from the advent of the Republican Party it is that the only way that a new major party can be formed in this country is in the  wake of the implosion of one of the two current major parties.  Obviously voting for one of the third parties will do nothing to hasten the implosion of either the Republican or Democratic Party.  You can’t affect a party’s future without being a voting member.

In our form of government, third party and independent candidates are virtually irrelevant except when they take away enough votes from the major party candidates with whom they are most closely ideologically aligned to throw elections to the opposition. This is the source of the political truism, “Third parties are like bees, when the sting the die.” This refers to the phenomenon which occurs in subsequent elections where many of people who voted for a third-party candidate decide they do not want to make that mistake again.  Third parties don’t actually die, they don’t lose their core supporters, but they become diminished until the voting public again forgets the lessons learned.

It is likely that many people who voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania may have had second thoughts after they realized that Stein’s vote total in each of those key states exceeded the margin of Trumps victory, thus putting Trump the Oval Office.  A similar situation occurred in Florida in 2000 where Gore lost to Bush by 537 votes while Green Party candidate Ralph Nader pulled in 97,488 votes. Incidents such as these serve to cripple third parties as soon as they gain any reverence meaning they will never rise to national prominence.  

I would a be a fool if I ignored the lessons of history and failed to realize that the support of third party candidates can easily be turned into an undeserved gift to our real opponents. 

Cajun     9/2/2018