Lincoln Chafee falls for third party fantasy

Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent, commemorated the impending retirement of fellow Senate legacy admission Evan Bayh with an op-ed reviving the fantasy of a centrist third party:

So I can certainly understand Senator Bayh’s remarkable decision to leave, but I also suspect that he’s not willing to give up on Washington. When he suggested recently that a third party could be a viable contender for the White House in 2012, my first thought was that he was focused on a future as an independent — and the exciting new avenues for public service it offers.

In 2001, John Zogby, the pollster, told our Republican caucus, “There is a burgeoning centrist third party waiting to be formed.” Either party could make a strategic decision to capture the center, he said, or both could wait for a third party to fill the vacuum.

Barack Obama stood in as a kind of third-party candidate in 2008, with an attractive message of hope, change and a post-partisan approach. He captured that popular, centrist energy for the Democrats.

So far, I’m sorry to say, he’s proving my assertion that Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all...

With our hopes for a post-partisan era still unmet, I say to Senator Bayh: Welcome to the club of independents who are looking for a better way to serve. Before long, we centrists may even come together to define the third party that Mr. Zogby foresaw in 2001.

It has happened before. In 1856, my former party ran a credible presidential campaign just two years after its founding. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House under that new Republican banner. If my friend Evan Bayh can walk away from the United States Senate and not look back, more power to him. But my guess is, he has a modern-day reprise of the Lincoln victory in mind.

What Chafee doesn't understand -- just like Mickey Kaus, Ron Brownstein, Unity '08, Hotsoup.com, James Fallows, Andrew Sullivan, Sanford Levinson, Dick Morris, Bob Shrum, and many others -- is that it's virtually impossible for a third-party candidate to win the presidency. Here's what I wrote back in 2005:

To even become a viable contender as a third-party candidate, you have to spend tens of millions of dollars to get on the ballot in most or all states, plus you need to compete in the ad wars and develop your own grassroots infrastructure from scratch. The party candidates can just plug into an established infrastructure that qualifies them for ballots, ensures them millions of loyal voters, and turns them out on Election Day. As a result, the relentless winnowing of Duverger's Law means they are almost surely going to be one of the two top candidates. It's certainly possible for a third-party candidate to become one of the top two, but it hasn't happened since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 (and he was an ex-president), and a third-party candidate hasn't won since Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

And even if a third party candidate did well enough to prevent both major party candidates from winning a majority of Electoral College votes, the race would almost certainly be decided in favor of one of the two major party candidates by state delegations in the House of Representatives.

Also, the comparison to Lincoln and the Republicans is specious. The reason that there was an opening for a third party in the pre-civil war period is that slavery was a highly salient issue that cut across the axis of partisan conflict and internally divided the major parties. No comparable issue exists today.

Comments

[T_groan]

Alas, without a third party there is no hope of change. The democrats and republicans are both owned by the same people. There is no hope with either of those parties. They are what I refer to as a two headed monster.

[Fred A Milton]

Bayh doesn't disagree in any important way with today's leading Democrats; instead he marches pretty much in lockstep with them. The reason Bayh is complaining about DC partisanship and talking about a third party is because he wants to be President and can't come up with a realistic plan to win the Dem nomination in 2012.

George Will talked about Bayh yesterday with ABC News host Terry Moran. Will observed:

"Well, it's hard to take a lecture on bipartisanship from a man [Evan Bayh] who voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts, the confirmation of Justice Alito, the confirmation of Attorney General Ashcroft, and the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State.

"Far from being a rebel against his Party's lockstep movement, Mr. Bayh voted for the Detroit bailout, for the stimulus, for the public option in the healthcare bill.

"I don't know quite what his complaint is, but, Terry, with metronomic regularity, we go through these moments in Washington where we complain about the government being broken. These moments have one thing in common: The Left is having trouble enacting its agenda.

"No one, when George W. Bush had trouble reforming Social Security, said 'Oh, that's terrible! The government's broken'."

[metrichead.blogspot.com]

We already have a multiparty system in the US. Each party (Republican/Democratic) has its conservative/moderate or liberal/moderate wings, thus creating factions within factions.

It's no different in parliamentary democracies where smaller parties often pledge their support to the major parties who don't win absolute majorities.

[metrichead.blogspot.com]

But as far as a presidential candidate making an impact as a third party or independent - see Ross Perot. Had he not dropped out of the race in 1992, he could've possibly won.

But I think he more likely wouldn't have gotten a majority in the Electoral College and would've thrown the vote to the House and Senate.

[Geoff Robinson]

Current situation of a struggling govt and an opposition widely seen as discredited and extremist does create a vacuum that a cashed-up political entrepreneur a la Perot could fill. Platform of cuts in entitlement programs and middle of the road social policy perhaps symbolized by ending DADT. Debt/deficits anxiety could mobilize many voters.Any such candidate would take more votes from the Republicans.

[d.eris]

The only wasted vote, in any election, is a vote for Democrats or Republicans.