Politics: The Third Party Option

Something that might be highly debated in the future of this country for a good long while is whether or not third parties are viable choices for office. Should one vote for them and actually think that this would be a vote in favor of them? Can third party candidates actually win? More importantly, can they win the presidency? Well, I’m going to talk about this option and see if it is a good one or quite a terrible idea. Honestly, it could depend on a lot of different factors. But I might as well get into it in this blog post.

People might feel this way about the election for president right now. They may not like either Trump or Biden. I mean, don’t both have women accusing them of sexual misconduct? To the unobservant, both or just Biden is guilty until more research is put into this. But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m wondering if voting third party for president in 2020 is a good idea.

This takes me back to when I was in eighth grade and taking a history class. The class of maybe around 20 students (myself included) voted in a mock election. After the votes were all counted, only one person (namely me) had voted for the third party candidate. (This was 2004 and before I realized that John Kerry was the better candidate.) Everyone else had voted for either of the main party candidates in the election. This is how it often seems to be in elections of all sorts. The third party gets a notable minority of the votes, but not close enough to getting anywhere close to winning. Would you vote for someone that you didn’t want to win? I doubt it. Would you vote for someone that you felt couldn’t win even if you wanted them to win? That becomes the next great question to ask.

Just two years later in 2006, the election for governor in Illinois gave people two major party candidates that weren’t well liked at all. This gave the green party candidate 10% of the vote as that many people wanted him governor versus the major party candidates. That party was even a major party in this state for a while as a result. The winner of that election got 49% of the vote. You might wonder, if all of the green party candidate’s votes went to the Republican who lost, would she have won? The answer is no. She would have just barely lost a close election. But this creates the big problem in the race.

Many suspect that voting for a third party candidate is throwing your vote away. Others think that it is far worse as you are ensuring that a party loses by not voting for that party. But this is not always a problem by just voting third party. There were enough people in 2016 who had done write-in ballots in Florida for people that don’t exist that if all of them had voted for Hillary Clinton instead, she would have won that state. That proves just how crazy the voting system is at times nowadays.

Of course, some might have to point out that third party candidates can and do win elections. And this isn’t by them switching parties after winning in a major party (although that does happen a lot from time to time). It is just such a rare and uncommon occurrence that all of them tend to stick out as unusual in most places unless they are from states or rare elections that did not have major party candidates on one of the spaces.

As we look towards the 2020 election for president, to me, it makes zero sense if you don’t like Trump to vote for a third party candidate. If you want Trump to lose, you would have to vote for Biden or you are just giving Trump more of an edge. There might be some issues with Biden, but to vote third party makes no sense this time around.

Ever since I first started voting in 2010, I have always voted for one Democrat, one Republican, and one third party candidate. People don’t get a free pass by running unopposed. Yet I do not vote often for third party in any major races and tend to give it to something that I don’t care that much about or to a race I feel is largely unimportant in some way to me at least. One time, the vote was for a two month term which would have meant little to nothing if they did win.

Honestly, part of the issues with third parties are the varied views that they support. The libertarians, for instance, seem to combine the worst ideas of Democrats and Republican and they also throw in some other horrible ideas of their own as well. The green party offers no real identity that I can tell. I couldn’t tell you much about the reform party nor do I know about the constitutional party and what they do. Independents often switch parties or represent one of the major parties while not actually officially labeled that in some ways.

Maybe a third party could break through all the gridlock that is going on and create a way through all of this partisanship. But it seems to me that instead we’d get another set of people who want their way and won’t get along with other people leading to even more partisanship. In fact, I would say that since I’ve heard talk about a major third party for a long while now and have yet to see anything come close to it in recent years, that it might be like how the red hair gene is going extinct as a thing that people say without any evidence to ever back it up.

That’s all that I can think of for this post. Maybe there is more to say, but their probably isn’t. Justin Amash, a former Republican, is considering running as a libertarian for president. I don’t think that he could hurt Biden’s chances, but we’ll have to see if he even wins the nomination or enters the race. Biden has been shown doing better in the polls then Trump, but that’s only if this remains a two way race. Trump could win a three way race and that is why we don’t want there to be any third parties messing things up.