What it Takes to Win

by Carl Milsted

Posted May 10, 2005

The year 2004 was not a good year for third parties in the United States. Come to think of it, most years are bad years for third parties. True, there are some years where a few celebrities do well or even win as third party candidates, such as Jesse Ventura running under the Reform Party ticket. But when was the last time that a new party won a significant number of partisan races?

The hard reality is that the U.S. political system is not friendly to third parties. This does not mean that we should necessarily give up on third party politics, but it does mean we should take an objective look at why the U.S. is so hard on third parties and search for loopholes.

The critical fact of U.S. politics is neither campaign finance limitation, FEC regulations, ballot access, nor an unfriendly media. All of these are surmountable by any party that is big enough to win.

The key factor is that our system is based mostly on plurality-take-all district elections. This produces several constraints which any new political party needs to work within or success is impossible.

The first constraint is that you actually have to win an election to win a seat in a legislature. This is far different from some parliamentary systems where a minority party can win seats by collecting 5% of the votes overall while winning a majority nowhere.

This is a very tight constraint. It means that purist ideological parties do not work in this country! To win, a party must put forth candidates and a platform that are sufficiently mainstream as to be the majority position in at least one district. (OK, maybe the 40% position in a three-way race will suffice.) This means patience, calling for incremental measures, polling, and focus groups. A “party of principle” cannot win. A reasonably libertarian party can win.

There are those within the LP who realize this and thus call for changing the system. I suggest that it is better to change the party. Changing the system is difficult—far more difficult than winning elections. Further, our current system has served us well; while it has kept out radical libertarians, it has also kept out communists and fascists during the darkest days of the 20th Century.

But this is not the only constraint. If it was, then we would have at least one successful moderate political party. While the Reform Party showed early signs of success, it did not last long.

The second constraint is that a party does need to have some principles; otherwise it can be blown apart by factions as happened to the Reform Party. This has been the strength of the Libertarian Party, and why we endure while so many others have come and gone. We just need to fuzzy-up those principles to have a bigger tent.

A third constraint remains: the Lesser of Two Evils Dilemma. Rationalizations will not get us around this dilemma; this dilemma stems from rational behavior on the part of voters. Most of those who vote do so to affect elections, not make a statement. This is our problem to solve. Fortunately, there are solutions.

The first is straightforward enough: concentrate energies in two-way races. In such races the LP is the second party right now! Due to gerrymandering, there are plenty of opportunities to do be the second party. Several years ago I did a study of state house races and found many states that had 1/3 to over ½ of the races uncontested between the major parties.

But just focusing on two-way opportunities may not be enough to grow the party. After all, in such districts it is relatively easy to take over the major party affiliate that is out of power. Where is the compelling need for a third party?

To grow and win elections, a new party must appeal to people who are equally dissatisfied with both of the major parties. This is difficult to do while still obeying the first constraint; that is, being near the center. All too often, Libertarian candidates who try to be moderate start sounding like Republicans and then get clobbered by the Lesser of Two Evils Dilemma.

The Libertarian Party’s original concept was to triangulate between the major parties by combining the small government ideals of the conservatives with the liberal ideals social tolerance and isolationism. This was a fairly even triangulation back in the 1970s when the RP was the party of squares and the DP was the ACLU party. But by the 1990s the Republicans had such major figures as Rush Limbaugh talking dirty and playing rock music on his show, while the leftists favored political correctness over free speech. We started looking too Republican.

With the George Bush faction in control of the RP, we might be triangulating correctly again – according to the Nolan Chart. However, this year’s election returns do not show corresponding success. I think this is because the Nolan Chart fails to accurately capture the essence of Left and Right. If it did, why does it place the extreme Left (the communists) and the extreme Right (fascists) in the same place? These two groups hate and kill each other; they must disagree about something.

The real value that distinguishes the Left and the Right is not the amount of economic freedom; it is the amount of economic equality. Socialism is one tool to bring about equality, but it is not the only one. Likewise, while overall tax cuts allow the wealthy to keep their wealth, special tax breaks and subsidies work even better. If we chart the true Left and Right along with our value, freedom, we get the figure below.

Note that this is a relative scale with the status quo at the center. Unlike the Nolan Chart, the axes are measurements of values, not actions. As such, not all locations on the chart are accessible. (Since people are different, it is impossible to maximize liberty and equality at the same time. On the other hand, the only way to have equality and tyranny at the same time is in a small scale true democracy. Otherwise, you have tyrants and upper-level bureaucrats who are above, and thus unequal, to their charges.)

While the axes are values, I have placed individuals and parties according to the results of their actions, vs. their intent. Thus, Stalin is not as far to the left as he tried to be.  Most importantly, this places the Libertarian Party mostly to the left, despite rhetoric from many Libertarians that sounds far to the Right.

I contend that the overall libertarian program would make for a more egalitarian society than we have today. While much of our government spending is on programs that attempt to transfer money to the poor, there are gigantic subsidies to the rich that get little notice. I am not talking about mere “corporate welfare” here. I refer to a tax code that encourages big corporations to hold onto capital and buy up little corporations vs. give dividends; a Securities and Exchange commission that prevents smaller businesses from floating stock directly; 401(k) plans that divert money from Main St. and onto Wall St.; trillions of dollars of deficit spending that subsidize those who have money to lend at the expense of workers and entrepreneurs. I could go on. (And I do go on at www.holisticpolitics.org.)

Notice the gap in the upper left quadrant that is near the center. A moderately libertarian party with an egalitarian emphasis could meet all three constraints. If we were to moderate our message and focus on where government reductions and equality coincide, we could become a major political party.

If we do, it will not be the first time. The original classical liberals were on the left. Classical liberalism got its momentum by attacking the Corn Laws, which were a subsidy to rich landowners. The word “liberal” may come from the word “liberty,” but we should remember that the classical liberals were also liberals in the modern sense of the word.

And the original classical liberals won elections.

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