Challenges to Multiparty Democracy in the US: Introduction

May 10, 2021

Last March, as the 2020 Democratic primary season was heating up, I began working on a multi-post series about the two-party system, the obstacles for minor party success, and the phenomenon of independents running for major party nominations. The concept was shelved at that time because other issues arose that made the topic less timely – namely the ascendancy of Joe Biden’s campaign and the growing certainty that it would be a two-person race in November. Now that the election of 2020 is behind us it is time to revisit the challenges of party representation in American democracy.

This series will take a deep dive into the legacy of the 1997 Timmons case, examine both simple and difficult ways to make American democracy more representative – including taking a hard look at what many European democracies do better than us (in representing their populations) and where there are problems – and how redistricting and gerrymandering complicate representation (here, we’ll overlap with my other series on Census, Apportionment, and Redistricting). Since this post an introduction to the series we should define some terms up front.

For this series, I use the term “independent” to refer to individuals who are not committed members of one of the two major parties. It does not refer in any way to ideological perspective or even nominal party membership.* What is important is why it makes sense for independents to seek major party nominations rather than pursue third party challenges, how the US system has otherwise shut out sizable portions of the electorate, and how both major parties have no moral high ground to complain about their nomination process being “hijacked” by “outsiders” while also complaining about third party “spoiler” candidates.

I will use the terms “minor party” and “third party” interchangeably in this series, although my preference is to use the former rather than the latter. A minor party is any organized political party that is not a major party, of which there are two in this country – the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. States and the federal government have their own legal definitions of minor parties which can vary, but for our purposes here I am using the term more broadly. “Third party” is commonly used to refer to any minor party in the US. The use of the word “third” underscores how ingrained the two-party system is in the public imagination. America has a myriad of minor parties, most notably the Greens and the Libertarian Party. But unlike many parliamentary systems, there is no formal opposition party or coalition government in the American system. It makes no difference at all if a political party finishes third – even if it is a strong third place. Yet, the term - and concept of - “third party” is well-known to even poorly-informed voters.

Now let’s move on to some relevant political history. Even though neither person has run for president in 20 years, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader still loom large when we think about independent or minor party presidential campaigns. What do their campaigns tell us about independent and third party runs for national office? Many people consider their efforts to be spoilers, helping to undermine the candidacies of major party candidates that they presumably would otherwise be aligned with. Did Perot really cost Bush the election in 1992? Did Nader really cost Gore the election in 2000? This is something that polling can’t tell us – historical counterfactuals can never be tested. We just don’t know how voters would have voted if Nader or Perot was not on the ballot. But, as a case in point, we do know this: in the 2000 election Gore lost Florida (and with it the Electoral College) by only 537 votes. While 24,000 Florida Democrats voted for Nader, another 308,000 Florida Democrats voted for Bush. How does this make Nader a spoiler? Would those 24,000 Democrats have voted for Gore (would they even have voted) if not for Nader? Why is Nader to blame and not those Democrats that voted for Bush – or Gore for not being able to win over just 538 of those Democrats? And just why did Nader capture 24,000 Democratic voters in Florida in the first place? These were Democrats; they were not independents or Green Party members, but registered Democratic voters.

Maybe the two-party system doesn’t adequately represent the spectrum of voter preference in this country. The fact is that in the case of Perot in 1992 and 1996 and in the case of Nader in 1996 and 2000, there were hundreds of thousands of voters who for one reason or another felt that this was the best way for their voices to be heard. And that may not be just because they were on the general election ballot. Since neither Perot nor Nader saw any utility in running for the nomination of a major party the only chance their supporters had to have a meaningful voice in the electoral process was in the general election rather than through the major party primary process. Sure, either of these guys could have run for a major party nomination in those years. No one was stopping them from doing so. But when one considers how poorly former Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) was treated in 2000 by the Democratic Party establishment it’s not hard to understand why they didn’t.

Now, let’s take a look at the 2016 presidential election. In addition to the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the 2016 race saw Jill Stein (G-MA) and former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson (L-NM) run third party campaigns that attracted significant support. While Johnson’s campaign had some impact on center/right voters, we’ll remain focused on the center/left in this post. Sanders, an independent who has long caucused with the Democrats, made a strategic decision to run for the Democratic nomination for president rather than run a third party or independent candidacy. Stein, who had run for lower office previously as a Green, ran as her party’s standard bearer in 2016. Many Democrats – particularly Clinton supporters – were angry at Sanders for running because he was not a “real Democrat.” At the same time, many of these very same people were angry at Stein for running as the nominee of the Green Party because of fears that she might split off enough vote to act as a spoiler in some states.

Sanders and Stein both appeal to similar progressive blocs of the American electorate, yet many Democrats argued that neither one should run for president as either a Democrat or independent. If heeded by both, then a significant number of Americans would have been denied any chance to vote for a candidate aligned with their views at any point in the entire presidential election process. Even as Sanders briefly became the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination, we heard grumblings that he was not really a Democrat and should not be running as one.**

In 2000, Democrats were often heard (and in fact can sometimes still be heard) complaining that Nader should have sought the Democratic nomination rather than run as the Green Party candidate. Hypocrisy sometimes seems endemic in American politics, with partisans often wanting to have it both ways on all sorts of issues. Either Nader was right to run as a minor party candidate or Sanders was right to run for the Democratic nomination. What would the Clinton wing of the party have said if Nader challenged Gore for the nomination in 2000? Likely that he’s not a real Democrat and no one should support him for that reason alone. In fact, that is exactly what many said about Bradley – who had been a Democratic Senator from New Jersey before becoming an independent.

Imagine if Sanders said this in 2016 or 2020: “You Democrats are correct. I am not a member of your party so I will run as an independent candidate in the general election.” It would not be surprising to find that the same people saying he should not run as a Democrat would howl that he was going to be a spoiler by running as an independent. So, what’s the solution here? That the sizable portion of the electorate that supports what Sanders is offering shouldn’t even get a chance to capture the nomination of a major party in a system that is designed to elect only one of the two major party candidates? That cannot be right.

The system of two-party control over our politics has been given special preference in federal jurisprudence and law, despite it appearing nowhere in the Constitution. Potential presidential candidates who want to seriously challenge for the office need to capture the nomination of one of the two major parties. In the past two decades we have seen – with some notable exceptions (e.g., the 2016 presidential election) – that minor party presidential efforts seemed to decline in favor of independents working within the major party structure. Sanders is not the only example of this – we saw it in the presidential candidacies of Bloomberg and Trump as well. In my next post in this series, we will discuss why that is and how it relates to one of the most important election cases that (almost) nobody knows about: Timmons v. Twin Cities New Party, a 1997 US Supreme Court decision held that states have a legitimate governmental interest in maintaining the two-party system.

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* This will become clearer when we discuss the candidacies of Bloomberg and Trump in a future post.

** The more compelling argument was that he had a ceiling of about 35% of the vote, which could win him multi-candidate primaries but was not a good indicator that he could win the general election.