12 Opinions
13 November 2020 Red & Black
Kanye West Damages the Possibility of Third Parties Paul Collier Red & Black Editor
A common criticism of American democracy has been the two-party system leaving us to choose from two disliked presidential candidates. This issue was perhaps most clear in 2016, when Trump held a 38 percent favorability rating and Clinton sat at 42 percent according to ABC. This improved slightly in 2020, as Biden jumped to 44 percent favorability, but his unfavourability dropped from Clinton’s 56 percent to 43 percent, giving him a one-point positive rating. Still, 44 percent is not even a simple majority of the American population. It’s obvious these candidates are not representing the views of a majority of Americans if a majority of Americans don’t even view them favorably, much less actively support them more than vote because they feel resigned to. In comes third-party and independent candidates, looking to build momentum for their movements off voters who feel disenchanted with both major-party candidates. These candidates can be valuable as an alternative to help signal to the major parties policies Americans support and actually force the two major-party candidates to earn the Americans vote, as opposed to receiving it along party lines or treating it as predetermined property, which far too many candidates and party-line voters do. But when the system is undermined by candidates like Kanye West, running for the Birthday Party, or write-ins like Harambe gain traction, legitimacy is taken from people with
actual policy goals that are attempting to better represent the full scope of American values. Like many third-party supporters claim, no vote is a wasted vote. And this is obviously true: candidates like Libertarian Jo Jorgenson, assumed to steal votes from Republicans due to the party’s conservative leanings, received nearly 78,000 votes in Pa., while Trump lost the state by 48,000 votes. Not every Jorgenson voter might have switched to Trump if her candidacy was unavailable, but the ability to vote in protest in elections like 2020 is crucial and still signals a disdain for the current administration. But there’s an asterisk to the original claim: Votes are wasted if they’re being spent on joke candidates that don’t actually represent the voter’s views. This goes beyond presidential votes. Two US Senators, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, both claim Independence even though they caucus with the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Representatives Alexandria OcasioCortez and Rashda Tlaib, and members-elect Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are members of the Democratic Socialists of America even though they still run as Democrats. In these instances, the two-party system even forces current officeholders to align with organizations that don’t support their views. In Representative Cortez’s case, she has publicly considered an early retirement due to being viewed as an enemy by the Democratic Party. The Libertarian Party holds 233 officials in local governments. In Vt., the Vermont Progressive Party holds two seats in the state senate and seven in the state house. On the local and state level, citizens have (continued on page 13)
Courtesy Wikipedia
Libertarian Candidate Jo Jorgenson speaks at a campaign event.
