Voting for third parties or choosing the lesser of evils in US voting

In discussing tactics for voting in presidential elections often votes cast for third party candidates are described as wasted ballots or alternatively as possibly helping to elect the greater of two evil candidates.

This article is designed to show that both criticisms are based upon misunderstanding the purpose of voting from the standpoint of the individual voter. Some discussions appear to assume that voting is something like betting. From this point of view voting for a third party candidate is irrational a wasted or losing bet. The statistics are clear: " Since 1988, third party candidates have averaged less than one tenth of a percent of the popular vote. With that in mind, it is fair to say this year’s leading third-party candidates are polling much better than average." Yet recent polling give Green Party candidate Jill Stein an average of just 3.1 per cent nationally, while Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson has an average of 8.6 percent. If voting were like betting one would demand huge odds before you would place your bet on a third party.

But voting is not like betting. Even if there are only two candidates running you do not vote for a candidate because they are more likely to win, but usually for the candidate you want to win. You hope that voting will itself help the candidate you vote for to win. You are at one and the same time expressing a preference and hoping that your vote along with others will result in your preferred candidate winning. Yet, your one vote is quite unlikely to determine the outcome. In almost all cases it will make no decisive difference but when a contest is likely to be close it makes sense to vote as a factor in determining the outcome. Even though you know your candidate will not win it still makes sense to express you preference and support. Even within a two party system it makes no sense not to vote for someone because they are quite likely to lose. As this article notes: In cases like California and Texas, where the results are often lopsided, the wasted vote logic could be applied to major party candidates. Should Californians planning to vote Republican or Texans planning to vote Democratic skip the election or vote differently simply because their vote “won’t count”? If a vote for a major party candidate destined to lose isn’t “wasted,” the same must be true of a vote for a minor party candidate also destined to lose.

If the wasted vote argument made any sense, all those votes for the losing candidates in states where one candidate is shown by polls to be almost certainly the winner are wasted. Yet no Democratic or Republican strategist ever suggests that voting for them in a situation where one or the other appears bound to lose is a wasted ballot. The argument that voting for a third party is a wasted ballot is not an argument at all. It is a myth widely accepted that is used by the two main parties to convince voters not to vote for third parties. A wasted ballot is more likely to occur when you vote for a person even though you do not prefer them. This brings us to another myth.

Often people vote for one of the candidates of the main parties even though they do not prefer either of them to a third party candidate or even disapprove of both of them. In this election, both Republican, Donald Trump, and Democrat, Hillary Clinton, have high disapproval ratings. Democrats are urged to vote for Clinton to stop Donald Trump and those who disapprove of Clinton are urged to vote for her as the lesser of evils. The result is that many will vote in a manner that does not express their preferences in terms of all the candidates but only in terms of those of the main parties. This is a device that functions as a means of bonding the voter to the two party system even though the candidates do not represent what voters prefer. It has little to do with any practical reality except for a few special situations. An extended critique of the lesser evil tactic can be found here.

Voting not only is an expression of support for a candidate but of the policies and platform of the party that the candidate represents. Voting for Clinton helps strengthen support for many policies that leftists disapprove. Electing her strengthens the power of an establishment that Clinton supports and to which she is beholden. The lesser evil doctrine is intended to do this, as was the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and progressive chatter of Elizabeth Warren. It is all part of ensuring that the left stays within the Democratic party fold. If the aim were to just avoid the election of Trump, then the following policy makes more sense:To those left leaders who say they agree that the Democratic Party is hopelessly corrupted by corporate cash, but propose a “strategic” vote for Clinton “just this year,” we should ask: Why not at least urge a vote for Jill Stein in the majority of the country that are considered “safe states” like New York, where Clinton is up by 18%? Given the Electoral College system, the election will really be decided in a small number of swing states like Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Voting for a third party will not prevent Trump or Clinton from winning. The US electorate is too habituated or indoctrinated into accepting the two-party system for that result to happen, but a vote for a third party candidate can have some effects:Strong showings by the Libertarians, Greens or other third parties in the 2016 election are very unlikely to prevent a Trump or Clinton presidency. But they could affect the positions presidential candidates take in 2020 and beyond.

If the showings are strong enough this could also encourage the growth of third parties and mount a challenge to the existing system. Third parties also give voters the opportunity to vote for candidates that represent policies closer to those that they prefer than do candidates of the two major parties.

Bernie Sanders' campaign gains ground among younger women

As if to prove Sanders is right and Wall Street and other money interests control U.S. elections, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) overturned a ban on federal lobbyists, introduced by Obama in 2008, restricting donations from super-PACs.

A political action committee (PAC) is an organization that collects contributions from members and uses those funds to campaign for or against candidates for election or legislation. Only Hillary Clinton will benefit from the move, since she is the only candidate who takes such donations. Sanders refuses to take any funds from super-PACS. The move may help Sanders though, as it shows Hillary is dependent upon lobbyists for support.

According to the New York Times, Clinton received a total of $47.9 million from super-PACs in 2015 at the same time as she advocated campaign finance reform. The chair of the DNC, Debbie Schultz, also accepts money from super-PACs and corporate interests. As more and more Americans are asking their politicians to break off monetary dependence on wealthy individuals and corporations, the DNC is moving to gain increased funding from those sources to defeat Sanders who is attempting to reform the system. Shultz's seeming favoritism towards Clinton has led to calls for her resignation in some quarters.

A joint fund-raising group between the DNC and the Clinton campaign, named the Hillary Victory Fund, rose $26.9 million as of the the end of 2015. Thirty-three state Democratic parties signed pacts with Hillary's campaign. The Clinton campaign is said to control the funds and decide which states receive the funds. According to Bloomberg, New Hampshire received $124,000. Another factor that worked against Sanders in New Hampshire are that six super-delegates voted for Hillary even though Sanders received 60 percent of the vote in the primary election. Super-delegates are automatically seated and are free to vote for whomever they want.

The super-delegate system was started in the 1980s as a way of giving the party establishment more influence on determining who was the presidential nominee. Sanders will have an uphill battle to win. The Democratic establishment together with wealthy individual and corporate interests that bankroll the party are doing their best to defeat him.

The Sanders campaign and his policies have even caused splits among renowned elite economists. Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, provided data to explain the costs and benefits of Sanders economic agenda. These include his Medicare-for-all health plan, $15 an hour wage plan, equal gender pay program, and other programs. Four economists, Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, Austan Goolsbee, and Laura Tyson wrote an open letter to Friedman accusing him of "extreme claims" and claimed he undermined the whole progressive economic agenda. The Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman then set out in several blogs to criticize Friedman and Sanders. Citing the letter against Friedman, Krugman said Sanders was engaging in "fantasy" and "voodoo."

The attacks caused former Joint Economic Committee Executive Director, James Galbraith to defend Friedman. Galbraith, who teaches at the University of Texas, said none of Friedman's critics had actually crunched the numbers to show where Friedman was wrong. He directly accused all five prominent economists of dishonestly smearing Friedman to gain political points for Hillary Clinton. Galbraith said of the letter from the four economists:"You write that you have applied rigor to your analyses of economic proposals by Democrats and Republicans .On reading this sentence I looked to the bottom of the page, to find a reference or link to your rigorous review of Professor Friedman's study. I found nothing there."The criticism of Friedman is rather ironic since he himself supports Clinton, not Sanders. Galbraith concluded there were quite significant results from Sanders program because of their scale and that they were not fantasy. Galbraith concludes: "What the Friedman paper shows, is that under conventional assumptions, the projected impact of Senator Sanders' proposals stems from their scale and ambition. When you dare to do big things, big results should be expected. The Sanders program is big, and when you run it through a standard model, you get a big result. It is not fair or honest to claim that Professor Friedman's methods are extreme. Nor is it fair or honest to imply that you have given Professor Friedman's paper a rigorous review. You have not."

Galbraith is particularly angry that Paul Krugman has used his "high perch to airily dismiss the Friedman paper as 'nonsense.'" Many people rely on Krugman to make careful assessments, Galbraith claims, but in this case he has made no such assessment. Friedman's work in this case is far more careful than Krugman's casual dismissal of his work itself, based upon an analysis by the four economists that did not carefully analyze Friedman's work.

Along with the division about Sanders and his programs among economists, the polls vary as well. However, Sanders definitely appears to be gaining in popularity while Hillary's popularity is sliding. Ironically, Hillary is failing to gain the support of many women, especially younger women. Policies are trumping gender. The result has been some very flawed attempts to help Hillary by prominent feminists such as Gloria Steinem.

A recent poll by Fox News shows Sanders with 47 percent support to Clinton's 44 percent. This is a 10 percent gain over the same poll taken in January. While this is the first poll showing Clinton as trailing, in the last two Quinniplac University tracking polls Clinton led Sanders by only two per cent. The Hill blog notes:It's unclear whether the numbers are outliers or indicative of a dramatic change in the race. Outside of the Quinnipiac poll, Clinton posted double-digit leads in all three national polls conducted in February, with the largest lead coming in at 21 percentage points.

The Democratic establishment is getting more and more worried. Sanders was supposed to be the sheepherder who would help bring leftists back into the Democratic fold. The only problem is that he brought in too many sheep and it now looks as if they could take over the party and Clinton could lose the nomination.