Cross-posted from Yahoo! Finance
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, and co-author, with Michael Mandelbaum, of That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented and How We Can Come Back, says it is. "There's a hole in the middle of our politics," he tells me and Aaron Task in the accompanying video. "If you had a credible independent candidate who came in, I bet you'd have 30 or 40 percent of the country."
It sounds convincing. Americans' faith in the ability of America's two-party system to function is (justifiably) at an all-time low. And the obstacles to a third party are substantially less than they were in the past. Historically, it was difficult to mount a campaign, organize, and get on ballots as a third-party candidate unless you were a self-funding billionaire like H. Ross Perot. But technology has erased a lot of those barriers. "The internet has leveled every hierarchy except one: the two-party system," Friedman says. He points to Americans Elect, a new organization that aims to promote political alternatives online. "You'll see people raising money and holding conventions on the internet," Friedman says. "I think 2016 will look like no election we've seen yet."
I don't share Friedman's optimism about the potential for the rise of a third party — for several reasons.
First, there's something slightly off-kilter about the pitch he and other third-party enthusiasts make. There's a small industry of professional centrists who are interested in politics but loathe to line up on either side of the partisan divide — because it's just not part of their brand. I'm talking about people like Friedman, Washington Post columnist Matt Miller, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and about institutions like the New America Foundation. (Disclosure: I was a non-resident fellow at New America ten years ago) One great way to stake your claim on a broad audience is to cast poxes on both houses, explain why both left and right have it wrong, and pitch your solutions down the middle.
But sometimes centrists have a difficult time laying equal blame on both sides. Listen to what Friedman's assessment of the Republican presidential candidates' uniform refusal to consider a deficit reduction package composed of 10 dollars of cuts for every dollar of taxes. "To me, the Republican party went officially nuts," he said. Aside from rejecting the very notion of compromise, the current GOP also tend to oppose many of the solutions he and Mandelbaum lay out in their book -- more support for alternative energy, big investments in infrastructure. By contrast, Friedman's critique of the Democrats is much milder. Friedman notes that Obama doesn't support a carbon tax, or a higher gas tax, and zings him for refusing to embrace the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan. "He's backed away from his own long-term fiscal proposal made by his own deficit commission. We shouldn't fool ourselves -- he doesn't have a credible deficit reduction plan on the table." What's more, it is not always clear where the middle ground lies. For example, the mid-point between more support for alternative energy (Democrats) and a denial of global warming (Republicans) isn't a carbon tax.
There's also a conceptual flaw to some of the thinking behind the potential for a third party. Friedman argues that another traditional left-right election "guarantees that either side will not have a mandate to do the right things." But in multi-party elections, it's likely that the winning candidate will have a significantly smaller chunk of the popular vote. For example, in 1992, when H. Ross Perot mounted a third-party challenge, Bill Clinton won with just 43 percent of the vote. What's more it won't change the nature of politicians. "We're having an economic crisis, and they're having an election," Friedman notes, describing the disconnect between the serious problems the country faces and the trivial problems Washington obsesses over. But once they're elected, third-party candidates are likely to be concerned about re-election, too.
But there's a larger structural problem. In our system of constitutional government, 51 percent of the popular vote gets presidential candidates a much greater chunk of the electoral vote, and the Senate and House are governed by majority rule. The U.S. doesn't have a parliamentary system in which a party that gets 20 percent of the vote gets 20 percent of the seats in the legislature. In European parliamentary systems, third parties can arise, prosper and flourish over time. But that's only because the system allows them to get a food in the door.
Ultimately, third-party enthusiasts don't need an online convention; they need a constitutional convention.
Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance
Email him at grossdaniel11@yahoo.com; follow him on Twitter @grossdm
His most recent book is Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation
