Your humble servant has borne witness to
what appears to be a serious divide on the Democratic side of the electorate.
Many Sanders voters are holding forth that they will not be casting a vote for
Joe Biden in the general election, promising either to cast a third-party vote
or to sit out the election. Whether that amounts to an effective vote for
President Trump depends on where these erstwhile Sanders voters reside.
California will most certainly go for
Biden in the general election. Mississippi will doubtlessly cast its electoral
votes for Trump. Those individuals sitting out the election, either effectively
or actually, probably won’t affect the outcome. In Arizona, on the other hand,
where the race is close, Sanders voters sitting out the election could be
outcome determinative. [1] And so it is in
some other states.
Now for those who sincerely don’t see any
meaningful difference between the major party standard-bearers, what I am about
to say won’t have any impact. But for those who really, if secretly, harbor
more loathing for one of the candidates, I must urge that they once again block
their sensory pathways and vote for the candidate they loathe less. Yes, I am
counseling that they vote for the lesser evil, as disdainful as that seems to
be.
Third parties, like the Greens and
Libertarians, are ideologically based. They come together because its members
view issues in the same or similar manner. The Democratic and Republican parties,
on the other hand, are coalitions of interest groups. These interest groups
band together in order to increase their political strength. Because of that,
the Democrats and Republicans will remain the major parties. Here is the
explanation using a thought experiment:
Suppose you have twenty different interest
groups, each of them forming their own political party. Then suppose two of
them recognize that they have interests that don’t conflict with one another,
so they decide to team up and run a single candidate. With plurality voting
such as we have in these United States, the two parties who unified into one
will win the election.
In the next election, the other parties,
being rational actors, will seek their own alliances. It is easy to see how
this process will eventually result in two large parties. It won’t result in
one big party, because the less numerous or powerful interest groups will
freeze out the groups with fewer people or less power, forcing them to split
off into another party.
What if a couple of the original parties
decide that such coalitions are an affront to their ideological purity? These
are doomed to a political wilderness where they will never enjoy electoral
success. Their members may feel good about themselves, but they will never
persuade enough people to discard their self-interest for philosophy. In a
democracy, people vote their interests by and large, even if they dress up
their interests in terms of good and evil. To not vote your interest you have
to be deceived as to what your interests are. Or you have to be rich enough
that it won’t matter. (Of course, there are a lot of rich people who vote in
the interest of staying rich.)
I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m
not saying that our situation is a good thing. I’m with George Washington on
this. I think political parties are a public nuisance, and I’m all for getting
rid of them. But we haven’t gotten rid of them yet, and we have to play in the ballpark
we’re in.
So, if you want the candidate you vote for
to win, you have to vote for the Democrat or the Republican. You may have
noticed that, with the exception of a rare local election here or there, that’s
the way it always works out. If you vote for a third-party candidate,
understand that you’re casting a protest vote, and are effectively sitting out
the election; and I submit that there is no evidence that sitting out elections
accomplishes anything useful.
Yes, this is a very disagreeable
situation. It ought to change. But the way to do that is to work to change the
system, not refuse to participate. Sometimes we have bad choices. But we have
to choose all the same.
