Nancy Jacobson, No Labels CEO, has an L.A. Times opinion piece attacking two-party “duopoly” and defending its plans for a potential third-party presidential bid. One bit of news in the column: it goes further than Ben Chavis said yesterday in declaring: “We would also back down if the polling indicates we would be a spoiler for either party.” As Seth Masket pithily tweeted about what Chavis said: “So… No Labels will drop out if they can’t make a difference, but will stay in if they can spoil it for Trump.” By contrast, I take Jacobson’s declaration to mean that if polling shows Biden does better against Trump without their candidate in the race, rather than with (because their candidate doesn’t pull votes evenly from both sides), then they won’t risk that their entry causes Trump to defeat Biden. At least I hope that’s a correct understanding of her statement.
On her broader point about the need to counteract the two-party duopoly, anyone familiar with my work on alternative forms of ranked-choice voting, like Total Vote Runoff or Round-Robin Voting, knows that I very much advocate electoral reform that would open up the process to genuine competition from third-party candidates. But the key point, which Jacobson’s column neglects, is that it is necessary to achieve that structural reform of the electoral system before running potential spoiler third-party candidacies. The mathematics of a plurality-winner system, which most states use to allocate their Electoral College votes, necessarily means that three or more candidates can fracture the outcome, preventing identification of what a majority of the electorate wants. As explained in my Presidential Elections and Majority Rule book, the Twelfth Amendment adopted after Jefferson’s election in 1800 was intended to assure that presidents would be elected based on a majority of Electoral College votes earned by accumulating majority support in enough states. But the switch by states to plurality-winner systems for awarding their Electoral College votes, as occurred subsequently in the Jacksonian Era, meant that operationally the Electoral College system became inconsistent with its original Jeffersonian–and majoritarian–premises. Until states adopt methods to assure that the winners of their Electoral College votes receive a majority of their popular votes (which they can do in a variety of ways, including with ranked choice voting), running a third-party presidential candidate is playing with fire because of the risk that it will produce presidents lacking majority support–as was true with Trump’s victory in 2016. Playing with fire this time around is as dangerous as it ever could be if Trump is one of the two major-party candidates, given his assault on democracy in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat.
Thus, I wish the electoral system were different, allowing No Labels (and others) to run third-party candidates without risking another minority-vote victory by Trump. But given the existing system, it is the height of irresponsibility (if one wishes to maintain a commitment to principles of majoritarian democracy) to run a third-party candidacy given the risk of Trump being one of the two major-party nominees.