Party Time: Wouldn’t A New Party Just Be A Spoiler?

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This is the fourth entry in an increasingly-long series:

And to answer the title question: yes, and also no.

Well, not necessarily.

In much of the country, yes a third political party could quite possibly tip an election to the less-favored of the current two parties.

By taking votes mostly away from one of the two parties, the third party will take more votes from the existing party with which it has more in common.

This is bad thing, and is largely why first-past-the-post voting systems like ours gravitate to having just two parties.

But there are situations, even in the United States, where that is not a concern.

I can think of 4, though there may be more that I haven’t thought of.

There probably are more I haven’t thought of.

The first 2 have to do with variant voting systems that are used only in some parts of the country.

These variants are:

ranked-choice voting districts
“jungle primary” districts

Several cities, such as New York City, and states, such as Maine, have adopted ranked-choice voting systems; the details differ widely between them but it’s a general attribute of ranked-choice voting that it eliminates the possibility of spoiler candidates.

The “jungle primary” is specific to California; in it, all parties’ candidates contend in a shared primary election, with the leading two candidates then facing each other in the general election. In this system a third-party candidate is unlikely to draw enough votes from an established-party candidate to keep them out of the general election without actually beating them outright.

The 3rd has to do with the balance of party support in a district.

If one party has enough more supporters than the other, then the minority party can’t win even in a 3-way race:

districts where one party is supported by over 2/3 of voters

In this situation, the majority-party candidate has enough surplus votes available that the third-party candidate would have to beat them outright before pushing their vote total below that of the minority-party candidate.

One of the aims of gerrymandering is usually to eliminate districts with this large of an imbalance when it favors the state-wide majority party. My congressional district, for example, was this imbalanced before California’s recent redistricting but is now much closer to an even split (though, of course, still favoring the Democrats).

The 4th has to do with how much overlap there is between the established parties.

If the new party is drawing its support largely from voters who are fed up with both existing parties:

when a majority of voters think neither existing party is desirable

This is the situation that much of the country is in today: by not putting up any significant opposition to the coup, the Democrats have ceased to be a usefully better option than the Republicans.

Because the Republicans are the party of the coup, and a clear majority of the country does not approve of the coup or it’s activities and they really want it opposed.

It becomes worth the risk of a Republican being elected in a normally-Democratic district because, on the one issue that actually matters now, the results would be the same with either a Democrat or a Republican winning.

Because effectively opposing this coup is all that matters right now.

Without an effective opposition to the coup, no progress can be made on any other issues anyway, no matter what you may think that progress should entail.