Decentering the Duopoly

In an op-ed for the NY Times, Nate Silver and Andrew Gelman of Five-Thirty-Eight consider some of the reasons why US elections have become less competitive. They provide three: 1) the power of incumbency; 2) the ideological self-segregation of voters; and 3) the inflexibility of party ideology. Clearly, within the confines of the two-party system, all three of these factors mutually reinforce one another to the benefit of the political status quo. Because duopoly party ideology has become more uniform and rigid, solidifying the Republicrat/Demoblican divide, and support from interest groups, fundraisers and national committees is tied to this ideological commitment, the Republican or Democratic challenger to an entrenched opponent is less likely to modify his or her positions to acquire a competitive edge in drawing the votes of a more ideologically homogenous voting public. How could any third party campaign compete in such an environment if the established opposition party is already incapable of mounting a competitive campaign?

When bipartisans trumpet their calls for compromise, and bray about the devaluation of centrism, what they fail to consider is that political discourse is always radically de-centered. More often than not, the political center is not to be found between the duopoly parties. The political center in Idaho, for instance, is located within its Republican majority, while that of Massachusetts is constituted by the wrangling of Democrats. While this would seem to constitute an intractable obstacle to any sort of political change, it only appears so because the political blinders of duopoly ideology obscure from our view the idea that such a state of affairs may well be the condition of possibility for real political change.

In a close Republican/Democratic race a Green Party candidate is likely to peel off votes from the latter, while a Libertarian is likely to attract voters away from the former, and thus either could effectively decide the election one way or the other. Voters who may well agree with the Green or Libertarian candidate on most issues will be less likely to cast their vote in that direction for fear of handing the election to the duopoly candidate with whom they disagree more. We see then that lesser-of-two-evils voting is closely related to the perceived potential of an electoral spoiler effect. However, in a non-competitive Republican/Democratic race, this danger is less acute precisely because the political center is already skewed to the left or the right as the case may be. The question thus becomes: how can this situation be exploited to the advantage of a third party campaign?