Duopolist Bias and the Creeping One-Party State: the Example of the US Senate Race in the Sunshine State

The inability of the establishmentarian political observer to conceive the very possibility of a politics that is not constrained by the logic of duopoly ideology is revealed in a recent article on the Florida race for US Senate by Eric Kleefield at Talking Points Memo. With polls placing Democrat Kendrick Meek far behind independent Charlie Crist and Republican Marco Rubio, Kleefield inexplicably construes the independent as the "defacto Democrat." He writes:

In the two months since Gov. Charlie Crist began building up to and ultimately did switch from Republican to independent, he appears to have overtaken Rep. Kendrick Meek as the de-facto Democratic candidate in the race against Republican Marco Rubio, according to the polls.

In reality, of course, Crist is not a "defacto Democrat" but rather a Republican-turned-Independent, whose political maneuvering has basically displaced what would have been a Republican primary contest, which Crist most certainly would have lost to Rubio, to the general election, which Crist may well win. In this way, the actual Democrat in the race has been almost wholly eclipsed by his Independent and Republican rivals, trailing both by double digits. From a recent Miami Herald poll:

Of the registered voters surveyed, 30 percent were for Crist, 27 percent for Republican Marco Rubio and 15 percent for Democratic front-runner Kendrick Meek.

Kleefield is clearly having difficulty grappling with the fact that the Democrats do not appear to have a viable candidate for US Senate in Florida. At Firedoglake, Jon Walker deconstructs Kleefield's duopolist bias:

Crist is not becoming the “Democrat.” . . . We have become so entrenched in our Democratic/Republican two-party political mindset that even when it breaks down, as it has in this race, we try to warp reality to fit the classic narrative. Most Americans view the major parties very negatively. People are unhappy about the last two years under Democratic control but still blame Republicans for the huge problems they caused when they had power. It shouldn’t be surprising that a significant group of people wants to vote for non-Democratic, non-Republican alternatives as long as they are viable.

Ironically, however, despite his criticism of Kleefield, Walker proves incapable of liberating himself from the cliches that pass for thought among ideologues of the two-party state. He concludes by arguing that the Democrat Meek has effectively become a "third party spoiler":

This is not about Crist becoming the de facto Democrat. It is about him becoming the de facto anti-Republican. The actual Democrat is now reduced to third-party spoiler status in most voters’ minds.

Other interpretations of this situation are entirely plausible. One could argue, for instance, that Florida is rather becoming a one-party state so dominated by Republicans that the GOP's internal rifts have been externalized, as it were, and become the fault-lines structuring the state's political landscape. Such a situation bodes well for moderate and conservative third party and independent candidates in the Sunshine State.