Are African Americans Abandoning the Major Parties in Favor of Superior Third Party and Independent Alternatives? Shouldn't We All?

Earlier this month, I relayed a report stating that African Americans in Illinois were supporting third party or independent candidates in relatively high numbers, with over 20% favoring an alternative to the corporatist shills of the Democratic and Republican parties. Unfortunately, it was impossible to determine just who those individuals were supporting because the polling outfit, Rasmussen, did not inquire as to which third party and independent candidates respondents favored, but rather subsumed everyone aside from the Democrat and Republican under the category "some other candidate." A similar situation may well be developing in Georgia. Jack Wagner writes at the Free Independent Sun:

I noticed something quite disturbing when studying recent polling for elections around the country. Rasmussen Reports will include upwards of 6 or 7 candidates in the Democrat and Republican Primaries, sometimes with candidates that only receive 1% of the vote, yet when it comes to the General Election they will only include the two Democrat-Republican candidates despite there being sometime upwards of 3 or 4 other candidates from Third Party Nominations or Independent Nominations. This case is most present and most dangerous in a particular Governor’s election in Georgia, where the African-American Libertarian Candidate John Monds is left out of General Election polls despite having won 33.4% in a statewide election in 2008, and apparently the most likely winner of the 15- 20% of unaccounted votes in Rasmussen Polls.

Though it likely stakes out familiar territory to Poli-Tea readers, the piece is well worth a read, and goes on to document the pollster's bias against third party candidates in Georgia, South Carolina and Illinois. Nonetheless, there seems to be significant movement afoot within the African American community away from the Democrats and in the direction of rational alternatives to Democrat-Republican party government. A column by Frederick Alexander Meade published at Akiit.com over the weekend argues that African Americans should support third party candidates for office:

In the face of a two party political system, in which neither entity holds any significant measure of deference for a socially ailing African-American body, the construction of a party in which the group may call its own, may serve as the only reasonable approach, by which this population may be afforded any degree of leverage.

The function of a third party, in its greatest capacity, would serve to conceivably eclipse the position of the Democratic Party in its perceived station, as institution of choice, for the socially dispossessed and of those seemingly concerned with the welfare of the masses.

A less speculative and perhaps more pragmatic conception of such a party, would maintain it function – in the short term – to erode a segment of the black Democratic voting base. An evolvement the Democrats can ill afford to experience, as the black vote often serves as the critical force this band relies upon, in securing electoral triumphs over political rivals in highly contested races.

A viable third party would not have to siphon twenty to thirty percent of the black Democratic voting base. Rather a ten to fifteen percent decline in this group’s support of the party would function to compromise its political strength in numerous municipalities as well as on the national level.

In politically disarming the Democratic Party, in regard to its African-American voting arsenal, a direct message would then be sent to this institution. The message delivered to this purported liberal body would boldly declare: black Americans have evolved into an electoral entity determined to observe its agenda honored and subsequently pursued by any political institution claiming to represent the interests of the group . . .

In pursuing this course of action, enough members of the African-American public must overcome the fear of perceived social loss the group may sustain in the short run, as the Republican Party would manifestly assume power within some domains presently controlled by its prime opposition.

In overcoming this fear, the African-American public must remain assured, its collective plight essentially experiences little nuance irrespective of the party that assumes office, as the masses have invariably suffered under the rule of all governing bodies.

This line of argument may be reasonably generalized, and would likely hold for the large majority of the American populace. Who is served by the tyranny of the two-party state, by Democrat-Republican party government as such, aside from the self-serving and self-entitled elites in the ruling criminal political class?