A Whole Lot About Parties, Third Parties, and Change

Recall that Ron Fournier wrote a recent column about how the Republicans and Democrats are in danger of cracking up, and that Brendan Nyhan and I wrote responses bashing him a bit. Well, Fournier apparently doesn't read TAP, but he did respond to Nyhan in a column today that I think is very helpful at sorting out where Fournier -- and his informants, who are political professionals -- have something worth saying, and where they get things wrong.

The short version: what Fournier and the political professionals are seeing is the potential for change within the parties. They are (or he is) mistakenly confusing it for the potential for third-party change.

I'll start with what's useful, which is what Fournier reports about what the world looks like to established party professionals. For them, the world is unstable; new technologies mean that new people, and new movements, can emerge at any point and from anywhere.

They're right! Partially right: I'm not convinced that technology is the cause, or at least not this particular set of technologies.

Indeed, a lot of this is just "it's always been that way." There's never been a point in time in which top-down national parties controlled everything, and the only way to get involved was to work one's way up within that party. Presidential campaigns have always been contested, and often won, by outsiders who challenge party leadership and then partially displace and partially are absorbed by the old leadership. For that matter, the idea that the Washington party establishment was a separate, self-sustaining thing is itself on the new side: until some 50 years ago, there were very few party professionals (formal party staff, consultants, Hill and White House staff, and more) in Washington.

That's also true for Fournier's concern about the party committees. He says:

A senior official inside the Democratic National Committee told me that he considers Obama to be the head of an independent party. The president built an infrastructure outside the DNC, the official argued, and wields powers once monopolized by the DNC: Fundraising, messaging and voter persuasion.

In a sense, we already have a third party -- the BOP, Barack Obama Party. Isn’t it possible that Obama paved a path for a more radical readjustment?

But the party committees never really have a "monopoly" on party activity even when the party doesn't have the White House, and when the party does have the White House there's always a president's party that co-exists, usually with a fair amount of tension, with the formal party organization.  That's just a function of the way that the US political parties are organized, which in turn is in part historical accident, in part the consequences of political regulation, and probably in part the consequences of a largely decentralized system.

What else does Fournier have?

I believe that Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean and even Wesley Clark are examples of how a political system can be challenged by a disaffected electorate, even in the absence of a strong candidate. In particular, Dean’s campaign illustrated the magnifying effect of technology. What if Perot and Buchanan had access to the Internet?

Well...since Dean's campaign failed to, you know, win anywhere, it's hard to be too impressed by its mythology. But regardless: all of these candidates other than Perot (and I suppose Buchanan in '00) were very much party efforts to control their own party. That they failed, or that Obama's sort-of insurgent campaign succeeded, may tell us something about influence within the parties, and within the party presidential nomination process, but it doesn't say anything at all about third parties. In fact, the Buchanan story is useful for that. As an insurgent conservative campaign against a president who had disappointed conservatives, Buchanan was able to make a fair amount of noise; as a factional nomination candidate in 1996, Buchanan was able to win a quarter of the votes in many states in a crowded field. As an independent candidate in 2000, however, Buchanan was a big nothing.

What that leaves is Perot. Perot -- and John Anderson, before him -- certainly shows that when the conditions are right it's possible for a third-party or independent candidate to make a significant showing. But Perot and Anderson also show that they can do so without having any lasting effects whatsoever. And that's because Perot and Anderson were almost exclusively voter-supported ego trips. They weren't pushed into their campaigns by organized groups frustrated at their lack of representation by the major parties, or by dissatisfied organized groups within the major parties.

And the key thing here is that these two points -- the Dean, Clark or Buchanan party attempted takeovers, and the lack of any significant third-party candidate with significant organized group support since at least 1968 -- go together. Our political parties are (apparently) doing a good job of assimilating new groups and new movements and new interests. Tea Partiers don't need an alternative to the Republican Party because they believed (with good reason) that they could get much of what they wanted out of the Republican Party. Opponents of the Iraq War didn't need an alternative to the Democratic Party because they believed (with good reason) that they could turn the Democrats from mixed on Iraq to almost solidly opposed. Nor are there large pools of emerging interest groups who are shut out by the existing parties.

Granted: each party is always going to have some internal tensions, and it's always possible, if you squint hard enough, to imagine cleavages that could emerge. What if the Wall Street portion of the GOP finally gets fed up with the evangelical portion of the GOP? But for the most part, what we've seen over the last fifty years is that if groups do want to split, they're usually more than welcome in the other party. And most of the time they don't want to split; to say that there are tensions is a long, long way from saying that they're better off on their own.

One important part of that is partisanship itself. One of the effects of the growth of truly national parties and stronger state parties in the last fifty years is that both institutional structure and partisan networks have been established on both sides, and that the strength of those structures makes breaking with them relatively more costly. If you're a politician thinking about entering a House race in Michigan or Georgia, the fact of national party networks makes your job much easier. Hiring a pollster who won't just make up numbers, a fundraiser who won't steal from you, a media outfit that will give you what they promise...that's a lot easier if you can rely on your party network and party institutions. So is tapping into existing fundraising networks -- even in these days of easier fundraising.

Moreover, because parties are now more network-based than they once are, and what ties all these different parts of the party together is partisanship, I suspect it's a lot harder to split off than it once was. Think about a stereotypical 19th century party, which might take the form of a series of fiefdoms -- urban or rural machines of one kind or another, with a Boss at the top of each. What ties the various fiefdoms together is the need to come together to nominate candidates -- governors, or presidents. It seems to me that there's relatively little to keep a Boss from switching sides (that is, from one political party to the other) or, perhaps, for Bosses on the losing end from both parties to agree to team up and form a new party. Since the fiefdoms are largely independent outside of presidential (or statewide) races, they can do that without changing anything within the Boss's territory.

That's not what parties look like these days. Instead, local, state, and national parties are interconnected in all sorts of ways. Leaving almost certainly has higher costs. And because the parties are less hierarchical, the choice of sticking and fighting is more appealing.

So, to put it all together as far as third parties are concerned...while one can never fully predict what will happen, what we can say is that the current major parties are very strong. Neither shows any of the kinds of weaknesses that could lead to a crack-up and a third party forming. It is still true, nevertheless, that an independent run is possible at any time, although it's less likely to happen in an open-seat presidential contest that we'll have in 2016 and it's at least a bit suggestive that nothing turned up in 2012 when the circumstances might have been fairly good for one. If we do get a strong independent run, it's even vaguely possible it could do as well as Perot or even better, although there are good structural reasons that it's very unlikely. Even if it happens, however, the most likely aftermath is that it will disappear without a trace.

Elsewhere: 3rd Parties, Hagel, More

I've been negligent on these posts again, but catching up now. My weekend column at Salon was about the Hagel filibuster, and what it indicates about any Supreme Court nomination. It's what I've been saying for some time: of course there's going to be a 60 vote standard, although that doesn't mean that all Republicans who oppose a SCOTUS pick will necessarily vote against cloture. But most will.

At TAP on Friday, I knocked down the idea that technology or whatever will lead to a crack-up of the Democrats and Republicans.

I'm not going to link specifically to everything else, but earlier in the week at PP I talked about the GOP and symbolic politics with regard to the new push for a Balanced Budget Amendment. And at Greg's place I've been pushing the idea that Democrats should at least threaten to reopen Senate reform, at least with regard to executive branch nominations.

Q Day 7: Third Parties?

Two questions about third parties. Another anonymous one:

...Mike Bloomberg wanting to run for president and going so far as to consult well connected political consultants to guage a run...what are they telling him that keeps him from running? IF he really wanted to run, wouldn't this cycle have been best? A slow recovery hurting the incumbent and a weak challenger should have been a wide-open window, right?

They're probably telling him the Iron Law of American Politics that NYC Mayor is a dead-end job. Beyond that, it's correct that this was a (fairly) good cycle for a third party candidate to run "successfully", but that means getting to 10% or maybe 20%, not winning. So those most likely to try under those circumstances are (1) people with real issue commitments who want to get some policies on the national agenda; (2) people with egos that will be satisfied by getting on TV a lot, maybe even the debates, and then getting crushed in November; (3) people stupid enough or egotistical enough to believe they'll win despite the strong evidence that they won't. Presumably, Bloomberg is not in any of those categories. Or, he just doesn't want the job.

Chris asks:

Do you think the current situation in California (i.e., an uncompetitive state Republican party and a Democratic party that's not particularly unified or effective) could set the stage for a meaningful third party presence (e.g., due to an intra-Dem schism)? If not, what structural factors are preventing it? And what's preventing the California Republicans from moderating themselves? Is California enacting the Emerging Democratic Majority scenario?

The traditional problem for third parties is "Duverger's Law", which is more of an empirical observation and logical conclusion than a "Law," but says that first-past-the-post elections will produce a two-party system because third party votes will switch to the big party that has the best chance of winning (since there's no reward for anything except winning. I don't see any reason to expect that to fail in the long run, but I wouldn't be shocked to see a serious third-party runs for major offices, and wouldn't be shocked if one or more succeeds. I don't really agree that the Democrats are weak, though; but what you want for all of this is Seth Masket's book, which is excellent.

If the demographics of the US eventually look like California now, I'd expect Republicans to adapt. But there are a lot of ways that could happen.

Dogs, Not Barking

Haven't done one of these for a while...these are items not in the news, which itself makes them newsworthy:

1. Citizen vetting: it seemed that we were going to get lots of ordinary citizens who made important opposition research finds. Were there any so far this year? Maybe we'll get more in Congressional contests.

2. Afghanistan casualties. Through the end of June, coalition deaths are down a bit over 20% from last year. US deaths are down just a hair below 20%. The people at icasualties credit one US death from Iraq this year; that puts total US deaths from Iraq and Afghanistan so far this year at 165, down from 243 through June last year. It seems likely that 2012 will be the "best" year for US and coalition casualties since 2002. That's still a lot of deaths, of course.

3. Well, the obvious one: third party candidates. Major ones, that is. It really was possible we could have had one this time around.

4. Either way: gun control or the old favorite, Fairness.

Dogs, Not Barking

Haven't done one of these in a while...it's an occasional item about things that aren't in the news or haven't happened, which is therefore newsworthy.

1. Minimum wage as a campaign issue, or for that matter a minimum wage dust-up in Congress. Seems like a natural for the Democrats. James Galbraith has been pushing it, but most Democratic pols seem oddly uninterested.

2. A third party candidate. Yes, Americans Elect is around, and nailing down ballot positions all over the place, but still no high-profile candidate. For context: Ross Perot's kick-off on Larry King was on February 20, 1992; John Anderson began his campaign some time after the Wisconsin primary, which was on April 1. So it's getting late, although the Americans Elect ballot line is certainly a wild card.

3. The Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Those who go back earlier than the 2008 cycle might remember when the big danger was that it would run out of money. It's now presumably overflowing with money, no? Oh, this is also an excuse to link to what I wrote about related campaign finance stuff over at Post Partisan today.

4. Toss up between gun control and, of course, the Fairness Doctrine. I'm getting scared though, that Republicans are really giving up on the fantasy that Democrats are going to bring back the Fairness Doctrine any minute now.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Nicholas Brendon, 41.

The good stuff:

1. Nice post by Jordan Ragusa on Americans Elect.

2. Bill Clinton is responsible for "38 percent of all presidential mentions of the word." What word? Stupid. Yup, stupid. Great research from Eric Ostermeier. My guess is that Clinton has to be also responsible for 90% or so of the presidential uses of the phrase "brain-dead," too.

3. Michael Tesler on race and opinions of the president's dog. Really.

4. Jamelle Bouie makes the case for Mitt Romney to go positive.

5. And Jodi Cantor on empty governors' mansions.

Sunday Question for Everyone 2

What percentage of the vote will the top third party or independent candidate draw in the presidential election this November? And who will that candidate be?

Q Day 6: Demographics and the Future of the GOP?

A commenter asks:

A lot of people think that the Republican Party is heading towards irrelevancy demographically because of its increasing trend to the right unless there's some kind of significant change. I'm less curious as to whether it will happen than I am curious about the mechanics of it. How could a party disappear? How could another rise to take its place? It's hard for me to see a 3rd party growing like that or the Republican party disappearing like the Whigs did. Any ideas on what will happen if these demographic predictions are correct? Will one faction take over the Republic brand while another heads out on its own? WIll both parties change based on new wedge issues?

As far as the future of the Republicans...I'm with those who believe that Latinos will become "white" (that is, they'll be thought of as part of the majority "racial" group) and that Republicans will compete for the Latino vote the way they now compete for the Irish or Italian vote. I do think in the near term there's a chance that Republicans could box themselves into a corner that would put them into the minority for an extended period thanks to demographic shifts, but I think it's unlikely in the long run.

On the larger question, my general sense of this stuff is that a two-party system is more or less inevitable given the US electoral system, but that the permanence of the Democratic and Republican parties has something to do with various "reforms" that make it hard for either to be replaced. Ballot access and campaign finance laws have favored the existing two parties. That certainly could change...let's see, for one thing the campaign finance thing is less of an issue now than it was a few years ago.

I think it's just very unlikely. It's almost always going to be easier for an unhappy faction to either jump to the other party or to take over their own party than it is for that faction to build a new party from scratch.

Johnson Out, In

I didn't get around to doing this post earlier in the week, but Gary Johnson is dropping out of the battle for the Republican Party presidential nomination...and in to the contest for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

I'm surely no expert on Libertarian Party politics, but presumably Johnson would be the overwhelming favorite to carry their banner -- unless Ron Paul decides he wants it. For whatever that's worth, it will mean that in most states there will be a conventionally credentialed third party candidate for president on the ballot. Indeed, I think I'd guess that Johnson's upside as a third party candidate is somewhat higher than Paul's; he's been a governor, and he has less baggage than Paul. On the other hand, however, he's a lot less likely to fulfill his upside. That basically requires good initial polling numbers, which would then get a third party candidate plenty of media coverage, money, and perhaps even inclusion in presidential debates, and Paul would almost certainly start out with higher polling numbers thanks to his much higher name recognition.

Which of course is exactly what happened to Johnson in his bid for the GOP nomination. Whatever else the debates do, they certainly divide the field between serious candidates -- those who get invited to the debates -- and cranks and kooks, who don't. As I've said before, had Johnson performed well in the very first debate and Herman Cain not done so well, it's very possible that Cain would have dropped right into the fringe status occupied by Johnson and Buddy Roemer, while Johnson could have at least made it to the debates.

But not much more: for better or worse, Johnson's campaign for anything more than crumbs vanished the day that Ron Paul jumped into the race. The "libertarians who want someone better than Paul" constituency within the GOP just isn't anything more than crumbs at this point.

On the other hand, if Johnson had really wanted to advance the libertarian cause in 2012, the natural move would have been to run -- probably as a Republican -- for the open New Mexico Senate seat. Libertarians upset with their candidates' choices should, in my view, start with that one.

Q Day 4: Ron Paul, 3rd Party Candidate?

A bunch of questions about libertarian third-party runs, including:

Do you see a Ron Paul third-party run happening next year? how do you imagine it would effect the race and the national conversation? I'm hoping you'll tell me it's inevitable and that it'll give Obama a landslide

Would Paul jump? That goes back to the earlier post: it's hard to get inside their heads. What we can say is that on the one hand, Paul certainly hasn't displayed long-term loyalty to the GOP (since he ran as a libertarian before), and he doesn't have a political career to lose by doing it, especially since he's already announced his retirement from the House. On the other hand, a jump would presumably hurt his son's status within the Republican Party. Hard to know how much he cares about any of that.

If he did it...well, he'd be a poorly financed general election candidate with a very strong but very small base of supporters, but the advantage of a ballot line everywhere (presumably strong Paul supporters would secure a spot in those states in which the Libertarian Party doesn't already have a line). 5% plus or minus 4% seems like as good an estimate as any -- but of course there's a huge difference between a candidate who takes about 9% from one side and a candidate who takes 1%. At the end of the day, I'd suppose that he would be unlikely to cost Republicans the presidency. If the election appeared close, Republicans, even the most libertarian-leaning of them, would drift back to Mitt Romney or whoever the nominee was. Meanwhile, if Obama is generally unpopular and getting clobbered, some liberal civil liberties fans might drift to Paul, but that will dry up if Obama is popular enough to have a fighting chance.

I guess what I want to say that how many votes Paul would get is probably a function of what else is going on. If the election is winnable for Republicans, the Republican nominee will wind up popular enough among Republicans that most will come home, and same for Obama and Democratic voters. Of course, if the election is very close, then it's certainly possible that the difference between a Paul at 2% or 3% vs. a no-name libertarian at 1% might turn a key state or two, but once the contest is that close then all sort of stuff can flip it.

Read Stuff, You Should

Here's some stuff for your weekend reading. By the way, the weekend should be normal schedule around here, and then I'd guess that next week will be irregular in some way, but I'm not really sure how yet. At any rate, on to the good stuff:

1. I'll start with a couple of CotD contenders what for whatever reason I didn't wind up using: Igor Volsky had Michele Bachmann's seven-foot-tall doctor who told her crazy things she believed, and Suzy Khimm takes on factually-challenged polling about the supercommittee.

2. Jordan Ragusa on the relationship between legislative salaries and corruption. Also partisanship and pizza from John Sides.

3. Paul Waldman on negative campaigning.

4. Barry Ritholtz tries his hardest to take down the "big lie" of the Great Recession.

5. Worshiping Calvin Coolidge, from David Greenberg.

6. More Newt! Much more Newt! Mark Blumenthal's Outsiders on the disgraced former Speaker, a wonderful piece on the (sometimes) lucrative field of housing history consulting from Alec MacGillis, and Kevin Drum analyzes Peak Newt.

7. Andrew Sprung has the most fun take on Cain and Libya that you'll read.

8. I don't entirely agree with Julian Sanchez on democracy and Occupy, but he's well worth reading as usual.

9. One of the best things you'll read about Citizens United and corporations as people, from Neil Sinhababu

10. Want a good example of how to do responsible third-party speculation? Steve Kornacki is it.

11. Ramesh Pannuru tries to talk sense to conservatives about the Bush years. Good luck with that. Daniel Larison chimes in.

12. Supercommittee negotiations, from Jonathan Chait.

13. And an excellent essay by Cord Jefferson about popularity, the internet, and Community. Also, ten Americans who deserve biopics, from Alyssa Rosenberg.

Third Parties Don't Work

Over at the Washington Post, Matt Miller has been crusading for a third party candidate. Ezra Klein and Miller seem to agree on policy more or less down the line, and they debated; Klein destroyed Miller. Key bit:

MATT: But let me ask you this. Just on that issue [the filibuster], which I admire your focus on, do you think that the likelihood of it happening would not be different if it were at the center of a third-party campaign explaining to people that part of why nothing gets done or that we can’t do things that are equal to our challenges is because of X, Y and Z in the rules, and this is one of them? If a candidate emerged and they were talking about this as one of the centerpieces of what had to change for us to be able to address our problems, I would think that that would increase the probability of it changing, if they won on it. Even if they didn’t win, they would change the nature of the entire conversation.
EZRA: No. You can run out the theory all sorts of ways, but certainly I don’t think Ralph Nader running on campaign finance reform or changing the amount of greed in politics changes it very much. I think it ended up going in the opposite direction. I think third-party candidacies in some ways can be helpful, but can be very, very, very unpredictable, obviously. And I think the actual answer is that I think it would affect the likelihood of this almost zero. I mean, it would be interesting if you had somebody relevant running a third-party campaign based on an attack on the filibuster. I think that would be pretty interesting.

That's exactly right.

Miller rests a lot of his argument on the Ross Perot campaign of 1992, and that it supposedly was responsible for deficit reduction. Miller was in the Clinton White House, and it's hard to argue against the subjective feelings of participants; I'm sure that to him, and perhaps to many of the Clinton crew, it felt as if Perot forced the issue. The problem is that it's real hard to find supporting evidence. After all, Reagan-era budget politics was dominated by deficit politics (thus Gramm-Rudman, among other things), followed by a major and successful deficit reduction package during the Bush presidency -- a package Perot opposed, just as he opposed the Clinton deficit reduction package in 1993. And histories of the Clinton administration stress the economic logic for deficit reduction (under 1993 circumstances, it would keep interest rates down and therefore spur growth), which presumably would have pushed the economic team in that direction regardless of Perot.

Perot did talk a lot about the deficit, but in my view his contributions to that discussion were almost always counterproductive, and at any rate I'm confident that had Perot never run for president not much would have changed about the Clinton administration's approach on that issue. My general feeling is that while it's possible for third parties to put items on the national agenda that neither party will discuss, it's a highly inefficient way of doing so at best. And as for actually passing things, it's almost never a useful strategy.

Indie Cred 2

What if a third-party or independent candidate actually did win the White House? After all, it's highly unlikely but not entirely impossible. Could he or she govern well?

Conor Friedersdorf makes the case. Even if one concedes that an independent president would have a tough time initiating and passing major legislation:

Imagine a president who proved particularly adept at cutting waste from the bureaucracy while improving the performance of its various departments; who vetoed the most imprudent bills that the Congress passed, and signed the most carefully crafted, necessary legislation; who proved a competent steward of foreign policy, a talented diplomat, and an adept negotiator of advantageous treaties with other nations; and whose appointees to the federal bench had above average intellect, wisdom, and integrity.

Well, yes. But here's the problem: a third-party or independent president would be in a poor position to do most of those things.

Could a third-party president do a good job of managing the bureaucracy? It's highly unlikely. The modern presidency has become a partisan presidency, in which presidents rely on partisan ties to staff the White House and the upper layers of the departments and agencies. And that's a good thing! Because the truth is that presidents have a hard time finding people to trust in those positions. Partisan ties don't just depend on loyalty; they also create incentives to people to do a good job so that they can be rewarded by the party in the future, either by moving on to more important jobs in the next administration or by going to work for party-aligned groups or think tanks.

See, any time that a president appoints someone to an executive branch job, there are at least three interests involved: those of the president, the agency, and the appointee. And while presidents should certainly be aggressive about monitoring what's happening, the truth is that they must rely on others to do much of that work, and they can't necessarily rely on those others, either. Partisanship doesn't entirely solve that problem, but it at least helps to align the interests of the president and political appointees.

So you're not going to squeeze a lot of waste out of agencies if the president's appointees go native and take the side of the permanent bureaucracy. You're not going to get a lot of brilliant diplomacy out of a president if the Secretary of State has his own delusions of grandeur and won't stay on the same page as her. And that's putting aside the severe problem of getting people confirmed in the Senate, a problem that might be even worse than it is now without having a party in Congress eager to help out a new president.

Indie Cred

So apparently within seconds of when I finished my Chris Christie item, news broke that he's not running after all. Since this is about the 32nd time we've heard that news there's no way yet to know whether it will take or not, and we still have Sarah Palin to contend with, but we're only a few weeks away from ending the quadrennial "who will run for the nomination" rumors.

Which means it's time for "who will run as an independent?" speculation.

So be prepared for that. Just to put a little timeline to it -- Ross Perot's 1992 campaign was launched with a February 20, 1992 appearance on the Larry King show. My vague impression is that ballot access laws are somewhat easier to overcome now than they were than (although I'm nothing close to an expert and could be entirely wrong); certainly it is a lot easier to quickly mobilize a whole bunch of people in 2012 than it was in 1992. And John Anderson dropped out of the 1980 Republican nomination contest to run as a third-party candidate in April. So depending on laws and all that, we could see speculation from now until, say, May. If it turns out that the GOP contest is long and hard-fought, it's very possible that both Mitt Romney and Rick Perry could suffer poor approval ratings for a while, which should encourage such speculation, especially if Barack Obama's approval rating stays right around 40% or drops further.

Will it happen? Stan Greenberg recently said (in an otherwise recommended interview) that "Somebody will run as an independent in 2012. You don’t have 80 percent of voters saying we’re on the wrong track and not have an independent candidate." I think that's much too strong. The conditions are certainly in place for a third-party candidate, as they are whenever the president is beatable. But that doesn't mean someone will actually do it. For incumbent politicians and those who wish to win office in the future, it means burning the bridges to their current party, something that has potentially high costs. And for non-politicians...well, it's not clear how many of them could put up a Perot-type campaign. They either have to be rich enough (and willing to spend it) to buy themselves a serious presidential campaign, or else have some other way to get enough of the press to take them seriously that they can mobilize all those people needed to get on ballots and run a campaign.  And there are serious costs, too -- you better have paid all your taxes properly, and better not have any skeletons in your closet.

And after all, you aren't going to win, and may well make a total fool of yourself.

Which doesn't mean we won't get a non-trivial 3rd party or independent candidate in 2012; it's just that there's really no way to predict whether anyone will do it, even if the conditions are excellent for someone to get, say, 5% to 20% of the vote.

But speculation, we'll get.

Oy, Bai

Yes, it's important to note that Matt Bai is completely wrong about what he calls "the rise of independents" -- we're living through a very partisan time, and there is no growing number of true independents.

Yes, it's important to note that Bai is completely wrong about the relationship between Tea Parties and the Republicans, and MoveOn and the Democrats.  He's completely wrong, too, that Barack Obama somehow proved that an independent candidate could raise lots of money; we don't know what percentage of Obama's money came from people firmly inside the Democratic Party network, but it was presumably a fairly high percentage.

Yes, it's important to note that Bai really doesn't seem to understand what political parties are and what they do, and he doesn't understand why and how third-party candidates sometimes thrive, to the extent they do.  Nor does he understand why they don't win.

But beyond that...the central conceit of Matt Bai's latest valentine to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is that something fundamental has changed over the last twenty years:

Since he wouldn’t need to build a party organization in the way Mr. Perot did in 1992, Mr. Bloomberg can wait considerably longer — perhaps even until the 2012 primaries — to assess whether a campaign might be viable.

This is entirely wrong -- but not in a "check with a political scientist" way, but in a "check Wikipedia" way.

Bai seems to be under impression that Ross Perot built a "party" organization in 1992.  That is wrong.  Perot didn't transform his personal campaign organization into the Reform Party until well after the 1992 election.  And Perot's mix of centralized campaign organization and grass roots volunteers began with a Larry King appearance on February 20, 1992.  In which, by the way, Perot claimed he was not running...although Ross Perot hardly invented that dodge, which Bai is so impressed with.  At any rate, Perot's campaign started two days after the New Hampshire primary, so Bloomberg would not "wait considerably longer" if he didn't start his campaign "until the 2012 primaries."

Oh, and Bai might not remember the previous similar candidate, but John Anderson's national campaign began in spring 1980, after he had unsuccessfully competed for the Republican nomination in 1980.  No party organization for Anderson, either.

So: Bai's description of Perot '92 doesn't at all fit Perot '92 or Anderson '80, although I suppose it does fit Perot '96.  The kind of candidacy Bai envisions and claims is brand new is, in fact, (at least) thirty years old, and exactly matches the campaign that Bai sets up as its opposite.

Nice job, Matt Bai!

(Fine, I'll mention that the entire notion that the nation yearns for a short, liberal, Jewish Mayor of New York is preposterous, anyway.  It is correct that if Barack Obama is unpopular entering 2012 that a third-party candidacy on the order of Anderson or even Perot is quite plausible, although it's extremely unlikely to do anything positive except entertain political junkies.)

Third Party Fantasies

Brendan Nyhan already knocked this down in up to 140 characters, but I'll take a shot too...

John Heilemann spins a convoluted scenario in which Sarah Palin wins the presidency in 2012 as a consequence of a third-party run from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Now, technically I suppose this doesn't violate the Iron Law of Politics that New York City Mayor is a dead-end job; NYC Mayors do occasionally run for other offices and lose.  Sometimes, they run for president.  Then they get crushed:

• John Lindsay sort of tried for the Republican nomination in 1968, but it didn't go anywhere.
• By 1972, Lindsay was a Democrat, and over the course of the primaries wound up getting about half the votes of Shirley Chisolm (sorry, Betty Draper.  It's not gonna happen).
• And Rudy Giuliani, you know about.

To be fair, Heilemann doesn't have Bloomberg -- who, let's remmeber, has neither constituency nor, at this point, any issues to run on -- winning.  And it's hardly insane to imagine that if Barack Obama is unpopular in 2012 , the right crazy billionaire could wind up doing about as well as Ross Perot did in 1992.  On the other hand, Perot caught a few breaks (mainly, getting included in the presidential debates thanks to a blunder by George H.W. Bush's campaign), and while surely he was crazier than Bloomberg would be, he also was more culturally compatible with swing voters than the short Jewish guy New Yorker.   (Being crazy may have been an advantage, too, in that Bloomberg might not be nearly as willing to spend hundreds of millions on a pipe dream).

But the real point here is that the third party fantasy is irrelevant.  If there's a double-dip recession and unemployment is over 10%, then odds are good that any GOP nominee would win.

Yes, Palin is very unpopular right now, no question about it.  That hurts her chances of winning the nomination.  But if she does manage to do that, well, we're not talking about today's Palin any more.  Republicans would rally around her; newsmagazines and network news poobahs would do features on how she's grown since '08; I don't need to tell you how enthusiastic the folks at Fox News and conservative talk show hosts will be.  She will have won GOP presidential debates (doesn't matter how she performs; since we're assuming she's nominated, that means she won the primaries that followed the debates, which means she'll be declared the winner).

Now, in a world in which unemployment is dropping, and Barack Obama has approval ratings of 55% or higher, then Palin would enter the general election behind and stay behind, and reporters (other than the partisan press) would rapidly forget her alleged growth and focus on how extremist and gaffe-tastic her campaign continued to be.  In that world, Obama is re-elected in a landslide.

If, however, Obama is under 40% approval, then Palin enters the campaign leading, and her campaign is thrilling and exciting -- a phenomenon!  Swing voters who already gave up on the president would either find themselves reconsidering the Sage of Wasilla (who, remember, would be getting great press), or would reluctantly settle for her.

Would a third-party candidate change any of that?  In those cases, not at all.

Could it possibly make a difference?  Never say never...if a third party candidate runs to the left of a marginally popular Barack Obama, it's certainly possible to imagine such a candidate taking 10% of the vote, all from the Democratic nominee.  Unlikely -- a lot of things have to happen to maximize the vote of the splitter, and the two-party race has to be close -- but not impossible.  Of course, given the record we've seen in 2010, right now it seems more likely that we'll see that on the right, not the left, but the opposite isn't impossible.

However, a third party coming from the center, more or less, won't do that at all; to the extent it "succeeds" by reaching double digits, odds are that those voters will come more or less equally from both parties.  After all, that's sort of the point of such a candidacy, to appeal to those who find their party drifting too far to the extremes.  To the extent that one of the candidates is particularly weak, a center-based third party candidate might draw more from that side, but that's just a sign of a candidate's weakness -- which, without the third party candidate, the other side would have exploited.

Indeed, a candidate who is flexible enough to have choices about where to position his campaign ideologically is going to search for his oppponents' weaknesses.  So if Obama is weak, Bloomberg might well run center-left -- but that just implies that without the third party candidate, the Republican nominee would have the advantage.  If that GOP nominee is the weak one, Bloomberg would position center-right, and poach (to the extent he could) her voters.  All of which makes for a lot of fun for reporters, but doesn't change the outcome.

In short, it's very unlikely that a third party candidacy would throw an election to a candidate who would otherwise lose; it's even more unlikely that center-based third party candidate would do so; and as much as a big checkbook impresses reporters, there's no real reason to think that Michael Bloomberg is particularly well positioned to be a particularly effective center-based third party candidate.

President Thirdparty, No; Candidate Thirdparty -- Could Be

I like just about half of Nate Silver's pushback against the idea that a third party serious run for the presidency is improbable (roundup here from Brendan Nyhan; Silver doesn't take on the question of whether or not such an idea would be a good thing, just whether it's plausible).

I basically agree with Silver that it's not at all improbable that a "serious" third-party candidate could emerge in 2012.  I do think he overstates the chances that candidate would have of winning, however.  As Silver notes, serious third party campaigns are by no means unusual.  What I'd say is that the proper way to think about them is by dividing the conditions for such a candidacy into two parts, supply and demand.  Demand for a third party is easy to explain; while Silver has quite a few conditions, we could boil all of it down rapidly to one: demand for a third party candidacy is caused by unpopular presidents.  That links each of the postwar cases (1948, 1968, 1980, 1992) but one, the Perot echo candidacy in 1996.  If the president has a high approval rating, you're not going to get a strong third party run.  But it's also true that demand is not sufficient; you also need someone willing to do it who has sufficient credentials that she will get Treated Seriously by the press, at least for a while.  Perot got that treatment because he was rich; John Anderson in 1980 was Taken Seriously after he attracted a lot of attention in the GOP primaries.  Most likely, any sitting Governor or Senator would qualify.

So, if Barack Obama's approval ratings take a turn for the worse over the next year, I do think the conditions will be there for a third-party run, if someone decides to go for it.  I disagree that such a candidate would have a reasonable chance of winning; I don't think Ross Perot in 1992 ever had a reasonable chance of winning.  The trick here is to think about voters and party identification.  It is true that many voters do not think of themselves, and do not say that they are, party voters.  As John Sides never hesitates to remind us, however, most of those people actually do act like partisans.  Here's what basically happens.  If a president, such as Jimmy Carter 1980 or George H.W. Bush 1992, is unpopular, that means that there's going to be a large group of people who think of themselves as voting for the person, not the party, and who also don't want to vote for the incumbent.  What do they think of the out-party challenger?  Well, they're not explicit partisans, so they don't simply rally to Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.  Indeed, there's probably an ongoing or just completed tough fight for the nomination on that side, so they've heard lots of negative things about the surviving candidate...last they heard, even a lot of Democrats don't seem to like Clinton (or Republicans, Reagan).  So you'll get a fair number who will say they will vote for a third party candidate, who at that point probably has the benefit of having avoided any negative publicity at all.  However, by the time the conventions come, the out-party suddenly seems, despite all (media) predictions to the contrary, to be unanimously enthusiastic about their candidate, who of course gets a multiday infomercial that even now is still broadcast pretty widely.  Moreover, the "independent" Republican is going to be watching Fox News (now shifting to a 2012 scenario) and hearing a lot of really good things about the GOP candidate, and some disturbing information about the third-party candidate, who suddenly looks a lot less new and shiny, and more like politics-as-usual.  Over on the other side, MSNBC hosts who may spend 2011 beating on Obama for deviations from the party line, leading some "independent" Dems to flirt with a third party candidate, will spend fall 2012 talking about how scary the GOP nominee is, and how Nader caused Iraq, and those independent Dems are going to float back to the Democratic president.  In our hypothetical, Obama is unpopular, so that requires another group -- people who normally vote Democratic but have sworn off Obama.   For them, it's probably easier to use the third-party candidate as a placeholder for a while, on their way to the actual taboo of voting for a Republican, just as Reagan Democrats did in 1980.

And that's without getting into a lot of the technical stuff, such as ballot access laws, or the advantages the established parties have in ready-to-go get-out-the-vote campaigns.  Essentially, there's just a lot of machinery in the political system designed to push people to the major parties at the end of the campaign, and that's what we should expect will happen at the end of the road, whatever things look like in March or July.

Weak Third Party Hype

Via Political Wire, the folks at USA Today are engaging in one of the staples of hack political journalism: hyping third parties.  The article is by Susan Page:

But this year there are three credible independent contenders for governor — a record.  If the "Tea Party" movement represents an uprising against the political status quo by the right, the independent campaigns and plausible prospects for gubernatorial candidates in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine reflect a rebellion from the middle. 

I really have no idea whether this is a "record" or not (define three credible contenders, please), but going way back to, oh, 2006, here's what Wikipedia has:

Andrew Halco, AK, Independent, 9.5% of the vote

Rich Whitney, IL, Green, 10.4%

Barbara Merrill, ME, Independent, 21.5%

Pat LaMarche, ME, Green, 9.6%

Christy Mihos, MA, Independent, 7.0%

Peter Hutchinson, MN, Independent, 6.4%

Carol Strayhorn, TX, Independent, 18.1%

Kinky Friedman, TX, Independent, 12.4%

Are the three candidates in Page's story going to do better than these Indies (and Greens) did in 2006?  I have no idea; it's very early, and it's not at all rare for Indies to poll well early and then fade. I'm reluctant, however, to say that Halco, Merrill, Mihos, Strayhorn, and Friedman were not "credible" candidates.  Well, maybe not Kinky Friedman, but the rest?  I'm not convinced that Tim Cahill in Massachusetts is in a different category, or will get very different results, than Mihos did four years ago; Page reports that he's around 10% in the polls right now. 

Indeed, it's not as if Indies never win.  Page says that if any of the Indies win this year it'll be the first time since Jesse Ventura was elected in 1998, but she doesn't add that Angus King of Maine, and independent, was re-elected in the same year.  King was first elected in 1994, a year in which two Indies cleared 30%, a year in which the fifth-strongest Indie reached 18%.  Two Indies (Lowell Weicker in CT and Wally Hickel in AK) also won in 1990, a year in which NY Indie Herbert London reached 20% (not as credible as this year's crop.  If so, that ties Page's "record" three).  So the last ten years have been lean ones for Indies winning, but there were a total of five in the 1990s. 

As for Page's interpretation of the Indie revival (and assuming that it exists in the first place), is she correct that it represents a "rebellion from the middle"?  I don't know...what it probably shows, more than anything, is the low cost of entry into gubernatorial elections, yielding lots of Indie candidates, most of whom will fizzle out long before November.  Of course, "independent" doesn't necessarily mean "centrist," and Page's article doesn't really explain why we should believe that interpretation.  The only actual issue position that we get from the article is that one of the candidates wants to raise taxes (is that centrist?  I don't know).  Beyond that, we learn that these Indie candidates think that rhetoric attacking extremism is good politics -- which, one shouldn't have to point out, doesn't mean that they are actually in "the middle," only that they think that people don't like extremists. 

Henry Farrell bait

See the Monkey Cage for the explanation.  And the miscreant is (via a nice post from Yglesias)... from Brookings, Isabell Sawhill:

With this as background, I am waiting for a leader who is able to articulate the need for more sensible and pragmatic solutions. Such a leader would start a movement of like-minded citizens that eventually culminates in a third party win of the presidency. I realize that the history of successful third parties is not encouraging, but the most potent political force in this country right now is a public that is completely disillusioned and angry about the way Washington works and less extreme in its view than its representatives in Congress. Thus, the times are ripe for greater success than in the past. (Emphasis added).

Really?  I don't know what "most potent political force" means, but lots of people like Obama and the Democrats -- they aren't part of this force she's talking about -- and of those who don't, a fair number of them are Tea Party types, who bring the crazy, not the moderation.  As Henry Farrell puts it, "Me, the People."

Not that she actually explains what is less "sensible and pragmatic" about the agenda that Obama and the Democratic Congress are busy passing. 

I do recommend the pieces by Tom Mann and Henry Aaron, also available at the above link (oh, I'll give it again).  There's also a piece by Jonathan Rauch, who I generally think is very good in addition to being a proud member of the Jonathan club, which oddly claims that "the best way of inducing Republicans to behave responsibly is to give them responsibility."  Not only do Mann and Aaron make the point that rewarding the GOP for being irresponsible in 2008-2009 would be unlikely to encourage different behavior, and that at any rate the Republicans will have plenty of incentive to continue opposing the president regardless of whether they're in the majority -- but I think more to the point is that the last time the Republicans did have responsibility we got the Bush tax cut, the other Bush tax cut, two unfunded wars, and one unfunded Medicare expansion.  Meanwhile, the Democrats are not waiting for Republican support to be willing to reduce the deficit and tackle the long-term medical entitlements problem: they just did it!   Republicans, meanwhile, are not running on the Paul Ryan deficit-reduction platform; they're running on an "explode the deficit" platform.  If what you want is deficit reduction, it's hard to see why you would want the  party pledging to never cut Medicare, especially Medicare advantage while also never raising taxes.