By Noah Dawson
The biggest campaign news of the past week has been U.S. Rep. Justin Amash’s entrance into the presidential race as a Libertarian. Though he is not yet the party’s nominee, his campaign has drawn a lot of media attention, and most of it has been centered around the question of if his campaign will “spoil” the election. As someone who admittedly regularly votes for third-party candidates, I feel like now would be a good time to explain my view on the spoiler effect and why it doesn’t prevent me from voting third-party.
First, let’s briefly go over how the spoiler effect works, or at least how it is usually portrayed as working. Let’s say that there are two major parties, both of which have moderate views. Each puts up a candidate for an election, A and B. Let’s say that candidate A wins with 52% of the vote, with candidate B getting the remaining 48%. Now, let’s say that some voters were unhappy with candidate A having moderate views, so they put up a candidate with views that are similar but more extreme. Let’s call this person candidate C. Let’s assume that the number of people who voted in the election stays the same, that candidate C gets 5% of the vote, and that all of candidate C’s votes would have otherwise gone to candidate A. Now, candidate A only has 47% of votes, candidate B has 48%, and candidate C has 5%. Now candidate B has won, with candidate C having spoiled candidate A’s victory. It would seem that it would have been better for voters of candidate C to have accepted the more moderate candidate A to stop candidate B.
That’s how the spoiler effect is usually described. But there are a few problems. First, real elections are a lot more complicated than the example. Firstly, politics isn’t just a simple spectrum with extreme views on either end of an axis and moderate views towards the center. For example, though the Libertarian Party is often viewed as being a more extreme Republican Party, the Libertarian Party holds many views directly opposed to the Republican Party, mostly regarding social issues (though even that is a massive oversimplification). And, while communism is often seen as being an extreme version of the ideas of the Democratic Party, real life communist states tend to have conservative social views that are often far more extreme than the Republican Party’s.
This leads to another point: It cannot be assumed that all votes that go to a certain third-party candidate would have otherwise gone to a specific main party. A perfect example comes from the 1992 election, where exit polling from the New York Times reported that 38% of Ross Perot voters would have otherwise voted for Bush and another 38% would have otherwise voted for Clinton. This also exposes another point: many third-party voters might not have voted for either major party if the third-party was not on the ballot.
Is this relevant regarding Amash? I would argue it is. While it is hard to know at this point, it is reasonable to assume a large number of those who vote for whoever the Libertarian Party nominee is otherwise vote Republican or vote Democrat. Another large number of Libertarian voters might otherwise vote for either major party. This seems to be a rational assumption, given two facts: First, Amash, until last July, was a member of the Republican Party. His voting record is one of the most conservative ones in the House. He has been one of the leading voices in the House regarding support of constitutionalism. This is likely to draw a large number of right-wing voters, many of whom might be dissatisfied with the Trump administration’s reluctance to reduce spending and Trump’s flexibility on gun rights.
Meanwhile, though, Amash also has the potential to draw many Democrats. With the moderate Joe Biden now the presumptive nominee, many Democrats further to the left are looking for a more principled option. With Amash being a longtime Trump critic, having even voted for impeachment, Amash seems like a good choice, even if his views don’t perfectly line up with the left. In fact, despite his history in the Republican Party, much of the focus on Amash so far has been regarding his potential to take votes away from Biden. And, while these facts are specific to Amash, similar arguments could be made for any of the Libertarian Party candidates.
Still, let’s set that all to the side for now. Let’s assume that a third-party will only hurt one major party’s electoral chances. If that is the case, then I would absolutely agree that supporting third parties is a good short-term strategy. But what about the longer term? If a major party loses an election because they were unable to convince third-party voters to support them, one must wonder if they deserved to win at all. Sure, it can be assumed that the major party might lose some moderate voters by nominating candidates to court otherwise would-be third-party voters, but an inability to strike a good balance between principled and moderate stances, I would argue, is a fault of the major party, not of third parties. And, if third parties spoil an election, it sends a signal to major parties that they need to shift their priorities if they want to win elections in the future. In this way, third-party voters can get what they want in the long run, with the major party moving to support their views.
Finally, I want to make one other point clear: The spoiler effect is not at all connected to the electoral college system. Many of the complaints I’ve recently seen about the spoiler effect seem to imply that it is dangerous to vote for a third-party until we get rid of the electoral college, as if that would get rid of the effect. In reality, any plurality based electoral system is susceptible to the spoiler effect. This was a major issue in the recent UK general election, where the Conservative Party worried that the newly formed Brexit Party might steal conservative votes. Still, I do have more to say about the electoral college, but, as this column is already over one thousand words long, that might have to be a topic for a future piece.
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