In response to
this diary entry, I'm rebutting a bunch of the conventional wisdom of how the Green party could build influence.
First, here's the short-form rebuttal. A quick description of their line of thought.
- Get 5% nationwide to qualify for public financing
- ?????
- Become President!!
Longer form below.
A lot of the dreaming about the Greens becoming a power involve schemes to run a national candidate, gaining 5% support for public financing, and then therefore be able to compete in a national election.
Focusing on the presidential candidate first is precisely backwards. To prove it, we have to look at the presidential electing machine. And as with any time you are trying to focus on an output, the best way to do that is to start with the output and work... backwards.
The only way to win a presidency is to get an electoral majority. In order to change that system, it would require the kind of congressional vote that our current congress would never accomplish. It would require different congresscritters to support this vote. If the Greens want to change it, this is one reason to focus on House/Senate races. Until this system is changed, it is the only way to play the game for the presidential election.
If there are three parties running in a national election, there is a larger chance of the election being decided in the House of Representatives, which would largely be a party-line vote. Until the Greens have a large contingency in the House, this will not help them. This is another reason that Greens need to focus on House races.
It is not enough to get a simple majority - you must get 270 votes. A partial representation of 100 or 200 or 268 EVs gets a candidate nothing. The only way that a Green candidate would ever be president would be if he/she gets over 270 EVs. And the only way to do this is to win states outright. At the very least, the eleven biggest states (which is a strange combination of states). It is not enough to have significant support nationwide if you can't win a large number of states outright. Even having 30% popular support nationwide without 270 votes and without other Green officeholders means that they'd have nothing to show for a strong Green presidential showing. Absolutely nothing, in practical terms.
In order to win states outright, you need to have a strong national party. This means more than just a strong ideology and strong voter support. It also means boots on the ground in terms of active officeholders. This is another reason for Green officeholders.
Basically, focusing on a presidential candidate before strong statewide representation is putting the cart before the horse in a huge and nationally damaging way.
There are also vote-splitting concerns for local and state races, but the good news is that it is far easier to change local and statewide voting systems than it is to change the electoral college. Many state constitutions actually explicitly allow preference voting systems, and many state secretary-of-state offices don't explicitly mandate certain voting systems for local and county-level elections. With enough public familiarity from successful preference-voted local elections, it should be possible to eventually gain support for implementing preference voting statewide.
Preference voting on the state level for presidential elections does not make sense because it just delays the vote-splitting phenomenon to when the electoral college counts their votes. Who cares if Oregon avoids a vote split and awards its EVs to a Green while a GOP candidate would have won under plurality? It would just split the EV total between the Dem and Green in the electoral college.
Greens and Democrats also need to understand one thing - eventually, somewhere in the governing process, coalitions occur. They can occur later, in legislative bodies like Congress, or they can occur earlier, in party-building activities like political campaigns. A coalition was obviously required in 2000 because everyone knew the Greens weren't going to win anything. The lack of coalition was a failure on the part of BOTH the democrats and the greens, and we need to share responsibility for that.
And so. The best plan of attack is this.
- Work to implement preference voting on a state basis for local races, and eventually statewide offices, national senators, and national congressmen (but NOT for presidential candidates).
- Work to build campaign coalitions between Greens and Democrats for presidential campaigns. If the Greens and Democrats both insist on fielding candidates, and the perception continues that the Green takes Democrat support but both would oppose the Republican, then hold a runoff election between the times of the Green/Democrat conventions, and the national election.
- Continue to treat the electoral college as it was designed: a two-party system. This could conceivably be Green versus Republican. In parallel, if the electoral college is objectionable, work to change it by electing congresscritters that would actually vote to change it.
One note: By preference voting, I mean an abstract term where people rank candidates, and then the votes are counted in some fashion. I do not specifically mean IRV, which is just one implementation of many.