• May 5, 2006 | 12:09 PM ET
With American politics in a particularly unsatisfying place, we're starting to hear more talk about a third-party candidate in 2008. People are unhappy with both parties over immigration policy: a recent
Rasmussen poll asked if voters would support "a third party candidate [who]ran in 2008 and promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority." Many respondents (both Republicans and Democrats) answered yes. Rasmussen was quick to observe that the response " probably reflects unhappiness with both parties on the immigration issue rather than a true opportunity for a third party," but I'm not so sure.
Democratic pollster
Mark Blumenthal thinks that Rasmussen has it backwards, and that the question actually demonstrates desire by Americans for a third party for reasons that go well beyond immigration, and I think he' probably right. Third parties tend to arise when large numbers of Americans think that the two traditional parties aren't doing a very good job. And right now, that condition obtains: Both parties aren't doing a very good job, even by the low standards of recent politics.
As the Rasmussen poll indicates, both Democrats and Republicans face splits over immigration. Each party has substantial constituencies (traditional conservatives in the GOP, African-Americans in the Democratic Party) who have reason to oppose open immigration, and it wouldn't be a surprise if those constituencies abandoned their parties to support a third party that promised a tougher line. But that's just the beginning. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal
poll last week, the single biggest concern named by respondents, ahead of immigration, was Congressional pork: 39% said that Congress wasn't doing a good enough job of controlling earmarks. Feeling betrayed, some Republican voters are vowing to stay home rather than support a "small government" party where Sens. Trent Lott (R-MS) and Ted Stevens (R-AK) can secure hundreds of millions of dollars for local goodies without much in the way of resistance or repercussions. Democrats might benefit if disenchanted voters sit things out, but that also means that there are a lot of voters that a third party might pick up. And plenty of Democratic voters are less than overjoyed with their party, too.
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that a third-party candidate can't win. That's been the lesson of recent history. But had Ross Perot been a bit less kooky, he might have pulled off a victory in 1992. And technology for mobilizing disaffected voters has advanced beyond the state of the art then, which consisted of toll-free telephone numbers. Thanks to the Internet and alternative media, reaching disaffected voters and rallying them behind a candidate is likely to be much, much easier than it was back in the 20th Century. (We saw an early illustration of this phenomenon with the insurgent campaign of Howard Dean, who, if he had been a bit less kooky, might have pulled off a victory in the Democratic primaries.)
Electoral laws in many states remain, by design, barriers to third party efforts, but as Ross Perot and Ralph Nader demonstrated, they are not insurmountable. Other barriers, barriers of fundraising, media attention, and voter organization, are much easier to overcome today than they were in the previous decade. (Someone should
write a book about that.) A popular candidate, in these times, could put together a formidable political machine in short order, and have volunteers on the ground before the two traditional parties could respond. The Internet has already given us flash mobs and flash media -- a "flash campaign" isn't too hard to imagine.
The two big political parties of today seem a bit like the three big auto companies in the 1960s: Outdated organizations producing a product that consumers aren't that happy with, unworried about outside competition. Competition and consumer dissatisfaction dealt the Big Three a serious blow. The Big Two may want to start improving their own products before the competition arrives.
