On not being obliged to vote Democrat

October 8, 2010 8:04 AM

Daniel Davies writes on not being obliged to vote Democrat, parts one, two, and three.
posted by kenko (64 comments total)

Is it just me or did he accidently the whole conclusion?
posted by 2bucksplus at 8:09 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

Who is Daniel Davies?
posted by stbalbach at 8:10 AM on October 8, 2010

Counterpoint.

The very idea that that headline is even remotely plausible is far scarier than anything H.P. Lovecraft ever imagined.
posted by schmod at 8:15 AM on October 8, 2010

Cunning... three pages paragraphs, split into three separate parts... It's almost as if he was driving up hike traffic!

And it seems he comes to the conclusion that his vote doesn't matter, so why should he care?

And don't we already have a self loathing democrat thread a few posts down?
posted by cavalier at 8:19 AM on October 8, 2010

Counterpoint.

The very idea that that headline is even remotely plausible is far scarier than anything H.P. Lovecraft ever imagined.

The irony here is that the people on the far right are quite successfully drawing the Republican party there by threatening (or in many cases creating) a "third party" primary challenge, while the left's ideological purity prevents them from creating the same sort of groundswell within the Democratic party.

Which is to say, republicans can vote third party, but democrats can't, because the US left has no political savvy/capital whatsoever.
posted by TypographicalError at 8:22 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

three pages paragraphs, split into three separate parts

I count seven paragraphs in the first part, so I'm very interested to know which of us can't do basic arithmetic. (I also am highly skeptical that Davies cares a fig for his traffic.)
posted by kenko at 8:25 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Who is Daniel Davies?

Answer.

I think he makes good points and I would be very interested to see a game theory analysis of the consequences of breaking from two-party voting (one comprehensible to a non-economics mjaor, that is).
posted by blucevalo at 8:34 AM on October 8, 2010

Is blind to Democratic party primaries, which is where most of left activist energy should be directed (like the smart teabaggers in the Republican party). Assumes voting is 100% of political expression. "Spots me" health care in the most crabbed little model of American politics over the last thirty years, which has been trench warfare against a right tidal cycle. If we had played this little game, this little purity test, over the last fifteen national electoral cycles, the United States and the world would be unimaginably worse.

This really boils down to whining about taking out the garbage. Yes, the American political system is permanently broken and sucks compared to any multiple-member-district parliamentary democracy. But garbage still stinks, and over the long run we really do approach Armageddon from every direction when Americans vote Republican.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 8:34 AM on October 8, 2010 [9 favorites]

> over the long run we really do approach Armageddon from every direction when Americans vote Republican.

By my precise calculations using proprietary formulae, a Democrat controlled government will stave off complete and utter ruin and Armageddon until 2060. If the Republicans control the shots the end will come a bit sooner, in 2040. So, do you want to squeeze a few extra miserable years out while dreaming things will get better, or do you want a quicker end to the misery? Either way, it's all going up in flames.
posted by Burhanistan at 8:41 AM on October 8, 2010 [4 favorites]

Well, I'd be a hearty 77 in 2040 and probably dead of old age in 2060 -- so it actually means a whole lot to me.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 8:53 AM on October 8, 2010 [6 favorites]

I love these debates about how fast to drive as we head towards the cliff.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:59 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

I vote as an act of defiance and as a matter of principle. Pissing away my vote on an obscure third party or by staying home would be surrender. The only reason wealth and power haven't totally usurped the process is because I retain the right to speak my mind and vote my convictions. Sure it's probably a losing battle but why make it cheap or easy for them?
posted by jim in austin at 9:09 AM on October 8, 2010 [7 favorites]

over the long run we really do approach Armageddon from every direction when Americans vote Republican.

I promise I won't vote Republican. So everyone's happy! Right?
posted by rusty at 9:11 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

One down, so many to go . . .
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 9:13 AM on October 8, 2010

"I vote as an act of defiance and as a matter of principle. Pissing away my vote on an obscure third party or by staying home would be surrender."

I'm not sure these two sentences go together.

Surely abandoning parties that actually reflect your views and voting for the lesser of two evils is in and of itself an act of surrender?

Unless you are totally on board with everything Democrats actually do, not just what they stand for, in which case these articles don't apply to you in the first place.
posted by edheil at 9:16 AM on October 8, 2010 [8 favorites]

Voting for a minor party was an attractive option for me for a while, because I figured if the Democrats saw themselves losing votes to other parties on the left, it might incentivize them to seriously pursue electoral reform.

... but then I realized that the point at which they'll start caring about electoral reform is the same point at which they can't implement it, because they didn't win any seats in the election, because we split the liberal vote in an attempt to make them care about electoral reform.

WOOOOOOOO
posted by magnificent frigatebird at 9:17 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

Very wordy and pompous but I do agree that I should not feel obliged to vote for the Democrats as the Democrats have not felt obliged to represent progressive interests for the past several decades.
posted by Rarebit Fiend at 9:27 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Surely abandoning parties that actually reflect your views and voting for the lesser of two evils is in and of itself an act of surrender?

No, it's an act of survival. It's a two-party system here. The third and fourth and fifth parties are toy parties. They're playthings for political children. If you vote for them, you may as well be taking a "What dog breed am I?" poll on LiveJournal. You'll be participating in the actual contest for power in approximately exactly the same way.

If you want to vote for a party that reflects your views, you have to emigrate to a country that has a multiparty democracy. Even there, though, you'll be treating your politics as though you were searching for the perfect church congregation or the scariest ride on the midway or the most delicious diet protein drink. You'll be treating your vote as an opportunity to consume, not an opportunity to make a strategic decision about the distribution of power.

Even the tea party people recognize this.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 9:30 AM on October 8, 2010 [25 favorites]

Edheil, I get to define what is a purposeful or wasted vote for myself. There are no parties, major or minor, that accurately reflect my politics. But there are plenty that scare the sh*t out of me. I choose to use my vote against those in the most effective manner whenever the opportunity presents itself...
posted by jim in austin at 9:30 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

FLAG (etc): The thing is, I was never going to vote Republican. There isn't, honestly, even the faintest shadow of a party that represents what I actually want in the US right now. The closest I could get would be to move to Vermont and vote for Bernie Sanders, but he seems to be doing fine without me.

FWIW, I vote for Greens (often) or Socialists (never so far, anyone in Maine want to run on a Socialist ticket? I promise you'll get at least one vote) whenever I get the chance at the local level, and Democrats at the national level. This makes the most sense to me right now, since the only way we're going to get more viable national parties is to have more viable local parties.

If any disaffected leftists are trying to figure out what you can actually do to change things, since you have no real option at the national level, seek out the smaller parties in your area and support the hell out of them in local elections.
posted by rusty at 9:31 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

Bad examples, I know (and there are some souls in the grip of the model who probably would vote for a policy of exterminating X puppies over a policy of exterminating X+1), but it seems pretty clear that there is some point at which it becomes obvious that a morally and politically valid response is simply to declare that the fundamental basis of the implied democratic contract has broken down, and that it's a reasonable choice to give up on electoral politics altogether

Question: if electoral politics fails, what is the alternative? Answer: bad, bad things.

One of the persistently forgotten facts of American politics is how close we've been to martial law in the past. I found out about the Business Plot here, and have yet to see it mentioned in any mainstream source. It doesn't help that we have a culture that, fed movie tales about single, strong, simple voices imposing order with force and fed up with political gridlock, might actually cheer, for a time, such intervention.

Anyway, if the Tea Party manages to Nader the Republicans I think we should wish them godspeed.
posted by JHarris at 9:32 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

No, it's an act of survival.

Odd how so many Dem voters sound like beaten spouses.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:34 AM on October 8, 2010 [10 favorites]

The irony here is that the people on the far right are quite successfully drawing the Republican party there by threatening (or in many cases creating) a "third party" primary challenge, while the left's ideological purity prevents them from creating the same sort of groundswell within the Democratic party. Which is to say, republicans can vote third party, but democrats can't, because the US left has no political savvy/capital whatsoever.

This is an overly sharp but needed observation. I think the left does have some political capital and could use it to buy more clout if they were just a little more savvy, less easily discouraged, and a bit better at understanding the perspectives of people they want to influence. But most of all, if they noticed how the right wing "third party" du jour isn't actually acting like a third separate party at all: it's a campaign almost entirely inside the Republican Party.

The folks behind the Tea Party were smart enough to recognize whatever their chances with Republicans are -- and don't imagine there aren't schisms and uphill battles to fight there, despite the unity of the caucus from the outside -- they don't have any potent voice outside that caucus.

So where have they done their work? Inside the caucus. Primary elections. Fundraising. A vast PR effort. Talking points that are as well crafted and targeted as they are false. And they have successfully pulled the Republican party to the right, and probably some degree of independents along with them.

This, incidentally, is the biggest mistake our economist friend makes in his article, and it's funny, because a lot of the country shares it. When you narrow your scope of political involvement to your general election vote, yes, the overwhelmingly rational cost-benefit analysis is not to bother.
posted by namespan at 9:37 AM on October 8, 2010 [5 favorites]

The third and fourth and fifth parties are toy parties. They're playthings for political children. If you vote for them, you may as well be taking a "What dog breed am I?" poll on LiveJournal.

Humorous, but not exactly true. The results of polls are made public. Abstaining from voting can easily be confused with laziness, but voting for a third party provides an objective measure of voter dissatisfaction.

For a third party to become really viable, it'll have to do it starting at the lower levels of American politics and work up. Possible, but that'd require long-term thinking and everyone's in OMG WORLD ENDS TOMORROW mode.
posted by JHarris at 9:39 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

Once you understand voting for candidates as a Least Worst proposition, a lot of this nonsense works itself out tout suite. There simply isn't a credible argument for the vast majority of elections where a third-party candidate is the least worst option; very, very many elections feature a Democrat as the least worst option.

Another notable effect this has is the perversion of the ideas of "liberal" and "conservative," placing them in false dichotomy. In the majority of cases currently, Democrats are the "conservative" choice in more senses than one, not least of which that they're the last bulwark against the dissolution of the New Deal and Great Society ideas that were the underpinnings of so much of our national prosperity.

Time to go make a contribution to Feingold, I think, even though he's not in my state.
posted by klangklangston at 9:46 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

Third parties here tend to be One Note Sambas and as soon as one of them shows any signs of success, both themselves and their marketable message are absorbed, digested and rendered harmless by one of the two majors.
posted by jim in austin at 9:55 AM on October 8, 2010

an opportunity to make a strategic decision about the distribution of power

Since that comes down to whether I'll be sold out to WellPoint or Halliburton, I've made the strategic decision to tell the Democratic Party to go fuck itself.
posted by Joe Beese at 10:05 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

This ramble is the best of the web?

we head once more into that season in which anyone with a US passport and politics to the left of the Washington Post editorial page has the unpleasant experience of being informed, usually quite bluntly, that the voting franchise which the US Constitution appears to grant to them personally is actually the simple property of the Democratic Party, and that any failure to dispose of it accordingly is to be regarded as a terrible dereliction of moral duty.

Or, alternately

Here is my strawman, watch him fall!

The election will happen. In almost all cases one of two people will be selected for a seat. If you think one is more shit than the other, the self-interested move is to vote for the one that is less shit.

If you don't, as folks have asserted over in the health care thread, by all means - why choose between two equal evils. But if you believe that one option is horribly shitty but still less shitty than the other I do not see how you justify not opting for that one.

It would be different if anyone - including this dude - provided what I consider a compelling case that allowing the worse option to prevail will result in a better version of the less-worse option to show up. But I have not seen that assertion.
posted by phearlez at 10:15 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Since that comes down to whether I'll be sold out to WellPoint or Halliburton, I've made the strategic decision to tell the Democratic Party to go fuck itself.

As long as you recognize you then take yourself out of the equation that is voting -- completely. It's noble to feel that both of the two parties are tainted, but they are the only players in the game. You're never going to have the majority of the population suddenly wake up and share your indignation; not in the way the current media and political arenas are configured.
posted by cavalier at 10:19 AM on October 8, 2010

Odd how so many Dem voters sound like beaten spouses.


Odd how many Tea Party types think actual spousal abuse is Biblically condoned and want to change the law to reflect that. Oh, and given the studies which show a correlation between poverty (and gender inequality and on and on) and actual spousal abuse, and given what a Republican-controlled government would likely do to the economy, making blithe analogies to the victims of such abuse while trying to score politico-rhetorical points about third-party ideological purity suddenly ceases to be funny.

Odd, that.
posted by joe lisboa at 10:21 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

The election will happen. In almost all cases one of two people will be selected for a seat. If you think one is more shit than the other, the self-interested move is to vote for the one that is less shit.

Whether the self-interested move is as you describe or not (and I believe it is), I still maintain that I would love to see an honest-to-goodness game theory breakdown of the consequences of x numbers of voters breaking away from two-party voting.

Is it a non-zero-sum game? Is it Pareto optimal? Etcetera.

I'm just a geek that way.
posted by blucevalo at 10:35 AM on October 8, 2010

Since that comes down to whether I'll be sold out

And this is one of the other mistakes: attributing all kinds of larger things to your primary election vote. In your case, apparently something like a contract of ownership or consent. Or perhaps, in other cases, a pledge of allegiance, an expression of conscience or feeling, support of everything the selected candidate does.

It's none of those things. Your general election vote isn't a contract. It doesn't come with a note attached (and a non vote sure as hell doesn't). It isn't anything at all but a method of influencing a process that is going to select an officeholder from an already determined slate of candidates, no matter whether you participate.
posted by namespan at 10:44 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

The idea that voting for a thrid party that can't win is a waste only makes sense if you think the purpose of your vote is to align yourself with the winners.
posted by baf at 10:46 AM on October 8, 2010 [5 favorites]

Meanwhile (NYT):

Congress, however, has been stuck in a partisan stalemate ahead of the November elections. Asked what kinds of policies Congress should consider undertaking to try to bolster job growth, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, the New York Democrat who leads the Joint Economic Committee, said, “What’s important now is to get Democrats re-elected.”

There's a point when even a diehard starts to wonder if that's actually what's important, given the current state of affairs, especially if that's the best answer a person in her position can offer.
posted by blucevalo at 10:47 AM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is blind to Democratic party primaries, which is where most of left activist energy should be directed.

This.
posted by 3.2.3 at 10:51 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

ChurchHatesTucker Not an entirely inaccurate assement I suppose. But the problem is that there's no escape. You either choose the person who beats you from time to time and at least pretends to be sorry (Democrats), or you choose the person who beats you every hour on the hour and laughs while doing so and makes you spend your own money on a bigger stick (Republicans).

The only effective method we have of enacting change is primary challenges, the Republicans are in fact so scary that voting Democrat in the general election is the only option that makes any sense. That, unfortunately, isn't an argument that is going to get a lot of enthusiasm.

"Vote Democrat! They suck and they're awful but the Republicans will start Wold War 3 just for shits and grins so we've got to stop them no matter how awful the Democrats are!" Yeah, that's not going to be very appealing to the first time voters who got Obama elected and are now feeling, justifiably, like suckers. they didn't vote cynically based on fear of a Republican enacted shitstorm, they voted for Hope and Change and they got jack shit.

And jack shit is better than a boot to the face, which is what Cranky & Crazy would have given them, but unfortunately that reality isn't going to get them back out this election; or possibly back to any future election. Obama may well have prevented an entire generation of liberals from ever bothering to vote again, there are times when it's tempting to wonder if he is a Republican plant.

What really bugs me is that Obama did such a good job of talking up a liberal game, or at least appearing to, that it's poisoned the well for a lot of genuine liberals who might be trying primary challenges on the vile slime currently in office. "Yeah, we've heard all that Hope and Change bullshit before bub, we won't be fooled again..."

But, unfortunately, we're over a barrel and the only thing we can do that makes any sense at all is to vote Democrat in the general while challenging the evil ones in the primaries.

What we need is a liberal equivalent of the Tea Party. Not in the crazy sense, but in the sense of an ideological force seeking to oust any politicians running under our ticket who fail to measure up.

Traditionally the Democrats are the "big tent" but what good does that do us when our supposed fellow Democrats vote against us on the important issues? We look big, but when push comes to shove we fail every single time.

I think we'll be seeing more primary challenges as time passes and maybe that'll scare a few of the not quite so bad faux Democrats into toeing the party line. I also think we need to try to institute some form of party discipline. The Republicans vote in lockstep, that's probably a bit too far to expect the Democrats to go, but there's no reason why Joe Lieberman should still be chairing any committees on our side after he campaigned for the other side. Or why Stupack should be anywhere but the doghouse. Etc.

What's really bad is that we have a ratchet effect. When the Republicans are in office things get very bad very fast, and when the Democrats are in office they mostly maintain the status quo. Things don't get (much) worse, but they don't get any better either. It takes 60 votes to get anything progressive passed, and we might never have that big a majority again, but it only takes 51 votes to get regressive Republican things passed because our "big tent" won't match the Republican ability to filibuster.

So the next two years are going to be deadlock even if the Democrats retain nominal control of both houses of Congress. The Senate is the only part of Congress that matters, there we need 60 votes to get anything liberal done (but only 51 votes to get Republican things done, yay!). Nothing even slightly liberal is going to pass the Senate even in its current form, and its all but guaranteed less than 60 Democrat votes there in the coming two years.

Right this second we have seen every liberal policy that Obama will ever have even a faint chance of passing passed [1]. This is as good as it can possibly get given the existence of the filibuster. Assuming that Obama wins in 2012 it is likely that his last term will also have exactly zero liberal legislative victories because [2], again, it is all but impossible that the Democrats will gain even the nominal 60 vote majority they had during the first part of Obama's first term.

So yeah, we do owe it to ourselves to vote Democrat, but let's not fool ourselves, the absolute best we can expect is to hold the line where it is now. I'm not sure, even assuming success in the primaries we can ever expect better because there remains the Senate and the filibuster. Even 59 real Democrats, not our current set of traitor Republicans in disguise still can't overturn a filibuster from a unified Republican party.

In the long run, even assuming we can hammer the Democratic party into something other than its current spineless incarnation, we're going to have to confront the problems of the filibuster and the Senate. And compared to reforming the Senate, ending the filibuster is a cakewalk.

[1] Note, this is why I never agreed with the people who said that we could amend health care reform to contain actual reform after the big bill was passed. When are we ever going to have 60 votes in the Senate again?

[2] Though I'm sure if he wants to invade Iran, or pass a law allowing him to torture confessions out of accused terrorists, or any other right wing wet dream it will pass with no problems at all. What worries me is the possibility that in an effort to get something, anything, passed so he can appear to have been doing things Obama will lurch even further to the right than he already has.
posted by sotonohito at 10:51 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

I still maintain that I would love to see an honest-to-goodness game theory breakdown of the consequences of x numbers of voters breaking away from two-party voting.

It's happened in reality for some values of X, so theorizing isn't necessary.

X voters broke (mostly) from the Dems in 2000. The result was George Bush AND a Dem party that did not get more green. So strongly negative immediate consequences with no long-term positive consequences. Conclusion: Bad move.

The same thing happened in 1992 where X voters broke (mostly) from Republicans to vote Perot, hoping that he would be more fiscally responsible and less of a Washington insider. The result was Bill Clinton AND a Republican party that got even less fiscally responsible and even more insider (the son of the last Republican president!) Negative (for them) immediate consequences with no long-term positive consequences. Conclusion: Bad move.

In short, it's just INCORRECT to vote for anyone other than one of the two major candidates in a presidential election if your intention is to change things in your direction.

The only reason to vote third party in the general is to get a warm and fuzzy feeling or to avoid a queasy one. If that's your priority, fine, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you're helping or even not hurting.

You want to move the party left, vote for the most left-wing candidates who have a shot of getting the nomination. Donate to or create think tanks and institutions devoted toward shaping the national conversation. Work towards improving education. Work towards reforming the system. Work towards getting money out of politics. There are a million useful things you can do. Voting third party is just not one of them.
posted by callmejay at 10:51 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

I've made the strategic decision to tell the Democratic Party to go fuck itself.

Good luck with that, Joe! Send us a letter from the barricades!
posted by octobersurprise at 10:53 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

The Democratic Party: Vote for us or the wrong lizard might get in.
posted by delfin at 10:57 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

[Your general election vote] isn't anything at all but a method of influencing a process that is going to select an officeholder from an already determined slate of candidates...

My vote's ability to influence that process - especially in a deep-red state like mine - is so tiny, and the policy differences between the two candidates who can win are so negligible, that voting is of demonstrably less benefit to me than any number of others thing I could do in the time required.

Such as flossing my teeth.
posted by Joe Beese at 10:58 AM on October 8, 2010

There's a point when even a diehard starts to wonder if that's actually what's important, given the current state of affairs, especially if that's the best answer a person in her position can offer.

That is what's important. To Democrats anyway. It's the fourth quarter, blue team is down a touchdown and needs to score, why are you not rooting for blue?

American politics at all levels has ceased to be about substantive policy, it's about which team scores and how many seats. That's the only thing that matters.

That and tax cuts. Long live Tax Cut, King of the Americans.
posted by T.D. Strange at 10:59 AM on October 8, 2010

I would love to see an honest-to-goodness game theory breakdown of the consequences of x numbers of voters breaking away from two-party voting.

Every two years there are 435 House elections and 33 Senate elections, and every four years there are 50 electoral college elections for president. That's almost a thousand races in every four-year cycle, and the cost to participate in each of them is millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the end of each of these electoral rituals, one candidate walks off with a 100 percent victory, and anyone else who paid to participate walks off with nothing. This is dictated by the Constitution, and is so normalized in American political culture that most voters cannot even imagine another way of organizing a representative democracy, let alone grasp that we're basically the only country in the world that does it this way.

In such a system, there's only space for two coalitions to win often enough to make the high cost of participation (and the zero value of second prize) worthwhile. A third or fourth or fifth position will occasionally, Quixotically, win one or two of these thousand elections, but there's basically no realistic scenario where "x number of voters break away" and disrupt this duopoly in any nonsymbolic way.

You may as well speculate about how how large a proportion of the electorate would have to learn to fly before we could begin maintaining polling places in the sky.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 11:04 AM on October 8, 2010 [3 favorites]

So this guy lumps all Congressional Democrats together as a centrist, corporatist party and then spends exactly 0 words talking about party primaries? Since Americans show very little interest in party primary elections in non-presidential years, it only takes a relatively small group of people to change the party's candidate. That effort then gets multiplied in the general election, especially in single-party states. The Tea Party figured this out. Even if they loose Delaware, they're still going to get their people elected in Alaska and Kentucky and possibly in Nevada.
posted by thewittyname at 11:05 AM on October 8, 2010

Interesting analysis from Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight:

In the context of polls, the enthusiasm gap manifests itself through likely voter models. Over the past month or so, the typical likely voter poll has projected a Republican turnout advantage of about 6 points, relative to the number of registered voters ....

The enthusiasm gap could mean one of two things:

• It could mean that Democrats were particularly unenthusiastic, relative to a typical midterm election year -- whereas Republican enthusiasm was about average. That would produce an enthusiasm gap, and would tell us a story about a depressed (or dissatisfied, or complacent) Democratic base.
• Or, it could mean that Republicans were unusually excited about the elections, while Democratic enthusiasm was just at par. That would also produce an enthusiasm gap. But it would be much more a story about Republican excitement than one about disarray in the Democratic base.

In fact, it's the latter explanation that seems to hold this year. The enthusiasm gap has more to do with abnormally high levels of Republican interest in the election than with despondent Democrats.

Gallup periodically asks a question about whether voters are more enthusiastic than usual about voting in the midterms. When they did so in March, shortly after passage of the health care bill, 57 percent of Democrats said they were more excited than usual about voting in the November elections. This was, in fact, the highest figure that Gallup had ever recorded among Democrats in a midterm year (they began tracking the question in 1994). The problem for Democrats? Some 69 percent of Republicans also answered the question affirmatively.

posted by russilwvong at 11:11 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

The real lie is that you only have two choices. Framed that way, of course you're supposed to pick the marginally less awful one. And, sure, you can argue that you only have two choices when it comes to your vote itself, that third parties don't matter — I'll grant that for the sake of argument.

But the Democratic Party isn't just asking for my vote. They're asking — directly (I'm sure you've all been getting the emails too) — for my time and my money. And when it comes to allocating those, I have a lot more than two choices. The ACLU gets more done waiting for the coffeemaker in the morning than the Democratic Party has managed to fit into any one of its last half dozen terms. The UE isn't waiting for EFCA, they're occupying factories now. The fight for gay marriage is being won and it's not being won in legislatures. So why on earth would I waste my time, energy, and money on the do-nothing Democratic Party — all quid and no quo, to steal a particularly nice line from Mr. Davies, whoever he is — when there are so many worthier and more effective groups by whom they are needed?
posted by enn at 11:12 AM on October 8, 2010 [4 favorites]

Such as flossing my teeth.

Like that matters. There's not a dime's worth of difference between your teeth.

(À propos of the topic, this is funny.)
posted by octobersurprise at 11:12 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

For those liberals and progressives or other non-Republicans for whom the idea of voting D in the upcoming seems abhorrent, I actually would rather that you vote for your 3rd party choice than to stay home. At some point, perhaps some credible, non-lunatic fringe 3rd party can emerge to parry the Republic-endorsed Know Nothing Tea Party. Staying home just shows a crushing ennui toward the political process at all. Perhaps I am of a generation that still cares about the myth of "Your Vote Counts," but it is something that is palpable with me.

Of course, if you are Republican, and would rather stay home and not vote, please do.
posted by beelzbubba at 11:15 AM on October 8, 2010

I would love to see an honest-to-goodness game theory breakdown of the consequences of x numbers of voters breaking away from two-party voting.

Given winner-take-all elections, the third position only begins to win enough seats to make its participation worthwhile if the electorate is split into three roughly equal camps. But that's an unstable scenario, because any single camp can disrupt the balance by making a small adjustment toward the center to gain votes. Political scientists call this Hotelling's Law. It provides a formal explanation for why the two parties in the American system usually rub shoulders at or near the center of the ideological spectrum of American politics: It's the only place where you stand a durable chance of winning enough elections to form a majority in Congress, or enough electoral college votes to win the presidency.

I'm not happy about this, but it's pretty much an immutable feature of American politics unless we radically alter the US constitution (if you can describe a scenario where the two parties band together to make that happen, you have a better imagination than me).
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 11:48 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

The clever thing about the Tea "Party" is that they've created a movement with the branding, coordination and loyalty of a normal party, but (mainly) within the Republican party, so that voting for the Tea Party candidate doesn't split the Republican vote in the general election. A similar "third party" within the Democratic party which focuses on primaries could be similarly successful in pulling the Democrats to the left without all the short-term costs of a general election third party. It could certainly be more effective than the perpetual one-off campaigns on the far left to primary right-wing Democrats.

That said, I don't think it's entirely cut and dried that third party general election challenges would only hurt the Democrats. Nader is the usual counter-example, but 50% of the multiverse may be living in a world where Gore won, and (as was the case) was noticeably pulled to the left late in the campaign due to the threat of losing to Nader. Had Gore won, not only would he have had at least a couple of last-minute left-wing promises to live up to, he would have had to deal with Nader again in 2004, again pulling him to the left. The argument for third-party general-election challenges is that they threaten the party with losses, but losses which can be averted by moving to the left. This is precisely what Nader's challenge did. True, Gore didn't move to the left soon enough (though voters were moving his direction in large numbers in the last couple weeks), but that just shows that the threat is (all too) credible. Whether we're willing to risk the horrors of another Bush in order to make that threat again is another question (I'm quite unsure myself), but that doesn't mean the strategy can't work.
posted by chortly at 11:59 AM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

You can really see that liberal Democrats have a timidity problem when their idea of being bold is to vote for a real moderate center-left social democratic party. If the demand of the right is "Capitalism! No limits!" then how can the bold option possibly be "Capitalism! But a few limits here and there!"
posted by AlsoMike at 12:15 PM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Nader-Nader-Nader! Nader-Nader-Nader!
posted by newdaddy at 12:19 PM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's entirely cut and dried that third party general election challenges would only hurt the Democrats. Nader is the usual counter-example, but 50% of the multiverse may be living in a world where Gore won

In the history of this country, I don't know how many acceptably left candidates have won offices in a race where the left-liberal vote was split two ways, but I can't imagine that it's very many. In spite of that, I suppose I should take some comfort in the notion that such a thing may happen in another universe.

how can the bold option possibly be "Capitalism! But a few limits here and there!"

The bold option is "Hang the last capitalist with the guts of the last priest!" If you're leaving your desk or sofa to join Joe Beese on the barricades, then let me wish you the same good fortune I wished him.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:36 PM on October 8, 2010

You can really see that liberal Democrats have a timidity problem when their idea of being bold is to vote for a real moderate center-left social democratic party. If the demand of the right is "Capitalism! No limits!" then how can the bold option possibly be "Capitalism! But a few limits here and there!"

It seems to me that "capitalism with limits" is the ideal economy, as far as we can tell. Being boldly extremist for the sake of being bold is stupid.
posted by callmejay at 1:38 PM on October 8, 2010

OH GOD THERE'S A MOB AT THE DOOR IF YOU DONT VOTE DEMOCRAT THOSE PEOPLE ARE GONNA TAKE OVER AND TAKE OUR FREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOMS!! SCAAAAAAARY! If I can't decide whether or not to compromise my morals for practicalities does that make me a "swing voter?"
posted by fuq at 1:42 PM on October 8, 2010

In the history of this country, I don't know how many acceptably left candidates have won offices in a race where the left-liberal vote was split two ways, but I can't imagine that it's very many. In spite of that, I suppose I should take some comfort in the notion that such a thing may happen in another universe.

The question is not whether they were "acceptably" left, but whether they shifted left at all in response to the third-party competition. Pragmatically, the tradeoff is between the risk of losing the election altogether, and the gain of shifting the dominant center-left candidate slightly leftward. Since history doesn't repeat itself, assessing whether past attempts at this strategy succeeded -- and thus whether the strategy in general can work -- requires considering counterfactuals and alternate outcomes.
posted by chortly at 1:59 PM on October 8, 2010

OH GOD THERE'S A MOB AT THE DOOR IF YOU DONT VOTE DEMOCRAT THOSE PEOPLE ARE GONNA TAKE OVER AND TAKE OUR FREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOMS!! SCAAAAAAARY!

No, (REDACTED), but they will take away the jobs of most everyone I know and care about and/or drive the economy into a ditch whereby I will never be able to afford to start the family I would one day like to.

This is not an exercise for some of us.
posted by joe lisboa at 2:46 PM on October 8, 2010

If you're leaving your desk or sofa to join Joe Beese on the barricades, then let me wish you the same good fortune I wished him.

But this is also a very timid option, maybe even more so for how it tries to conceal it's timidity with an empty outburst that ultimately signals nothing but impotence. We should distinguish between acting out and a truly disruptive act.

It seems to me that "capitalism with limits" is the ideal economy, as far as we can tell. Being boldly extremist for the sake of being bold is stupid.

The only reason to be bold is that we have no other options. If you believe that the left can achieve its goals through compromise, moderation and rational good-faith debate, then by all means vote for the Democrats. But from where I stand, capitalism reinforces it's position through crisis. Every time there's a collapse, the social safety net is weakened, and the limits on capitalism are rolled back even further. How can we call for stronger environmental regulations with the economy in such a state? And so on. In the wake of this crisis, cracks are showing in the social democratic consensus in Europe - what happens if this is only the beginning?

In fact, we should be voting for Democrats because they're the lesser of two evils. The idea of voting for a third party is only plausible if you think "OK, we have the right social democratic idea, now just the political problem of making it happen..." In my opinion, this is a far too optimistic assessment of the situation, the depth of our malaise is far more severe than that. The only hope of resurrecting the left is by fully admitting this and rebuilding intellectually and philosophically.
posted by AlsoMike at 3:06 PM on October 8, 2010

My apathy antidote: They're voting.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:25 PM on October 8, 2010

On having a London stockbroker condescendingly explain how I should vote, while leaving out little details like primaries and the very real effects on my life when Republicans hold power:

Dude. You're a douchebag.
posted by zota at 3:30 PM on October 8, 2010 [2 favorites]

Primaries are the answer, eh? Is where I complain about how my local Democratic party organization decided they didn't like the Democratic nominee in the Cook County assessor's race chosen through the primary process so they have ignored the primary results and last night endorsed this creep, who didn't even have the guts to run in the primary and is now running as an independent and who is inexplicably popular among the self-styled progressives in Chicago despite saying things like this:

Well, I think the thing that motivates me most is a fundamental belief in the individual. The individual, not the collective and not the state, is what matters. It's about protecting the rights, dignity and potential of every single human being. In my office, I have two photographs; one is of Martin Luther King and the other is of Ayn Rand.

But this is the party of grownups and anyone who tries to do anything outside of it is a dirty hippie, right? Keep on telling yourselves that, guys.
posted by enn at 3:46 PM on October 8, 2010

The ACLU gets more done waiting for the coffeemaker in the morning than the Democratic Party has managed to fit into any one of its last half dozen terms. The UE isn't waiting for EFCA, they're occupying factories now. The fight for gay marriage is being won and it's not being won in legislatures.

Supporting these organizations with money, volunteer hours, and publicity (as you've done here) is terrific. Thank you, enn!

They're all deeply committed to working in the Democratic party and pushing it left, by the way. There's no Civil Rights party underwritten by the ACLU because the ACLU is too smart. There's no American Labor party because organized labor is too smart. There's no Gay Marriage party because any such party would be an instant footnote to the actual struggle. Gay couples are too smart.

The day the ACLU left the Democratic party would be the day I'd cancel my membership. But that's never going to happen, because the smart political organizations that do the best work on the American left understand what an unusual and unredeemable party system we have, and make the great choice to put their heat under the Democratic party. That's where the action is. That's where the hope is.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 6:34 PM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

Or this.

Thanks for the sanity, FLAG ...
posted by joe lisboa at 8:06 PM on October 8, 2010

They're all deeply committed to working in the Democratic party and pushing it left, by the way. There's no Civil Rights party underwritten by the ACLU because the ACLU is too smart. There's no American Labor party because organized labor is too smart. There's no Gay Marriage party because any such party would be an instant footnote to the actual struggle. Gay couples are too smart.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. The ACLU is non-partisan and routinely represents right-wing individuals and groups in civil liberties cases. It doesn't do electoral politics of any sort. The UE is certainly not "deeply committed to working in the Democratic Party." This is an organization that was thrown out of the AFL-CIO for refusing to purge itself of Communists. There are plenty of other unions that are committed to the Democratic Party, of course, like the UAW, which just signed an agreement to pay future autoworkers $14/hr, half of what current autoworkers are making — I don't think that deep commitment to the Democratic Party has worked out so well for them. And you realize that plaintiffs in the big California gay marriage case are being represented by Republicans and Democrats and that it's the Log Cabin Republicans mounting the most credible current challenge to Don't Ask, Don't Tell, right?
posted by enn at 9:56 AM on October 9, 2010

Enn, if you think the ACLU, organized labor, and gay rights groups don't consider the Democratic party a coalition of allies and the Republican party a coalition of enemies, I really don't know what to say to you, except maybe you need to get outside more and talk to actual people doing actual things in the actual world. You're approaching American politics as if it were some sort of card game. "I get to play my gay rights card on the Republican party because Ted Olson worked for George W. Bush"! "I get to play my organized labor card on the Republican party because the UAW got screwed when GM filed for bankruptcy"!

The ACLU, the unions, and the groups working to secure marriage rights for gay couples don't go about their business as if they're playing a parlor game. Their stakes are a lot higher than that, and they're effective because they understand how the battle lines are drawn in American politics. The fact that all death sentences don't get commuted, all auto workers don't get raises, and all gay people don't get to marry doesn't mean that the Democratic party is an ineffective sham. It means that the enemy is opposed and the war is ongoing.

If you're really this incapable of recognizing who your friends are and who the enemy is, I think the safest place for you is far away from the battlefield. Honestly, though, it's not that hard to tell the difference. Give it a try.
posted by FLAG (BASTARD WATER.) (Acorus Adulterinus.) at 11:03 AM on October 9, 2010