Third Parties
After reading Matt Bai on Michael Bloomberg's prospects as a third party presidential candidate along with various recent commentary about the idea of a from-the-left challenger to Barack Obama, I'm coming to the view that too much of this kind of talk focuses on the actual viability (or lack thereof) of possible third party runs. What's more interesting to me is all the ways that non-viable candidates can make a difference.
After all, it's reasonably common in recent years for an incumbent or quasi-incumbent center-left party leader to succeed in capturing the median voter and nonetheless lose power in the face of many people voting for further-left candidates. That's how Al Gore lost, that's how Paul Martin lost power in Canada, that's how Gerhard Schöder lost power in Germany, and it's arguably the reason Lionel Jospin couldn't beat Jacques Chirac for the Presidency of France. In all these cases, I think the Nader/NDP/Linke/Trotskyite voters were being short-sighted and counterproductive. But the point is that these things happen. A lot of people all around the developed world are basically pacifists and fundamentally don't accept the neoliberal economic consensus. And there's basically no way for a center-left movement to win without getting the votes of that constituency, even though few mainstream center-left political leaders (and certainly not Barack Obama) actually espouse those views.
The resulting problem of coalition management is both big and quite difficult. It's something worth paying attention to even though the idea of a third party candidate winning the presidency or of a primary opponent beating Obama is silly.


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