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Voting for the “Lesser of Two Evils” in a Two Party State

In the months leading up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election, many people were unhappy with both Obama and Romney. Rather than voting for a candidate, they were merely voting against their least-preferred of the two.  These people were deciding to cast their vote for the “lesser of two evils.”

This isn’t just anecdotal; if we look at Google Trends’ chart of search interest in the phrase, we can see that it has been rising sharply since August, from a fairly steady baseline. What’s more, there were more modest peaks around the 2008 and 2004 elections.

Clearly, in this country’s elections, many people are not particularly happy with the candidate that they voted for. It’s not just the presidential candidates, however. Recent Congress job approval ratings have been below 40% since 2005 (Gallup), lasting through Republican and Democratic control of both the House and the Senate.

Now, it’s hard to say exactly what fraction of people are dissatisfied with the current two parties, and what fraction would vote for a third party instead, but it would have to be very high before it would make a difference, because of the setup of our elections.

Using terminology from our class’s treatment of used car sales, let’s say that dissatisfied voters have a preferred, “good” candidate G, a “bad” candidate B, and a “lemon” candidate, L. The voter’s valuation for G winning is positive, B winning is negative, and L winning is more negative than B. Now, let us assume that the voter v’s vote actually has a chance of impacting the election (so maybe v actually represents a demographic, rather than an individual voter). If v believes that only B and L have a chance of winning, then v’s best option is to vote for B rather than G, because G has no chance of winning anyway, and having B isn’t as bad as having L.

Nationally, third-party candidates amassed only 1.64% of the vote. Either people aren’t as dissatisfied as they let on, or they felt in the same position as voter v, and ended up casting their vote for the less-bad candidate.

Now imagine voter w who thinks B is just as bad as L – both have the same negative valuation in w’s opinion. In this case, it makes sense for w to vote for G as a protest vote, and also on the offchance that others do the same, since w has nothing to lose.

There were likely some people who felt like voter w – they didn’t care who won; they disliked both candidates. Given this, it isn’t surprising that the third party candidate with the most votes, Gary Johnson, is a libertarian – not a liberal or a conservative. A liberal voter might prefer the Green party over the Democrats, but would probably be motivated to elect a Democrat over a Republican. A conservative voter might feel the same way about the Constitution party. However, many libertarians are equally upset at both parties, as they disagree with the Democrats on economic issues, and the Republicans on social issues. Therefore, more libertarians than liberals or conservatives were indifferent about Obama vs. Romney, and voted for their third party candidate.

Finally, if v prefers B over L again, and G still has no chance of winning, but v expects B to do significantly better than L, or vice versa, it again makes sense for v to vote for G. v has reason to believe that his/her vote won’t change the outcome, so v has the luxury of voting for G again as a protest vote.

Because of the electoral college system, in which the winner of a popular vote of a state – no matter how small the margin of victory – gets all that state’s electoral votes, some voters were more important than others to the outcome of the election. For instance, New York is solidly Democratic. Therefore, a voter there can feel safe about voting for G, as B doesn’t need their vote (because B is certain to either win or lose). As might be expected, competitive states like Ohio, Florida, and Virginia had somewhat lower rates of third party candidate votes (although this trend wasn’t as sharp as might be expected).

 

All the indications point to the Republicans and Democrats remaining as the only two important political parties in America. How is it that other democracies often have three or more parties with substantial power? There are many possible reasons, but some are because of the specifics of countries’ election systems. For instance, many countries use proportional representation, meaning that a party will have a number of seats in whatever assembly that is being elected equivalent to the proportion of votes it received. If the U.S. House used this system, then the libertarians, with their 1% of the vote, would have about 43 seats!

Under our current system, majorities have to be won for a politician to be elected to an office. Ironically, this is similar to the situation discussed in class about protesters in an oppressive regime; the protesters need to know that enough people will be there. The original dissatisfied voter v needs to know whether enough other people will vote for G to make it worth his/her while. Unfortunately, this information is hard to come by. To make things worse, polls before the election generally overestimate the fraction of votes of a third-party candidate, as there is no cost to reporting in a poll that you prefer G; however, you might end up voting for B anyway.

At this point, it is clear that it would take a tremendous swing in voter preference, or a significant change in our election process, to allow a third party to be successful in America’s political climate.

Election statistics from http://uselectionatlas.org/

– Red.Tide

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