Posted under Constitution Party & Election 2012 & Libertarian Party & Politics & Ron Paul
Here is a recent article from Justin Raimondo urging Ron Paul to run third party.
Here is a reply from Ron Holland that appeared today at Lew Rockwell.
Read them and give me your thoughts. Here are mine.
While I would love to have someone I could enthusiastically support in November, especially with the Constitution Party likely to nominate Virgil Goode who is not a clear cut non-interventionist and the Libertarian Party likely to nominate cosmotarian favorite Gary Johnson, I hope Ron Paul doesn’t run third party or independent, but not for the reasons Ron Holland gives.
I have expressed before my general wariness of candidates who compete in a major party primary who then jump ship to a third party when they fail to win the nomination. I make an exception to this if there were blatant shenanigans by the major party to keep the candidate down that could be exploited by jumping to a third party in which case the party switch could be viewed as a form of just punishment or payback, but in general I think it is a bad strategy and bad form. I say this because it strikes me as bad faith to go running to another party if you weren’t successful in the major party. It also reinforces the perception that third parties are for major party castaways and malcontents. If a losing candidate is unhappy enough with the major party nominee then he should refuse to endorse the major party nominee and endorse the nominee of a third party, not be the nominee of a third party.
I think if Ron Paul were to run third party it would diminish his standing in the long run the same way that Pat Buchanan’s Reformed Party run diminished his standing. Paul would very predictably start out impressively in the polls but would very predictably fade as the election grew nearer and the “don’t waste your vote” mentality set in. Ron Paul does his movement more good in the future as an ex-Congressman and an ex-GOP presidential candidate than he does as the/a poorly performing nominee of a third party or independent.
That said, the major case against a Ron Paul third party run in Holland’s essay isn’t really about a Ron Paul run in particular, it is about the electoral futility of third party politics in general. This is where I disagree with Holland. I readily concede that third party efforts are almost certainly destined to fail electorally, but that is only the measuring rod of success if you naively believe that the purpose of third parties is to win elections. As I have stated before, that is not the purpose of third parties or third party involvement.
Don’t get me wrong. I support and frequently counsel third party voting. I am the Constitution Party correspondent for Independent Political Report, one of the largest sites on the web for third party news and information. I attended the Constitution Party convention in 2008. I have supported the Constitution Party nominee in every presidential race since 1996 and regret to this day that I didn’t vote Constitution Party in 1992, its first year in existence. But I don’t believe that I am voting third party so that my candidate will win. I am voting third party as a way to register dissatisfaction with the status quo and either of the big two.
If you get past the notion that third party politics is actually about winning elections then Holland’s electoral futility argument is not persuasive.
If I hold my nose and vote for the GOP nominee (Romney) in spite of the fact that I have significant disagreements with him on the issues, my vote is still registering as a 100% endorsement of Romney. There are no half votes. There are no three quarter votes. Every vote counts the exact same. My holding my nose vote counts just the same as an enthusiastic “Rah Rah for Romney” vote. Voting third party is the only way I have of registering discontent. A vote for Romney is a vote for Romney and arguably a vote against the Democrat. A vote for the Constitution Party is a vote for the Constitution Party and a vote against the big two parties.
Now maybe this system is screwed up. Maybe there is something to be said for rank order voting or proportional representation or whatever, but this is the system we have. Our first past the goal post electoral sytem may favor the development of a two party system even though I don’t think this is what the Founders intended, but it also makes third party voting a real way to send a message to the big two and reject the status quo.
Also, Holland seems to contradict himself with his own argument. He says the power of Ron Paul and his supporters lies in their ability to keep the GOP Establishment guessing and anxious, yet he rules out preemptively one option.
Holland also seems to believe a Ron Paul endorsement of Romney is a possible bargaining chip. That ain’t going to happen. If Paul endorses Romney I will be very surprised. Ron Paul is a man of principle, and he simply won’t endorse an Establishment figure like Romney even with a Rand Paul Vice President selection, a Ron Paul cabinet position, platform language on the Fed, etc. and if he did there would be a massive revolt among his supporters.
So Holland is essentially saying give us a Ron Paul acceptable VP nominee or whatever or we are likely to stay home. First of all, I’m not voting for Romney under any circumstances, and I suspect a lot of Ron Paul supporters feel the same way. I also highly suspect that a lot of Ron Paul primary voters (which is different than Ron Paul “supporters”) will vote for Romney anyway because they will be seduced by the “anybody but Obama” and “don’t waste your vote” argument that seem to be so persuasive every presidential election cycle. So the actual number of voters who might be up for grabs based on Romney’s overtures is possibly not that significant.
But Holland’s alternative if Romney is insufficiently gracious to Ron Paul seems to be to stay home on election day. Would someone please explain to me how staying home, which will be interpreted as apathy, is superior to voting for a third party candidate that you know will not win but that allows you to send a message. What communicates better to the Establishment your political will – one additional vote for the CP or LP nominee or one less vote from the total?
Holland and others who make similar arguments need to disentangle in their minds the electoral prospects of third parties from the act of third party voting.
So in summary, Ron Paul should not run third party or independent, but neither should he endorse Romney, and Ron Paul’s supporters should likewise refuse to endorse Romney with their vote and should register their dissatisfaction by voting for the third party candidate of their choice on election day.
RedPhillips on 11 Apr 2012 at 7:48 pm #
I just cleaned this up and made it into a more straight forward essay and submitted it to EtherZone.
RedPhillips on 11 Apr 2012 at 8:00 pm #
Savrola, are you going to vote for Romney in the general? Answer me that, and then I will explain my rational further.
RedPhillips on 11 Apr 2012 at 8:40 pm #
OK, so as I said in the article above, please explain to me why not voting is a better idea than voting third party?
How does anybody know that you not voting is out of protest vs. just being disinterested?
On the other hand, a vote for the CP, for example, can’t be misinterpreted.
RedPhillips on 11 Apr 2012 at 9:05 pm #
Where did you send the submitted article?
Mathematically speaking, voting is a pointless exercise.
As things stand now, political action is also largely pointless.
Our efforts need to be on educating (changing the opinion of) the masses. Third Parties are one mechanism of education, unencumbered as they are by the necessity to say the things necessary to actually win.
Not Libertarian on 11 Apr 2012 at 9:13 pm #
How does voting for a third party mean anything more or less than not voting? Apathy about an obviously horrid system and political landscape seems more sensible to me than voting for life long advocate of war crimes Virgil Goode
RedPhillips on 11 Apr 2012 at 9:28 pm #
Again Not Libertarian, I didn’t say I was going to vote for Goode. I said I am waiting to see how things shake out.
“How does voting for a third party mean anything more or less than not voting?”
Because not voting puts you in a category with millions of other who don’t vote, and most of them don’t abstain from voting due to principle. They just neglect to vote.
Voting CP, for example, makes you one out of 200,000 perhaps who deliberately voted for a conservative alternative and refused to settle for Romney.
Which one of those acts is more powerful, conceding that neither is really powerful at all? Which one sends a clearer message? Not voting is ambiguous. Voting third party is not.
Not Libertarian on 11 Apr 2012 at 11:00 pm #
What message does voting for an irrelevant third party that is not principled enough to weed out candidates that clearly oppose key planks of their platform really send?
I vehemently disagree that most non-voters are non-voters due to “neglect.” In fact I think that is a wildly inaccurate. The vast majority of the folks I know who don’t vote, don’t vote because they believe voting is irrelevant, there is no difference between the two major parties and a third party can’t win, they do not want to be responsible for the bad acts of a candidate or party they cast a ballot for or there is no one they can justify voting for. It is very rare for me to hear someone say “I don’t vote because I don’t care at all” or “I didn’t vote because I forgot” and I have been heavily involved in politics for half of my life.
I respect you Red and I have voted third party in every Presidential election of my life in which I have cast a ballot (I stayed home in 2004 for a variety of reasons). I apologize for misrepresenting your views on Goode and don’t want to make that the focus of this discussion, but what happens if Goode and Johnson are the respective nominees of the LP and CP? I personally could not vote for A3P, could you? If you couldn’t what other option is there? Are you seriously arguing for a “lesser evil” vote for a third party rather than staying home? If so why not take the “lesser evil” argument to the next level and vote for Romney?
If one wants to send a message and vote for a candidate that is anti-establishment, why not write-in Paul’s name?
RedPhillips on 12 Apr 2012 at 2:38 am #
Savrola, did you send it to editors@conservativetimes.org?
Sean Scallon on 12 Apr 2012 at 11:36 am #
We’ll have a better idea of the situation after this weekend because there are several state and congressional district conventions picking delegates for the convention. Places like Colorado and Minnesota will ones to watch because Santorum won them and we’ll see how greedy Romney is to get delegates. After what happened in North Dakota, where Romney finished third in the caucus straw poll but came away with 20 of the state’s 28 delegates due to political shenanigans, it could be a very strong signal for Paul to play the only leverage he has and that’s third party.
RedPhillips on 13 Apr 2012 at 1:54 am #
A cleaned up version of this has been posted at IPR.
http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2012/04/red-phillips-ron-paul-to-run-third-party-or-not-to-run-third-party/
RedPhillips on 16 Apr 2012 at 1:53 am #
The cleaned up version is now posted at EtherZone.
http://www.etherzone.com/2012/phil041612.shtml