What About a *Moderate* Third Party?

A Reaganite third party would throw elections to Democrats. Why not siphon off common-sense voters from both parties?

Much of conservative punditry this week has discussed the proposal by Jonah Goldberg that conservatives who dislike Donald Trump form a new third party:

Perhaps there’s another way. The primary system is the GOP’s Achilles’ heel because it makes a mere plurality of the vote a de facto majority of the vote. A recent Pew survey found that 44 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again. As 2016 showed, that’s more than enough to win the nomination in a crowded field. The same dynamic explains why Republican congressional candidates kowtow to Trump—they’re afraid of his primary voters. And right now, there is no countervailing pressure within the party.

So why not create pressure outside of it? Specifically, a third party with a simple, Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the soundness of elections? For simplicity’s sake, think of it as a GOP minus the Trump personality cult.

If a Republican candidate met its requirements, a new party of the right could endorse the Republican, the way New York’s Conservative Party does. If not, a non-Trumpy candidate could play the role of spoiler by garnering enough conservative votes in the general election to throw the election to the Democrat.

The proposal got a lot of pushback and discussion going. David French agreed, saying Jonah Is Right. Many, including Charlie C.W. Cooke and Dan McLaughlin, criticized the idea, causing Jonah to respond.

I think a lot of the criticism missed the fact that Jonah’s proposal is about reforming the Republican party. It’s not really about winning, at least in the short term. I don’t even really think Jonah thinks his idea would work—if by “work” you mean “lead to a viable third party that could get major candidates elected.” To me, Jonah is just trying to communicate his displeasure with the state of the Republican party these days, and saying we have to do something about it. I think Jonah’s response to his critics makes that clear:

They all make the perfectly sound point that a third party that throws congressional elections to the Democrats would make a lot of Republicans angry. But I will posit that a strategy that yields a victory for J.D. Vance or Josh Mandel in Ohio would be wholly pyrrhic from a conservative point of view. It would further fuel the transformation of the GOP into a right-wing statist party, and having two statist parties is like a car with two gas pedals and no brakes—the crash is inevitable; the only uncertainty is in what direction it will materialize.

Now, I understand that some people think that having a right-wing statist party would be preferable to a left-wing statist party. And if those are the only choices on offer, I can’t gainsay the reasoning too passionately. But I reject the choice. Keeping conservatism politically viable is more important to me than winning the next election.

. . . .

My friends at National Review disagree with me on a conservative third party not because they dispute my diagnosis of the predicament we’re in, but because they don’t think it will get us out of it

In the same spirit, I want to offer a proposal of my own, which I advance with about the same level of seriousness—which is to say, I am dead serious about the problem, but not terribly sanguine about the proposed solution.

The proposal is: what about a moderate third party?

After all, one of the main objections to Jonah's proposal is that his idea would simply throw elections to Democrats. As Charlie C.W. Cooke says:

And if, as Jonah desires, conservatives were to establish a third party likely to “throw the election to the Democrat” — and accepting Jonah’s premises about the current state of the GOP makes it fair to assume that this would indeed be the likely outcome — they would be . . . well, throwing the next election to the Democrats.

Cooke worries about “a federal takeover of the election system, de facto open borders, the full Bernie Sanders economic agenda, a set of historically aggressive gun-control measures, a codified Roe v. Wade, single-payer health care, and, potentially, a packed Supreme Court.” Yeah, that’s something to worry about, all right.

But a moderate third party would not necessarily cause that problem. If the party’s message were constructed correctly, the party would not poach voters exclusively from the right side of the aisle, but from both parties.

Part of my assumption here is that there is a market for such a party. That may sound crazy on its face. It’s not. As extreme as both parties have become, I am convinced that there is a completely untapped desire for centrism out there. I know that may appear impossible when you are watching the whackjobs on social media or cable TV news, but hear me out. I think it’s quite possible that we have overestimated the extent to which the average American is wedded to the more extreme positions of the two national parties.

One of the reasons I believe this is the tendency of Conventional Wisdom to believe that a candidate who ekes out a win in a primary has his Finger on the Pulse of his party, while a candidate who ekes out a win in a general election has his Finger on the Pulse of the whole country. All of a sudden, the philosophies of the candidates who barely lost are all but forgotten, along with the millions and millions and millions of Americans who share those philosophies.

Take the Republican party. In 2016, there was a problem: far too many candidates competed in the primary, allowing one candidate with an energetic plurality to take over. But Ted Cruz came close. Why he lost is subject to debate. Some (and I count myself among them) blame Cruz in part for stupidly deriding “New York values” in an effort to appeal to the base. This alienated the entire northeast and actually allowed Donald Trump to play the adult in the room. Cruz also had to deal with Marco Rubio stubbornly playing spoiler. You might have your own views about where Cruz went wrong. But the point is: Cruz did well—and under slightly different circumstances Cruz might have had a real fighting chance against Trump in 2016.

Had Ted Cruz won in 2016, everyone would have marveled at how the GOP was once again the party of Reagan. And that could have happened.

But once Trump won, the Conventional Wisdom took hold that Republicans all loved the Trump agenda. This is always the Conventional Wisdom after an election: whoever won was right.

Once this Conventional Wisdom takes hold, the next step is for everyone in a political party to adjust themselves to the New Reality. After all, they want to win! So if a candidate manages to succeed while pushing a new philosophy, most people in the party will eventually gravitate towards that philosophy. In a way, this phenomenon seems to vindicate the Conventional Wisdom, because all of a sudden the voters do seem to line up, by and large, with the philosophy of the most recent winning candidate. And so it has happened with Trumpism.

But it’s my contention that this is something of an illusion, and that the changes in philosophy are motivated more by a Desire to Win (and even more importantly, a desire to see the other side lose) than by some deep-seated philosophical shift. People’s assessment of Who Will Win is more important, by leaps and bounds, than any other factor in politics. It’s so important that it causes people to forget what they really believe.

I will illustrate this through a difficult thought experiment, the premise of which you will want to reflexively reject . . . but which I urge you to accept, only temporarily, purely for the sake of answering the hypothetical. Assume for the sake of argument that you had no idea of the relative electoral viability of two candidates. Now assume that one of the candidates is a Generic Republican from Jonah’s Reaganite Third Party. The other candidate is Trump—or, to keep the comparisons generic, a Generic Trumpy Candidate.

For whom would you vote?

I think people reading this email will be completely, utterly, totally unable to get past the premise. They will argue that the hypothetical should not even be discussed because electoral reality is what matters. (I’m not disagreeing that electoral reality is what matters but that is not my point.)

But for those of you who can manage to answer the question as phrased, I actually think a lot of you—maybe even most of you!—would vote for Jonah’s Reaganite candidate.

And if I’m right about that, what does that mean? Are you, the readers of this newsletter, whom I assume to be mostly lifelong conservatives, really so out of touch with the GOP? Or are there many more who think like us—but for whom the perceived electoral reality is all that matters? And these days, it somehow seems like being Trumpy is the path to electoral success. (Sure, he lost the 2020 election and likely cost the GOP two senatorial seats in the Georgia runoffs, and thus control of the Senate . . . but let’s not talk about that right now!)

Again, this is not an argument that Jonah’s proposal is good, or that third parties are good. It is just an argument that maybe people read too much significance into “what worked”—and discount the significant oppositional forces who end up going along with what they perceive to be “the program” . . . because, like Charlie Cooke, they want to win and think losing would be worse. The fealty to the “reality of electoral politics” is why I suspect not one in ten readers of this email will be able to answer my hypothetical as phrased. In all likelihood, most readers will dispute my premise, and tell me why it doesn’t matter what people think if they ignore electoral reality. And by brushing off my question in that way, they will miss an interesting thought experiment about what people really do think in their heart of hearts.

And that could tell you something about the viability of a Moderate party.

As crazy as the Republican party seems these days, I'm not sure that the Republican party, on the ground, is made up overwhelmingly of anti-vaxxers, nutjobs who think Biden stole the election from Trump, lovers of the Trumpiest Trumpy candidates, etc. There are plenty of people, I think, who will go along with that crowd if they think that's what they have to do to win. There are plenty of politicians who will pander to that crowd if that’s what they think will get them elected. But I don't think most members of the party are that extreme in their heart of hearts.

Similarly, I'm not sure that the Democrat party, on the ground, is full of people who resemble the Most Online Democrats, who love them some Ilhan Omar and Bernie and AOC. Conservatives can't be the only ones worried about the extremes taking over. There were enough moderate voters on the left to elect Joe Biden—who, although he has governed like an extreme leftist, won the election by portraying himself as a far more moderate alternative to crazy socialist Bernie.

The Patterico of ten years ago would be agog at the idea of my proposing the establishment of a moderate third party, even as a thought experiment. I used to hate moderate political opinions. But these days, the extremes on both ends worry me more than the idea of compromising with reasonable people from an opposing viewpoint, even on hot-button issues.

Speaking of hot-button issues: a natural objection would be: what about the issues people get passionate about? Like abortion? Federal spending? Guns? I hate to say this, but even though such issues might be a deal-killer for readers of this newsletter, who are likely more ideological than your average voter, a lot of people are OK with the idea that maybe our side can compromise a bit if the other side does too. That maybe we could try to apply a little more common sense and a little less ideological fervor. And even if you ended up disagreeing with the platform of the moderate party, sometimes you support a party even when you disagree with them on some big issues.

To me, it all comes down to whether you're worried about extremists. I'm very worried about extremists. Leftist extremists are super-panderers on race. They are turning criminal prosecution in jurisdictions throughout blue America into a joke and a travesty. Meanwhile, the rightist extremists are nucking futs. They believe in QAnon. They wanted to steal the last election and they want to steal the next election too.

Shouldn’t we have an alternative? I like Jonah’s idea, but you can’t get conservatives to buy into a party that will just elect Democrats. So how about a party that takes from both sides?

I know, I know: the country is set up for two parties; the system is rigged to prevent ballot access to third parties; etc. etc. Again, like Jonah’s proposal, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal. To the extent that it had any effect, the effect would be to put pressure on the parties to moderate their positions to reclaim the voters lost to the Moderates.

And even if you think everything about this idea is pointless, just imagine the rallies!! I am paraphrasing the Simpsons a bit here, but I can visualize a rousing chant of "WHAT DO WE WANT? SENSIBLE COMPROMISE AND MODERATE, COMMON-SENSE VIEWPOINTS! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? WITHIN A REASONABLE TIME FRAME!!" 

WHO’S WITH ME?!?!?! OR AT LEAST WILLING TO CONSIDER MY POINT OF VIEW??!?!?!