The Case for Running Spoiler Candidates

As we all know, it's a common trope that "a vote for a third party is a vote for my opponent!" Along that line, losing candidates will often claim third-party voters are to blame (rather than, you know, a system of voting that guarantees that third-party voters will hurt the major candidates most similar to them).

This effect (the spoiler effect) is a powerful thing. In fact, the closer a race is, the more effective a spoiler is. If candidate D has the support of 49% of voters and candidate R has 48%, it only takes about 2% of D voters (1% of total voters) to vote for a similar third-party candidate to cause R to win.

As I just mentioned, this fact is cited for why you shouldn't vote third party. What I am here to argue is the opposite: The fact that closer races are more easily affected by spoilers should be taken advantage of as often as possible. To see why, keep reading!

When you think of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the first image that comes to mind might be nuclear war. In a MAD situation, the side which has the most power is the one with the least to lose, and vice versa. Or to put it another way, the side which can most effectively convince the others that it is willing and able to launch a nuke will get considerably more out of political negotiations than it would otherwise have if we were only considering other sources of power, like total voter base (for a party) or economic output (for a nation).

As it relates to American politics, the sides with the most to lose are the Democrats and Republicans, the two major parties. Not coincidentally, these sides complain the loudest about spoiler candidates and the people that vote for them. What is left out of the discussion is the fact that we have the most room to negotiate by running spoilers, because they have the most to lose.

For example, if we run a hard progressive candidate in a close race between a neoliberal and a typical republican, the neoliberal candidate basically has two choices: they can either adapt their position to capture more progressive voters (i.e., give progressive voters at least some of what they want), or they can lose, and they obviously don't want to lose. Ideally, in this situation, the neolib would change their positions, however this often doesn't happen.

Remember that in order to make effective use of MAD, you must be able to convince the other players that you are willing and able to follow through. That means running spoiler candidates even when you expect doing so to cause you to lose. This means that, in the short term, you should expect less favorable outcomes.

In the long term, I see two potential ways of this playing out to our advantage.

• The major candidates change their positions to capture more third-party voters (an excellent short-term goal).

• Both Democrats and Republicans finally agree, for the sake of maintaining their own power, to change the voting system to one that doesn't suffer as badly from the spoiler effect (the ideal outcome).

So that's the good news. The bad news is that it is still vulnerable to gerrymandering. Gerrymandering can be used in, essentially, two ways. It can make a less popular candidate more likely to win (turning an uncompetitive election into a competitive one), or to give the most popular candidate an even greater chance to win (turning a competitive election into an uncompetitive one).

The first kind of gerrymandering plays to our advantage, and the second kind of gerrymandering defeats it. Thus, one possible negative outcome of my proposed strategy is more gerrymandering, of the variety that favors incumbents.

The other potential obstacle is harsher ballot access laws making it more difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballot. The Supreme Court's rulings are not exactly consistent on this issue.

Before I finish, I want to point out one last thing. Because this strategy gives the major parties a real incentive to fix our broken voting system, we should encourage not only progressives to use it, but also hardcore conservatives, and any other marginalized group, even if we strongly disagree with the things that group wants. The more we can give credibility to the threat of a spoiler, the fewer obstacles we have to overcome to get politicians to actually represent voters.