Why the Democratic Party Demonizes Third Party Candidates

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of the shitstorm started by Hillary Clinton when she spoke on David Plouffe's podcast Campaign HQ.

I'm not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.

If you're just visiting this planet, you may not be aware that the "somebody" that Hillary references is none other than Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is currently running in the Democratic primaries to be the presidential nominee.

There are so many levels of weirdness attached to this, I need to prune some of them to narrow the focus. Forget, for the moment, that Hillary, whose supporters have been rightly claiming for years has been the subject of unfair accusations, is now leveling unsupported accusations at a fellow Democrat.  Forget that she is a senior member of the Democratic Party wading into a primary to shoot at one of the candidates. Forget that Gabbard's campaign was dying and Hillary's foray into this mess has shone a new spotlight on it.  Forget even that by stirring up controversy, Hillary is doing the Russians a huge favor because they ostensibly are trying to sow division in the US.

The weirdness I want to focus on is this: why do Democrats get so passionate when it comes to third party candidates?  After all, Jill Stein, who Hillary directly accused of being a "Russian asset", garnered a grand total of just under 470,000 votes in 2016.  Rough math tells me that's just around 1/3 of 1% of the votes cast. It seems hardly enough to make a huge deal over.  Democrats claim that she took enough votes away from Clinton in swing states to cost the election but this is nonsense.

Though Democrats have often pointed to Stein getting 1 percent of the vote in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as a reason Clinton lost those longtime Democratic strongholds, exit polls have shown that most of Stein's voters would not have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein had not run.

 The Democratic Party is an institution with lots of money and elections run on data; so I'm sure they know that Stein didn't cost them the election.  So, why are Clinton and others making with the histrionics?  More to the point is this.  If third party candidate really are a threat to the US electoral system, isn't there a way to change the voting system to address the threat?

The answer to the second question is yes and provides insight into the first question.  If third party candidates were a threat to the US electoral system, there is a fairly simple way to address it.  Simply switch from a from a "first-past-the-post" single choice ballot to a ranked ballot where voters can rank their choices.  The inherent assumption in the Democrats complaint is that if the third party candidates (like Jill Stein) weren't there, the voters would still show up and they would vote Democrat.  This isn't actually true but for now, let's assume it is.

You might think that the Democratic Party would jump at the prospect of an "alternative vote" system with ranked ballots where people who really wanted to vote for, say, the Green Party but would choose the Democrat second.  This would allow the Democratic Party to capture the votes of those "spoiler" candidates.  If you think this, you would be wrong.

The last thing that either the Democrats or the Republicans want is a system that encourages more parties.  They have a monopoly on voter choice and they don't want to give it up.  Every election, they use fear mongering to get people who don't really like them to vote for them anyway, just to stop the other party.  It's a dumb, anti-democratic game but it works for them.  So, they don't want it to change.