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For third party purists, rejection by the general public confirms their sense of moral superiority and martyrdom: winning 0.03% with uncompromising principles feels somehow nobler than winning an election through the normal compromises and actually changing the direction of politics. In this sense, fringe party activism represents the ultimate in masturbatory politics: giving intense pleasure and passing thrills to the individual participants but exerting no impact whatever on anyone else.  

On those rare occasions when third parties play some decisive role in close elections, they almost always damage the candidates who more closely resemble the independent contenders. Former Republican Ross Perot, for example, destroyed Republican President George H.W. Bush, leftist Ralph Nader damaged Al Gore, and “limited government” Libertarian Senate candidates in Montana, Washington, Georgia and other states recently swung elections to big government Democrats (and in 2006 tilted at least three close elections to give Harry Reid his one-vote Senate majority). 

By taking votes from the major party contender who’s ideologically most similar, and rewarding those opponents who agree with them the least, independent candidates move the political process away from their professed goals, not toward them. 

Most Americans have come to understand this cruel and dangerous game, so that even the most ballyhooed fringe candidates fail to live up to their promising poll numbers. In 1980, moderate Republican John Anderson believed the surveys and pundits who said he could establish himself as a middle-of-the-road alternative to the outspoken conservative Ronald Reagan and the failed liberal standard-bearer, Jimmy Carter. In the end, Anderson drew only 6.6%, fading fast in the last days before the election as the American people began to focus on the true stakes in the choice before them. 

This pattern repeats itself in almost every election: even the most intriguing third-party flirtations abruptly turn sour in the “getting serious” phase that precedes a final decision. With an evenly divided electorate providing see-saw victories for Democrats and Republicans, an individual can change history far more readily by voting for one of the major candidates than by giving his support to a laughably irrelevant fringy. A shift of 0.5% can alter the outcome of many elections, but it changes nothing if a Constitution Party candidate gets 0.7% vs. 0.2%. 

In this context, the American people remain too sensible to accept the fulminations of brain-dead blowhards like Lou Dobbs. “All that seems to remain of the Republican and Democratic parties is their partisanship, their labels, and their records of intransigence and ineffectiveness over the past forty years.” Over the past forty years, Mr. Dobbs? Since 1967? The Reagan Revolution, which won the Cold War and slashed top tax rates from 70% to 28%, represented only “intransigence and ineffectiveness”? Welfare reform and balanced budgets, achieved by the Gingrich Congress in collaboration with the administration of Bill Clinton, amounted to nothing more than “partisanship”? 

Third party purists say they refuse to accept a choice between “the lesser of two evils” – a wretchedly misleading line that suggests that any public servant with whom we disagree is, indeed, evil and not merely wrong. In truth, very few working politicians, Republican or Democrat, honestly qualify as “evil”: the need for winning and retaining office won’t eliminate all mediocrities, but almost always rids us of any truly malevolent individuals. The notion that electoral opponents constitute “evil” of any kind – either the lesser or greater variety – serves only to poison our politics, and to prevent mature choices between major party candidates who, while invariably flawed, give us a chance to serve our country by selecting the better of two imperfects.