I have three things to say about this.
Surrounded by fellow Libertarians during a 2018 election night watch party at a rented Airbnb in Fort Worth, Eric Espinoza, who was running for state Rep. Jonathan Stickland’s seat, saw a Facebook message notification pop up on his phone.
“‘It’s people like you who are preventing other candidates from winning,’” he recalls the message saying, though he doesn’t recall which candidate the sender supported.
“I was like, ‘Hey, guys, look — I think I finally made an impact,’” Espinoza remembers saying, as he passed his phone around to others in the crowded living room.
“That to me was like, OK, cool, I was able to affect something so much that somebody who knows nothing about me, and nothing about why I ran, blames me for somebody losing — when it’s not the votes. It’s not that I took votes from them; it’s that people didn’t want to vote for that person, and they had a better option.”
Republicans and Democrats alike will blame third-party candidates for siphoning votes from traditionally two-way races. Espinoza not only took votes that might have gone to Stickland, a Republican, but he had more votes than Stickland’s margin of victory. Stickland beat his Democratic challenger by fewer than 1,500 votes, and Espinoza, in third place, had racked up more than 1,600.
It’s still rare for third-party candidates to capture enough votes to potentially sway an outcome — in the past three general elections, there have been just six such instances, according to a Hearst Newspapers analysis. But the number is growing, in a sign of tightening Texas elections.
[…]
A year after some of the most competitive state-level races in decades, Texas Republicans moved to make it easier for third-party candidates to receive and maintain a spot on the ballot. In doing so, they returned ballot access to the Green Party after it lost it following the 2016 election.
“Maybe Republicans are just kind of viewing this as, either you could call it an insurance policy or maybe it’s a way to subject the Democrats to things they’ve been subjected to on the part of the Libertarians,” said Phil Paolino, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas who has studied the effect of third parties on presidential races.
As elections get tighter, Paolino said, “you might see a few more races where third-party candidates are able to cover the margins — whether it’ll have the effect of altering the results is a big question.”
1. I’ve said my piece about third party voters. I will add that in 2018, the last year we’ll get this statistic, 0.49% of all straight party votes in Harris County were straight party Libertarian. That continued an upward trend in the off-year elections, which has come to an end thanks to the end of straight ticket voting.
2. Along those same lines, I’ve also said that I’m not particularly worried about the Green Party effect in Texas. Among other things, Green Party candidates just don’t get that many votes, and there are very few of them in non-statewide races. And as Professor Paolino notes, we don’t know that much about what might have happened in a race won with a non-majority due to the presence of one or more third-party candidates in the counterfactual event where they hadn’t been present. Maybe someday the poli sci professionals will take a crack at that, but until then we’re all just guessing.
(This is usually the point at which someone chimes in to remind me of the merits of ranked choice voting, which would provide a measure of what third party voters would have done if there had been only two choices. This is also the point at which I remind everyone that we don’t have ranked choice voting, and there is no prospect of getting anything like it in the foreseeable future. This is just a restatement of the “but what if there had been only two candidates” hypothetical.)
3. I dunno, when I read a story about a political party “thriving”, I imagine it’s going to be about how that party is winning more elections, or at least competing more strongly in elections where they had not been before. This story is about how one party is thriving in a way they hadn’t been before, it’s just that the party in question is the Democrats. I don’t see what that has to do with the Libertarians, but maybe that’s just me.
This is also the point at which I remind everyone that we don’t have ranked choice voting, and there is no prospect of getting anything like it in the foreseeable future.
Okay, I’ll bite. While there is no real RCV activity in Texas, it’s becoming increasingly popular in municipal elections around the US. Consequently, I think at least one major Texas city, like Austin or San Antonio or El Paso, will have it within the next 10 years. The state and federal elections are probably a long way away though.
Blank – Except that municipal elections are also governed by state law. I may be wrong about this, and I’m happy to hear from someone who knows better, but there’s no provision for RCV in municipal elections in state law. I don’t see that changing any more than I see RCV in state elections happening. Again, I’m happy to hear someone explain why I’m wrong about that, but this is why I believe it’s not going to happen.
Kuff—I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know the extent to which the state governs municipal elections. I know for example Arlington just added term limits, which involved no state input to my knowledge. Nonetheless, I don’t know whether RCV, which involves counting votes, would be a bridge too far for a municipal election. If someone knows more, I would be happy to hear it too.