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Political Ephemera
Ideological Purity Loses the Common Good
Stop blaming Democrats for not winning the Electoral College when they win the majority of votes cast by citizens. Stop blaming the democrats or the republicans. Blame the political ephemera of third party vanity candidates. We’ve repeatedly been warned, ad nauseam, by all the political scholars and pundits: Third party candidates amount to little more than vanity candidates with no legitimate chance to win — they can only bleed votes from the two major parties. They can bleed off enough votes to alter the course of a nation — but not to create the change they promise. As we’ve seen in our lifetimes, these third party candidates cannot get elected, but they do change the course of our political landscape for years or decades in the opposite direction they promise.
What if there had been no third party candidates in 1992, 2000, or 2016? Republicans who felt they could vote for a GOP candidate may have voted for a conservative third party candidates, such as a libertarian nominee or a conservative independent – for example, Ross Perot, whose candidacy bled votes from Bush Sr., leaving Clinton a clear and uncontestable win both in real votes and the Electoral College. The same is true of liberal third party voters, such as the Green Party whose candidacy bled votes from Al Gore, giving us Bush Jr.; these voters would…
