Bringing the Rent Downs

Back during the 2010 New York gubernatorial election, a candidate by the name of Jimmy McMillan garnered a surprising amount of support for The Rent is Too Damn High Party. Though his party didn’t truly have a platform apart from its stance supporting the expansion of government-sponsored social programs to provide free healthcare, free higher education, and rent subsidies, he was able to reel in more than 40,000 votes. That may only represent 0.9% of the popular vote, but it also means that The Rent is Too Damn High Party actually beat out several other party candidates, and was in fact on par with both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party.

Assuming that voters behave rationally at the poll box, it would seem irresponsible to simply assume that all 40,000 of those voters were willing to throw their vote away to the candidate with the funniest party name. Thus we must seek another explanation as to why McMillan’s ridiculous party was able to gather such an unexpected amount of support. Using Downs’s theories about the spatial location of parties along a political spectrum and the distribution of voter preferences, we should be able to shed some light on this enigma.

Its website claims that The Rent is Too Damn High Party consists of Democrats fed up with current policy decisions (see the party's policy statement here). The party is clearly liberal, and in fact more liberal than the Democratic Party on most fiscal issues. If we were to create a spatial diagram for fiscal policy with conservative fiscal legislation on the right and liberal fiscal legislation on the left, The Rent Is Too Damn High Party would lie to the left of the Democratic Party, and the voter preference distribution would have a median that lies left of center (based on the election’s results). Thus it seems that McMillan’s party may actually be catering to the interests of those voters whose fiscal policy preferences lie far left of center, and who may have been alienated by a Democratic Party whose fiscal stance was too close to center. Had The Rent is Too Damn High Party gained more support, it could have actually incentivized the Democratic Party to shift left on the fiscal political spectrum to regain the votes it had lost. Unfortunately, 40,000 votes is hardly enough to prompt that kind of shift. I suppose Jimmy McMillan and The Rent is Too Damn High Party will have to try their luck in the next gubernatorial election.