The Role of Third Parties in Senate Races

             In this article on Politico, the author observes the role of Ed Marksberry, a Green independent candidate, in the Kentucky Senate Race, positing that he can “outflank Democratic Senate candidate Alison Grimes from the left.” Downs’ theory of static and dynamic party ideologies lends explanatory power to role of independent candidates, like Marksberry, who ‘outflanks’ the Democrats from the left by taking a stance with an ideologically stronger far-left position, which is only possible because the Democratic Party candidate has strayed further towards the median voter and thus also further to the ideological right, allowing the creation of a more liberal party to capture more extremist voters. 

Marksberry explains the Democrat’s shift towards the median voter, claiming that Grimes or "anybody for that matter, [is] going to be pro-coal because they’ve got to be pro-coal in order to be elected.” Grimes takes a pro-coal stance, even though the ‘perfect’ ideological liberal would take a greener energy stance, as she is aiming to gain further votes in Kentucky’s coal country. While this would theoretically allow Grimes to gain more median/conservative voters while keeping the liberal votes to the left, as she is still more liberal than the conservative candidate, her shift towards the median voter has made the Democrat susceptible to Marksberry entering the political spectrum by ‘outflanking’ her to the left and seizing more extreme liberal votes. 

An important distinction is that candidates cannot ideologically jump over one another in this system, thus causing a stable equilibrium of two parties, as supported by the American electorate’s distribution. It is also rational for the parties to have equivocal and ambiguous policies to confuse the electorate, so that their vague position will cover “a wide spread of voters in a two party unimodal system.”[1] The author addresses this concern by suggesting “Grimes is…too nervous to take a position on anything for fear she’ll make herself unelectable.” In such as system, the third party candidate can never win a significant and competitive race against Democrats or Republicans, but they can swing the election in favor of either of the candidates by outflanking one of the candidates and extracting their closest extreme votes. Marksberry effectively wins the election for Mitch McConnell, the Republican candidate.

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[1] Downs, Anthony. "The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideologies." An Economic Theory of Democracy. 122. Print.