Left In

Every election cycle, the State of Washington sends a Voters' Pamphlet to each home. It's a convenient way to see who, and what, is on the ballot this time around. I've paged through mine, and checked to see how many parties were fielding candidates for President. This year, in addition to the Big Two, there are eight.

Three of them stood out for me:

• The "Socialism and Liberation" Party
• The "Socialist Workers" Party
• The "Socialist Equality" Party

My first thought was, "Wow. That's a lot of Socialist parties." Then, I became curious why. There could be any number of reasons.

It's possible that one or more of them are not seriously contending the election. Now, to be sure, there is a sense in which none of them, or any of the other "third" parties, are seriously contending the election. I'd be impressed if any of them managed to pull in a full percentage point of the vote, and utterly blown away of they managed two points. Their chances of winning a single electoral vote is, flatly, zero. But here I mean not serious in the same way that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his "We The People" Party is not seriously contending. They are on the ballot here in Washington in hopes of siphoning enough support away from Vice President Harris and Governor Walz that the Trump/Vance ticket might have a shot at winning; "We The People" has removed themselves from the ballot in states friendly to Mr. Trump.

And it's possible that the trio of Socialist parties are more of the same, on the ballot here in Washington with Republican support, in hopes that disaffected Progressives might take the opportunity for a protest vote, and maybe give Trump/Vance a shot at an upset.

It could also be a party-building exercise. I'm always dubious of third parties attempting to run for the Presidency when they don't appear to hold any down-ballot offices; mainly because a) there's no chance that they'd win, and b) even if they did, they wouldn't have any members of Congress that they could rely on to help advance their policy platform. But it's reasonable to presume that the various Socialist parties have placed themselves on the ballot in Blue states, because they're mainly looking for name recognition, and Blue states offer them more bang for their buck in that endeavor. Pushing back against this theory, however, is the fact that I have seen exactly zero yard signs or billboards for them; relying solely on the Voters Pamphlet would bring them to the attention of people like me, but precious few others. But this sort of third party strategy would explain why I didn't see any parties that appeared to be running to the right of the Republicans.

Which brings me to something else that occurred to me. As I noted, there weren't any parties that appeared to stake out a position to the right of the Republicans. And maybe that's because the Republican platform appeals more to the Far Right of American politics than the Democratic platform appeals to the Far Left. As much as the Republican caricature of the Democratic Party casts them as unrepentant (although not always open) Socialists, there have always been Socialist parties in the United States that have sought to stake out positions to their Left. And there are any number of Progressives, for that matter, who are of the opinion that the Democratic Party leans too far to the Right of American politics.

While I have heard of third parties that have sought to occupy the space to the right of the Republicans, there have never seemed to be as many of them. Now, it's possible that, not really attempting to win the election, they've adopted a strategy of only appearing on the ballot in Red states, the opposite of what I conjectured above. In such a case, I'd never hear of their candidates unless they somehow made the news.

So maybe what's happening here is that between the two major parties, there is a rightward skew; the "non-partisan" area between them is not in the center of American political thought, but is itself somewhat to the right. This would leave a greater vacuum on the Left, and, as such, more parties have arisen to fill that void. Being a random weblogger, rather than a political scientist, I have no idea.

So, in that sense, it's not even an educated guess. But it's an interesting phenomenon, regardless of the precise cause.