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Three's company in politics

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By ROSS DOUTHAT

The New York Times

Published: November 3, 2009

Most American elections aren't particularly competitive. So an off-year election cycle featuring only three significant contests doesn't have any business being interesting.

But the 2009 political season has proven surprisingly entertaining. True, the Virginia governor's race looks increasingly like a Republican cakewalk. But today's other two noteworthy elections, in New Jersey and far upstate New York, have become fascinating free-for-alls.

And in both cases, a third-party candidate provided the spark.

If it weren't for Chris Daggett, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator turned independent candidate for governor, the race for the Garden Statehouse would have been a dull, grinding contest between an unpopular incumbent, Jon Corzine, and a cautious challenger, Chris Christie, who has spent his campaign promising not to be Jon Corzine and not much else.

If it weren't for Doug Hoffman, a Lake Placid accountant running on the Conservative Party line, the battle to represent New York's 23rd Congressional District would have been a Tweedledee-Tweedledum affair, featuring a Republican, Dede Scozzafava, who's arguably more liberal than Bill Owens, her Democratic opponent.

It's a shame that this doesn't happen more often in American politics. Gerrymandered districts, the power of incumbency and our tendency to self-segregate along ideological lines all help make our elections uncompetitive. But so does the absence of third-party entrepreneurship.
Presidential elections are the place where the two-party system seems more necessary than ever. The office of the presidency has become so potent and so polarizing - part priest-king, part ritual scapegoat - that would-be chief executives need to represent the broadest possible coalition to have any chance of success.

It's at the state and local level where an independent politician or party can actually hope to get things done. And it's at the state and local level where we could use a lot more of them. (In this regard, the cranks and idealists in your local Green Party have more sense than the pundits who fantasized about a Bloomberg-for-president campaign.)

Regional third parties might get unorthodox candidates elected, and win hearings for unorthodox ideas. They could provide a counterweight to the corruption associated with one-party rule, whether in solidly-red states or deep-blue cities. They could punish political machines for ignoring their own constituents - as New York's Conservative Party has done in the past and is trying to do again with Hoffman's candidacy this year. And they could help fulfill the promise of federalism, by keeping statewide races focused on state issues, rather than the national political debate.

These aren't just idle fantasies. The Internet has democratized political organizing in ways that ought to weaken the two-party duopoly. Howard Dean and Ron Paul have proven that you can fund a presidential campaign with a laptop. Where Hoffman and Daggett have gone, others should be able to follow.

For anyone who wants to try, the time is now. In a modest way, 2009 has been a good year for independent candidates.

Given the public mood these days, 2010 could prove an even better one - and there will be a lot more than just three seats at stake next fall.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.

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