Help Us Break The Two-party Stranglehold, James Carville

With his bald head, glasses, and Cajun accent, political consultant James Carville was long one of the most iconic representatives of the Democratic Party establishment. In the 1990s, he was often seen as a kind of consigliere to President Bill Clinton. In the 2000s, he was everywhere on cable television offering up his characteristic mix of colorful zingers and boilerplate liberal politics.

Now he says he’s considering leaving the Democrats altogether. In multiple interviews, he’s raged against the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and left-wing influencer Hasan Piker. In an appearance on Fox Business earlier this month, he expressed amazement at “this idea that we’re going to seize the means of production” and urged viewers to “just go look at the DSA platform.” (I agree.) At one point, he said:

I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker, I can tell you that right now. If he becomes a force in the Democratic Party, I’m outta here. I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.

As the segment continued, he said that the “two-party system” might be under “tremendous stress” in the coming months, and that he wasn’t sure what would happen. The one thing he could say “for sure,” though, is that he and Hasan Piker won’t be in the same party.

Sadly, this is almost certainly hot air. But if he does turn out to be serious, and he and other centrists start a third party, that would be an excellent thing for American democracy.

When Carville talks about leaving the Democratic Party, his meaning is not entirely clear. For one thing, the Democrats and Republicans aren’t membership organizations like European or Latin American political parties. If you’re a congressman or a senator, you can be a member of the Democratic caucus within one of those institutions, but technically there’s nothing for a citizen like Carville to either join or leave.

Instead, “the Democratic Party” is a nebulous concept that vaguely refers to many things — the Democratic caucuses in various elected bodies, the Democratic “brand,” the population of Americans who vote in Democratic primaries or consider themselves Democrats, and so on. Most of all, though, it refers to the Democratic ballot line.

America’s half-democratic election system is designed to make it extremely difficult for any candidate who isn’t on either the Democratic or the Republican ballot line to meaningfully compete in a general election. The deck is stacked against third-party candidates on every level, from signature gathering requirements to participation in debates.

Additionally, we have what’s called a “first-past-the-post” voting system, where voters can’t rank candidates. Instead of a runoff when no candidate clears 50 percent, whoever wins a plurality is simply declared the winner. This creates strong incentives for voters to vote not for their ideological first choice but simply for the least-bad candidate with a chance of winning. This in turn creates collective action problems that make it extremely difficult to build up a new party to a level where it can win.

That’s why the overwhelming majority of the socialist left in the United States has concluded that trying to form a ballot-line third party is a nonstarter under current conditions. The deck is stacked in many ways against insurgents in major-party primaries, but realistically it’s stacked much more against third-party candidates. If we want to actually elect socialists to office rather than simply run symbolic protest candidacies, the only way to do that is to challenge the Democratic establishment for the Democratic ballot line in races where there’s a strong socialist contender.

In the short term, this has been an effective strategy. As of now, it looks like several new socialists will be arriving in Congress after this fall’s general election, a fact that has caused a cascade of rolling meltdowns among centrist commentators and politicians. In the long run, as Carville says, the two-party system will be under increasing stress. Sooner or later, divorce may be inevitable.

If Carville “leaves the Democratic Party” in the sense that he starts rhetorically calling himself an independent but nothing else changes, and he still regularly weighs in on Democratic contests, that means nothing. If he leaves to become a Republican, an annoying presence will be removed from those contests (and it’s unlikely that the GOP will benefit much from his presence). But the least likely possibility indicated by his comment about the two-party system is the most interesting. What if Carville convinces some nontrivial subset of his centrist friends to leave and start a third party with its own ballot line?

If nothing else changes, the dynamics described above will destroy the new centrist party just as they’ve crushed every attempt to form a third party on the Left. In order to get a different result, at a bare minimum, Carville and his friends would have to push for reforms like ranked-choice voting that would remove many of these hurdles. The good news for them is that, as they fight for election reforms, they can tap into networks of deep-pocketed corporate and individual donors to which the Left has no access. Who knows? Perhaps they can even pull it off.

If so, they would be doing the Left a tremendous favor. In 2016 and 2020, polls often showed that Bernie Sanders would cruise to victory over Donald Trump if he reached the general election, but he never did. If Carville and whomever he brought with him truly were able to reform our system to the point where a centrist third party was viable, then the Left would be spared the choice between fighting an uphill battle over a ballot line ultimately controlled by our ideological enemies and fighting a much steeper uphill battle against the basic dynamics of American elections. Instead, there could be one ballot line controlled by socialists, another controlled by centrists, and voters could face a real choice without the distorting effect of “spoiler” worries.

It won’t be easy, but if Carville can figure it out, the Left will owe him a debt of gratitude.