To belabor my point about Duverger's law and why it doesn't mean third parties shouldn't run at all.
In 168 House districts Trump got only 40% of the vote or less in 2016 -- according to The Cook Political Report . If you want a more cushy threshold we can say in 92 House districts Trump got only 30% of the vote in 2016 or less. If we include all of California's House districts because they have a jungle primary where the top two candidates move on to the general election regardless of party status, that means the People's Party (or any other left-wing third party) can run in somewhere between 100 to 200 House districts (again depending on which threshold you prefer) without jeopardizing the district to far-right Republicans and either the PP or Dems would win an overwhelming majority of those seats.
The result would be that it would be a competition between Democrats and PP candidates in these districts, and since the PP candidates would be challenging Democrats to the left they'd pull their Democratic competitors to the left. Republicans voters in those districts would have to decide whether they'd want to vote Republican or not because chances are that the GOP would be a third party in this situation. So they might cross over to vote Dem instead of Rep so that the PP doesn't win, if they prefer Dems to PP.
Assuming the People's Party only gets a third of the seats, Democrats get 65% of them, and moderate Republicans get 2%, that'd give PP somewhere between 33-66 seats (depending on threshold), Dems somewhere between 65 - 130 seats (depending on threshold), and moderate Republicans somewhere between 2-4 seats (depending on threshold.) This might sound bad to give Republicans 2-4 seats they'd otherwise not have, but the ideological median likely would be further left than it would've been otherwise because the PP would pull Democrats leftward, and Democrats would pull moderate Republicans leftward in these districts.
It makes the chances of progressive legislation passing much higher as the whole Overton Window has shifted leftward when you have a House of Representatives with say 66 Populists (synonym for People's Party members), 162 Democrats, 1 Libertarian, and 202 Republicans with the Populists and Democrats forming voting coalitions for a majority and to elect the Speaker of the House, but otherwise having separate infrastructures.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 22 August 2020
