Blame the Federal System for the Collapse of the Kennedy Campaign

It’s the federal system, not a cub bear, that’s to blame for Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s campaign collapse. Third-party candidates lose because U. S. elections, like horseraces, are won by the candidate who comes first past the post. Only the candidate in second place has a ghost of a chance.

One of the election year’s most gruesome moments occurred when Kennedy confessed that he, as a drunk twenty something, had hit a cub bear and tossed its carcass into Manhattan’s central park.

The confession hurt Kennedy, but he is right to place the blame for his sliding poll numbers on the federal system. “In an honest system,” he lamented, “I …would have won.”

The presidential selection system is undoubtedly peculiar. Each state gets as many “electors” to a so-called “college” as it has members in Congress, and each state, subject to certain constitutional rules, decides how electors are picked.  In all states, electors are chosen by a plurality of the popular vote.

All but two states choose electors as a bloc rather than in proportion to the popular vote.  No matter how close the election, all the electors pledged to the candidate that comes in first attend the college. In 2000, George W. Bush captured all twenty-five of Florida’s electors, even though he won the state by just 527 ballots.

Most states cast electoral votes as a bloc to maximize their impact on election outcomes.  If a state were to split them according to each candidate’s popular vote share, the state would divide its own strength in the college. Were California’s Democratic state legislature to follow progressive instincts it would split the state’s 54 electoral votes among the candidates, giving Trump at least 20, possibly enough to put him over the top. Not surprisingly, neither California nor most other states are willing to do that. Only two states, Maine and Nebraska, which have only marginal influence over the outcome whether or not the state votes as a bloc, split their electoral vote.

The consequences of winner-take-all elections for third parties are frightful. Over a hundred years ago, a French professor-politician pronounced what is known as “Maurice Duverge’s Law”: Countries with horserace elections can have only two political parties.  The two parties tend toward moderation, because they must compete for voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum.  Third-place candidates inevitably lose ground as horses race to the finish. Rather than waste votes on a sure loser, voters choose the least-worst of the two front-runners.

Suffering the consequences of Duverge’s law, Kennedy threw his support to Donald Trump, reminding backers he had said from the beginning he “would withdraw from the race if I became a spoiler.”  To which the Kamela Harris team aptly replied, “his candidacy has never been anything other than a spoiler campaign.”

Duverge’s law is more of an insightful exaggeration than a universal law of politics, but third-party candidates in the United States have always proven to be nothing but spoilers.  Abraham Lincoln is the great exception in this as in so many other ways.  He led a rising Republican party to victory, benefitting by the total disintegration of the Whig party and the division of the Democratic party into northern and southern branches.  Lincoln came first past the post with 40 percent of the popular vote and collected 60 percent of the electors to the college. The Whig party disappears, to be replaced by the Republican party, demonstrating that the one way a third party can win in a horserace electoral system is by displacing one of the existing parties.  

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, the country’s greatest third-party spoiler, had been an extraordinarily popular presidential candidate in 1904, in part because he did not kill a cub bear, giving children across the globe a delightful bedtime companion known as the “Teddy Bear.”  After winning that election, Roosevelt made the fateful promise not to run for a third term.   Yet in 1912, he came back from a hunting trip in the West to form the Bull Moose Party, which got 27 percent of the popular vote, but only 17 percent of those cast by the electoral college.

 Third-party candidates risk condemnation by the party expected to lose votes. In the cliff-hanger election of 2000, Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, was mercilessly condemned by Democrats, who to this day claim he cost Al Gore the presidency.

Third-party candidates are “mornin’ glories”, to borrow a phrase from George Washington Plunkitt, a New York machine politician of yesteryear. They look lovely in the beginning of an election campaign, but they inevitably fade and all but disappear by November. As election day draws nigh, voters become increasingly hesitant to waste their vote on a sure loser. 

In 1992, Reform party candidate Ross Perot stood as high as 39 percent in early polls, but on election day he got 19 percent of the popular vote and nary a ballot in the electoral college.  Late in the campaign Nader still had 6 percent support in many polls, but in the end got less than 3 percent.

Third-party candidates with regional support are the most effective spoilers.  Thirty-nine members of the electoral college cast votes for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948, and 46 electors backed George Wallace twenty years later. Both candidacies were designed more to punish the national Democratic party for its civil rights leanings than to win an election. Wallace elected Nixon, Thurmond came within an ace of electing Dewey.

Despite Kennedy’s withdrawal, loser parties are still feared this year by both Republicans and Democrats.  The Libertarian party candidate, Chase Oliver, could receive a little over one percent of the vote, as the party did four years ago, and Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, received 1.2 percent when she ran in 2016. These are vanishingly small percentages, but the number of ballots could be enough to make the difference in the battleground states.

Proportional electoral systems in Europe seem more “honest,” to use Kennedy’s characterization, as they produce splits in parliament mirroring those at the ballot box.  If systems are proportional, new parties can gain a “fair share” of the seats, allowing them to establish a presence in national politics and, perhaps, become part of the governing coalition.  Populist parties in France, Germany, Sweden and elsewhere are being propelled forward by proportional representation. Several older parties are on the verge of extinction.  

Seemingly fair systems can have devastating unanticipated consequences.  One should never forget that Hitler rose to power by manipulating a system of proportional representation to the advantage of the National Socialist party.

In the United States, horserace elections in a federal system stymie extremists on both right and left.  The progressive “squad,” within the Democratic party, led by Andrea Ocasio-Cortes, has lost seats in the House of Representatives in this year’s primaries.  The Republican story is open to debate. Some say Trump has captured the Republican party, but a better case can be made that the Republican party has captured him. Trump blusters and babbles, but, as president, he, like old-fashioned Republicans in the past, cut taxes, deregulated business, fostered fossil fuels, imposed immigration controls, and appointed conservatives to the courts.  When Trump denied electoral defeat in 2020, a solidly Republican vice-president and numerous Republican party leaders at state and local levels deserted him. Whether Trump likes it or not, he must wear a Republican pin on his lapel.  

Electing presidents by popular vote sounds like true democracy in action. But horserace elections encourage the two leading parties to moderate their policies as they pursue the voters in the middle, while proportional elections can have unanticipated consequences that bedevil their most convinced advocates. Though peculiar and seemingly “dishonest,” horserace elections in a federal system serve a constitutional democracy by limiting the number of viable political parties to two.  

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 Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a professor of government at Harvard University.