A third party strategy that never hurts Democrats

[HamdenRice]

I was just listening to an interview on the radio here in NYC with a representative of the Working Families Party, and it occurred to me that here we have a third party strategy that never negatively affects Democrats that might be useful elsewhere.

The Working Families Party is both a party and a progressive faction or caucus in the Democratic Party. All WFP candidates are also Democrats. When a progressive Democrat runs on the WFP line, he also appears on the Democratic Party line. (This is a strange tradition in NYC -- that is, politicians often run on two or more party lines.)

The party totals list the Democratic Party line and WFP line separtely, but the candidate total includes the vote under both lines. WFP candidates never run against the Democratic Party candidate; they are always the same person.

This way the WFP pushes the local DP to the left and is in a strong position to bargain for progressive issues within the DP.

BTW, in my Congressional district, the WFP does pretty well; but then again in my district, the DP gets over 95% of the vote in federal elections, followed by WFP, Greens and Socialist Workers. The Republican vote is usually too small to list in the election results.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

1. I'm slightly disturbed that that's possible.

While there's nothing wrong with doing so if it is, I don't like the idea of one candidate being able to appear more than once on the same ballot and getting his votes totalled. Is there anything to stop me putting myself on there hundreds of times, to attract attention?

[HamdenRice]

2. The party has to have a legitimate organization

They either have to gather a certain number of signatures or have won a certain number of votes in the prior election. Effectively, that means that there are usually only about 6 or 7 parties.

But it can create bizarre results. Mayor Koch once sewed up both the Republican and Democratic Party lines, although he had initially been a Democrat. Also there was one vestigal party, the "Liberal Party" about whom journalists used to quip, it is neither liberal nor a party. It started out as a liberal party, but became basically a corrupt family organization.

But it works well for local politics and gives progressives some bargaining power.