Incumbency, reform, and the Forward Party
An electoral reform party is targeting state and local races. Will it work?
Many of you may remember the quixotic bid of Andrew Yang for the Democratic nomination in 2024. He was an “internet favorite” candidate with the unusual distinction of being the candidate who faced the most obvious media bias, with media coverage lagging well behind his polling numbers. Today, he leads a political group known as the Forward Party.
I just wrote a piece discussing how the Electoral College system works with three or more major candidates (badly) and then got an interesting e-mail off a Forward Party mailing list talking about the Forward Party’s 2024 agenda. They’re not putting together a quixotic bid for the presidency; they do have plans to try to help American democracy move forward.
In this role, they may help get around the central problem of electoral reform: Majority parties are rarely interested in changing the systems which have given them power.
Broken promises and the incumbency problem
Major political parties routinely promise electoral reform when they are out of power, and then routinely break those promises once it is no longer in their immediate interests. In general, incumbents tend to feel that the electoral rules that put them into power are favorable, and this is one of the largest and most persistent problems for electoral reform.
In the United States, a large number of Republican challengers embraced term limits in 1994, and then promptly abandoned those promises once they were in office. Similarly, the Democratic Party embraced anti-gerrymandering rhetoric after the unfavorable 2010 election cycle — and then largely abandoned it as “unilateral disarmament” after the more favorable 2020 cycle.
The #YangGang background
As I mentioned, Andrew Yang’s bid for the Democratic nomination faced an uphill battle. He lacked the normal prior political experience, did not have the billionaire self-funding capacity of Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, and did not have the friendly media coverage of Pete Buttigieg. Additionally, he was only nominally a Democrat, presenting himself as a post-partisan centrist: “Not left, not right, but forward.”
This gave him substantial crossover appeal, but earned the enmity of Democratic partisans. Nevertheless, he was one of seven major candidates on stage during the eighth debate and placed sixth in the crowded Iowa caucuses. Yang dropped out promptly after placing eighth in the New Hampshire primary, but continued to earn votes in thirty-seven out of the forty-eight remaining states.
Overall, his campaign was more effective and better-run than those of most politicians with more traditional credentials, most notably including eventual vice president Kamala Harris. Afterwards, he went on to place fourth in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City the next year in a ranked choice election.
The Forward Party agenda
While Yang’s campaign for president focused heavily on specific policy proposals, the near-term focus of the Forward Party is much narrower. As best as I can tell, the Forward Party has become the first notable minor party in the United States focused on electoral reform.1
Forward Party’s focus is on state and local elections. To that end, the Forward Party intends to target twelve states during the 2024 cycle, and call particular attention to uncontested seats. By putting a particular focus on running centrist candidates in uncontested seats, the Forward Party seems to be intent on avoiding spoiler effects wherever possible.
Since many of those seats are “safe” for one party or the other, this means targeting more ideologically extreme incumbents and avoiding spoiler effects in tightly-contested seats that the major parties are willing to invest large amounts of money. Their primary agenda is simple: Create the electoral reforms necessary for a third party to thrive. This means moving away from simple plurality elections.
Rather than focusing on one particular potential reform, the Forward Party is in favor of a wide range of possible electoral reforms:
- Approval voting
- Ranked choice voting
- STAR voting
- Nonpartisan primaries, where the top candidates advance to the general elections.2
- Nonpartisan redistricting commissions
All of these reforms have the potential to significantly improve American democracy.
Recap: The three-body problem
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have the unqualified support of a majority of Americans. However, they hold majorities in most states. Electoral reforms are in the interest of everyone except the most loyal partisans belonging to the majority party. This means that the coalition for electoral reform usually consists of a partisan minority plus a principled minority.
While many partisans on both sides of the aisle have conveniently forgotten this fact, California’s highly successful package of electoral reforms passed in the 2008 and 2010 cycles did so in spite of organized opposition from the Democratic Party. These reforms went into place through the initiative system with support from key Republicans (notably Arnold Schwarzenegger) combined with independents who otherwise tended to vote for Democrats.
An organized minority party in favor of electoral reform crystalized with support from voters in the minority in each district might be exactly what’s needed in order to push electoral reform forward. The Forward Party’s strategy is different, and it looks promising.
This article was originally published at the MathIntee Political Post on Substack.
1 My focus has been on presidential elections, and so I am only familiar with a couple dozen minor parties or so. Arguably, the early Jacksonians were focused heavily on electoral reform.
2 This can be “top two” followed by a majority vote, or “top n” followed by a ranked choice, approval, or STAR vote.