Men Without a Party

After more than two decades in local, state, and national politics, Lincoln Chafee still cannot seem to find a home on the American political spectrum. In the 1990s, Chafee served as the Republican mayor of Warwick, Rhode Island; home of the state’s only major airport. His famous father, the late Rhode Island Senator John Chafee, no doubt played a role in his rise in politics. When his father died in 1999, then-governor Lincoln Almond appointed Chafee to finish out his father’s term, which would have expired the following year anyway. Chafee won a full term in the Senate as a Republican in a blue state but had little in common with many of his GOP colleagues in the upper chamber.

As Ann Coulter pointed out shortly before Chafee had to run for re-election in 2006, “Chafee opposes Bush on taxes, Iraq, abortion and gay marriage.  This man is literally too stupid to know he’s a Democrat…In the last election, Chafee famously refused to vote for Bush, instead writing in Bush’s father.” Chafee actually flirted with running against President George W. Bush in the Republican primary in 2004 but decided against it after the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

With an unimpressive voting record from a conservative perspective, Chafee drew a primary challenger in the form of Steve Laffey, the mayor of Cranston.  Chafee emerged victorious in the primary but lost the general election narrowly to now-Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. When asked if he thought his loss in the election helped the country, Chafee replied, “to be honest, yes.”  Had Chafee managed to win re-election, the balance of power would have stood at 50-50, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Republicans.  However, Chafee likely would have pulled a Jim Jeffords and gone independent if he had managed to win re-election. 

Even though he did not return to the Senate in 2007, Chafee became an independent.  He ran for governor in 2010 and won with 36 percent of the vote in a four-way race. He governed as a liberal, therefore it came as no surprise that he switched to the Democratic Party in 2013. In light of low poll numbers, Chafee decided against running for a second term. Even though voters in his own state rejected him, Chafee somehow thought it would make sense to launch a national campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Needless to say, that didn’t last long. Two years later, Chafee entertained the idea of running for his old Senate seat by challenging Whitehouse in the Democratic primary but ultimately decided against it.

Now that Chafee has had little success in Republican and Democratic politics, he has decided to seek a home in the Libertarian Party. In addition to rejecting the two major political parties in the country, Chafee has apparently decided to give up on Rhode Island as well; moving to Wyoming.  As a new member of the Libertarian Party, Chafee feels that he has the qualifications necessary to launch a bid to receive the party’s nomination for President of the United States. At first glance, Chafee’s migration into the Libertarian Party makes sense; considering his views on “abortion and gay marriage” as well as his belief in non-interventionism. However, it seems unlikely that the Libertarian Party will get behind one of the signature platform ideas of his 2016 Presidential campaign: converting the United States to the metric system. The Libertarian Party generally does not like it when the federal government undertakes massive projects; which replacing the customary system with the metric system would most definitely require.

Chafee hardly finds himself alone in the list of politicians attempting to run for office with no constituency. Congressman Joe Walsh announced his plans to challenge President Trump in the Republican primary. Walsh does have conservative credentials, as a one-term member of Congress and a talk radio show host. However, he has chosen not to highlight his conservatism; instead devoting his entire platform to beating up on President Trump. Make no mistake about it: the attacks against Republicans will not stop if Walsh got the nomination instead of President Trump. The mainstream media, Walsh’s only constituency, have made it clear they see the former Congressman as nothing more than a useful idiot that can help them achieve their goal: to “wound” President Trump. If Walsh got the nomination, the media would instantly point out that Walsh has unleashed a series of controversial tweets in recent years. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos brought up the tweets during an interview with Walsh, even as he gushed over the prospect of a primary challenger weakening President Trump.

So far, Walsh only has one competitor in the quest to prevent President Trump from receiving the Republican nomination: former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, another man without a party. Weld served as Governor of Massachusetts for six years until President Bill Clinton nominated him to become United States Ambassador to Mexico; at which point he resigned. For the record, Weld’s nomination ultimately fell threw. 

Weld secured a spot on the Libertarian Party’s Presidential ticket in 2016 as the running mate of Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson. The Libertarian Party seems like a natural habitat for Weld, described by the website Reason as a ““pro-choice, pro-amnesty, ‘Libertarian for Life’ who backed Barack Obama in 2008.” While Weld might actually have a better shot at winning the Libertarian nomination than Chafee, he has decided to pursue a fool’s errand instead by attempting to become the standard bearer of a party that primarily identifies as pro-life and anti-amnesty.

With just five months to go until the Iowa caucuses, another potential challenger to President Trump has yet to make a decision. Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford may decide to run for the Republican nomination; choosing to make the growing federal deficit his signature issue. While Sanford’s rhetoric leading up to his potential presidential campaign launch has included the usual anti-Trump commentary that the media delights in, at least his campaign attempts to focus on an actual issue. According to a poll conducted by The Post and Courier, he receives the support of just two percent of Republican voters in his home state.

Sanford has a personal beef with President Trump. After two terms as South Carolina Governor, Sanford returned to Congress in 2013 after Governor Nikki Haley appointed Congressman Tim Scott to the United States Senate. Sanford won re-election two times and would probably have won re-election a third time, if not for the intervention of President Trump. The day of the Republican primary, President Trump sent out a tweet urging the Republicans in South Carolina’s 1^st Congressional District to support Sanford’s primary opponent, Katie Arrington. While Sanford had personal baggage from his time as governor, specifically when he disappeared for a few days to spend time with his mistress, President Trump’s tweet likely played a key role in his primary defeat. In spite of Sanford’s dislike for President Trump, Sanford at least understands the threat that the radical left poses to the country. Sanford has said that if he had to choose between President Trump and a Democrat, he would choose President Trump.

Many of the other Republicans who despise President Trump will either stay home, vote for a third-party candidate, or vote Democratic. Depending on which state they live in, this could have serious electoral consequences in 2020. Then again, maybe not. For the most part, President Trump has not alienated many of the people who voted for him in 2016; many of the #NeverTrumpers did not vote for President Trump in 2016 anyway.

The tone of this article, specifically the title, may make it seem like I have a beef with third parties and people who do not identify with a particular party. I do not. After all, independents make up a plurality of the electorate in several states; including the key swing states of Iowa and New Hampshire. In fact, I technically do not belong to a political party; I decided not to enroll in any particular party when I registered to vote at the DMV.  I briefly switched my party affiliation to Republican to vote for President Trump in the primary and then promptly switched back to unaffiliated.

Although I do not belong to any political party, I recognize the reality of American politics, as every one of the “men without a party” mentioned in this article should. While third parties did particularly well in the last election in certain parts of the country, only two parties have any chance of winning any given election at the federal level.  An independent candidate might win from time to time but even the so-called “independents” vote with one of the political parties nearly all of the time. In the case of the two “independents” serving in the United States Senate, they almost always vote with the Democrats. 

Both major political parties definitely have their fair share of flaws, which explains why the American people selected an outsider in 2016; much to the chagrin of the insiders in both parties who have benefitted from the status quo. President Trump actually adopted some of the views of the Constitution Party, specifically regarding trade, immigration, and foreign policy.  As their support for the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all demonstrates, Democratic presidential candidates have decided to adopt some of the views of the Green Party in an effort to absorb some of its voters in 2020.

Considering the flaws of the Republican Party, specifically regarding immigration and spending, it makes sense why some right-leaning voters might want to support third party candidates. However, supporting third party candidates effectively dilutes the vote of the silent majority. An article written for the University of Virginia Center for Politics’s Crystal Ball points out that the combined vote total of the right-of-center candidates in the 2016 Presidential Election; namely President Trump, Gary Johnson, and Evan McMuffin, exceeded the combined vote total of the left-of-center candidates, Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. Had it come down to a matchup between conservative and liberal candidates, conservatives would have won every single one of the six big swing states; which the author identifies as Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. President Trump only won four of the states in 2016 but still managed to win the election. The empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that voting for a third-party, right-leaning candidate could jeopardize Republicans’ chances of winning the states they desperately need if they want to win the White House in 2020. While the “men without a party” may not have a particular party that they agree with at this point, they do have a particular ideology. They have to decide what parts of their ideology matter more to them. Libertarians have to decide if they want to watch the debt explode just so you can vote for a party that favors legal pot and abortion? If the “men without a party” cared about the debt as much as they say they do, then they would vote for President Trump in 2020. A vote for a third-party candidate or a Democrat effectively amounts to a vote for the Green New Deal; the nightmare scenario for any libertarian. Fortunately, the “men without a party” have plenty of time to decide which matters more to them: their principles or their hatred of President Trump.