Frozen Instant Runoff Voting

Last year, in a series of posts, including this one, I discussed proportional representation. There are other alternative voting systems that, like proportional representation, have mainly been used outside the U.S.

Now, my native city of Minneapolis is adopting one of those systems, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), for its municipal elections. Actually it's normal IRV, not FIRV as indicated in the headline on this post; I'm merely fondly remembering (from a safe distance) the winters of my childhood.

That city's former procedure had involved a non-partisan primary. There was only one primary, rather than a separate one for each party. And no candidate was identified by party on the ballot. The top two vote-getters in the primary would face off in the general election, again without being identified by party. Barring a tie (highly unlikely, although the state came close to such an outcome in its U.S. Senate election last year), the winning candidate in the general election had a majority of the votes.

Rather than casting one vote for their favored candidate, under IRV a voter will rank all of the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, he or she is elected. Otherwise, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and the second-place votes of that candidate are distributed among the remaining candidates. That procedure is repeated until one candidate has a majority. (The city also holds elections, such as that for its park board, which involve filling multiple positions. The math gets more complicated in those cases. For a further explanation, see this court opinion which rejected a challenge to the city's adoption of IRV.)

One clear benefit for Minneapolis is that it will avoid the expense of holding separate primary and runoff elections. The electorate will vote only once, and the "runoff" will merely be a matter of doing the math.

Other practical considerations involve potential difficulties. People like me, who eat, sleep and breathe politics, will have known about IRV for many years, and will be ready to go, when the first IRV election comes up. But I'm absolutely certain that, despite all efforts at voter education by the state, the parties, and the candidates, there will be many voters who go to the polls, and still need to have it explained to them, why they can't just put an "X" next to their favorite candidate's name, as they've been doing all their lives.

Also, there will be some issues with counting the votes. According to some reports, polling places will not, yet at least, be equipped with voting machines designed to handle the IRV process.

But aside from all that, how might it change voting behavior? My guess is that, in places such as Minneapolis where it's replacing a non-partisan primary, not much. IRV is just a more efficient way of implementing the same runoff that that system has always had.

If, however, IRV were implemented at a general election, following partisan primaries, I suspect that it would result in increased support of third-party candidacies. In recent years, the Independence Party, the third party that grew out of Jesse Ventura's successful gubernatorial candidacy in 1998, has been getting a sizable share of the votes in Minnesota's statewide elections. None of its candidates, other than Ventura, have come anywhere near victory, but it continues to garner much higher percentages than, for example, the Libertarians or the Greens.

Under the traditional system, an Independence voter will have no say about the preference between the Republican and Democratic candidates, if, as is usually the case, the Independence candidate finished third. But, under IRV, a voter can vote Independence with a Republican second choice, or Independence with a Democratic second choice. That would not be a wasted vote. And if there were enough such voters, then perhaps third-party candidates might win every once in a while, and not only once in a lifetime when the stars are aligned just right, as they were for Ventura in 1998.

Whether that would be a good or a bad thing depends on whether you want 1) the stability represented by continuation of the existing two-party system, or 2) the shake-up that would come with at least occasional third-party victories. I lean toward #1, but I think it's somewhat of a close call.

I know what the NFL is, but what's the DFL?

Political observers from outside of Minnesota are sometimes puzzled by references to the "DFL Party" in that state.

The Democratic Party organization in Minnesota is officially known at the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota.

That organization is the result of the 1944 merger between the Democratic Party and the Farmer-Labor Party.

The Farmer-Labor Party was a socialist third-party movement that was founded in the aftermath of World War I. It was active in several states, but Minnesota is the only state in which it achieved significant electoral success.

Between 1923 and 1940, four party members represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate: Henrik Shipstead, Magnus Johnson, Elmer Benson and Ernest Lundeen. Shipstead was apparently not a full-blooded believer in the F.L. platform; he returned to the Republican Party in 1940, and continued to serve in the Senate, as a Republican, until 1947.

Three F.L. members served as governor of Minnesota between 1931 and 1939. The most prominent of those was Floyd B. Olson, who was running for the U.S. Senate, when he died of cancer in 1936. His lieutenant governor, Hjalmar Petersen, completed Olson's third two-year term. Elmer Benson was elected in 1936, and served one two-year term.

It's obvious from the surnames that the party leadership was heavily drawn from the prominent socialist element in the state's large population of Scandinavian ancestry.

The F.L. Party's 1934 platform was summarized in a article that was published that year in TIME magazine, a periodical that, especially in the heyday of publisher Henry Luce, would not have been at all sympathetic toward the party. That summary is as follows:

The Farmer-Labor platform dictated by Governor Olson announced bluntly that "Capitalism has failed," declared for "a complete reorganization of our social structure into a co-operative commonwealth." It demanded public ownership of factories, packing plants, banks, transportation and communication systems,mines, water power, public utilities.

Olson and his successors were unable to push the more radical aspects of that program through the state legislature.

In 1938, the F.L. hold on the governor's office was broken by Republican Harold Stassen, the "boy governor" who, at the age of 31, defeated Elmer Benson's bid for reelection.

By the early 1940s, the Democrats and the F.L. Party realized that they were splitting the anti-Republican vote. In the wake of Olson's death and the emergence of Stassen, the F.L. Party was no longer strong enough to dominate Minnesota politics on its own.

In 1944, the Democrats and the F.L. held a convention at which they agreed to merge into the DFL Party.

The DFL soon became the dominant party in Minnesota. Hubert Humphrey was elected to the U.S. Senate on the DFL ticket in 1948, followed by Eugene McCarthy in 1958. Orville Freeman was the first DFLer elected governor, in 1954. The party held the governorship for 26 of the ensuing 36 years.

The balance between the DFL and the Republicans has been somewhat more even in recent decades.

1978 was a calamitous year for the DFL. Humphrey died in January of that year. Wendell Anderson, who had been a very popular DFL governor, saw his support collapse after he had, in effect, appointed himself to the U.S. Senate vacancy caused by Walter Mondale's 1976 election as vice president.

The 1978 general election brought a defeat that must be rare, if not unprecedented, for any state party in American history, when the DFL lost the governorship and both U.S. Senate seats on the same day.

The party has recovered in the meantime. Its most prominent subsequent leaders were Rudy Perpich, who served a record total of 10 years as governor in two different periods, and Paul Wellstone, who was in the U.S. Senate from 1991 until his death in 2002.

Image: Minnesota Historical Society (official portrait of Gov. Floyd B. Olson)

"I'm All Ears"

Henry Ross Perot, who had previously been an IBM salesman, started building his fortune when his firm, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) received a federal contract to computerize Medicare records. He later sold that company to General Motors, and founded another IT start-up, Perot Systems. During those years, he divided his time between his business ventures and various political activities.

In 1992, he launched a third-party candidacy for president.

The Republican incumbent, George H.W. Bush, had near-unanimous support in the polls, following the successful effort to expel the Iraqi military from Kuwait in Gulf War I, in 1991. At that time, there was semi-serious talk of his being unopposed for reelection in 1992.

However, the recession of 1990-1, and the relatively high unemployment that continued into the election year of 1992, resulted in a gradual erosion of Bush's popularity. Employment is a lagging indicator of economic growth, i.e., when recovery from a recession begins, it takes an extended period of time before the unemployment rate decreases significantly. Therefore, it felt to many people in 1992 as though the U.S. were still in recession, even though a strong recovery had begun in the first half of 1991. Bush's Democratic opponent, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, was able to exploit that unease by promising a different turn in economic policy.

Perot's candidacy was largely based on two economic issues: 1) federal budget deficits and 2) international trade. The 1980s had seen budget deficits that were unprecedentedly high in nominal dollar terms, and high, but not unprecedented, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As GDP grew strongly from 1982 forward, the deficits measured on that percentage basis fell rapidly.

Whether small or large, and however measured, continued deficits meant continued increases in the national debt. The issue of public debt has been controversial for all of American history; here is a discussion of how the founding fathers dealt with the issue.

Perot advocated a combination of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget.

Perot took a protectionist position on international trade. He opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was then being negotiated by the U.S., with Canada and Mexico. During the following year, Perot engaged in a debate with Vice President Al Gore on CNN, in which Gore took the pro-NAFTA position.

Perot argued that, as a successful businessman, he had experience that was relevant to handling those economic issues. He contrasted himself with Clinton, who had been a professional politician almost his entire adult life, after a brief stint in academia, and Bush, who went into the oil business after college, but had been a professional politician for over a quarter of a century by 1992.

The counterargument is that an individual businessman tends to seek any advantage he can gain by lobbying government, e.g., for subsidies or for tariffs levied on his overseas competitors. But if a businessman-turned-president were to base the entire system on providing such favors, the system would break down, because resources would be allocated by government fiat, rather than by market forces, and the resulting inefficiencies would hamper economic growth. This is an example of what economists call the "fallacy of composition".

I don't want to be too coy about being the impartial historian here. As you might have guessed anyway, I'll acknowledge that this "counterargument" is the side that I take on that question.

For anyone who doesn't remember a moment of comic relief during a debate between Bush, Clinton and Perot on October 11, 1992, I want to explain the title of this post. Perot was asked about the fairness of his proposal to increase the federal gasoline tax. As part of his answer, he said that if anyone has a better plan, "I'm all ears". That was an unfortunate figure of speech on the part of a candidate with ears out of proportion with the remainder of his diminutive body. Laughter ensued and Perot, who I think has a tendency to take himself too seriously, good-naturedly acknowledged the unintended humor in his remark.

Clinton won with 370 electoral votes, to 168 for Bush. Perot won no electoral votes; however, his popular vote total, at 18.91%, was the highest of any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Perot did better in the midwest and west, than in the east; he finished second to Bush in Utah.

Perot ran again in 1996, but was a lesser factor, with only 8.4% of the popular vote.

A Turbulent Year

There will forever be disagreements about the meaning of various events in 1968. But I think all will agree on one thing: it was a turbulent political year such as has seldom been seen in America (not that the turbulence was limited to America).

Four years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had won a full term as president in a huge landslide, almost a year after he had become president when John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. After the 1964 election, the widespread expectation was that Johnson would run for a second full term in 1968, and at that time he seemed invincible. Johnson would have been constitutionally eligible to run for two full terms, because he had served less than half of the term to which Kennedy had been elected in 1960. However, no president who had succeeded to the presidency upon the death or resignation of a president has won a second full term.

What ensued? To quote Harold Macmillan, who was British prime minster from 1957 to 1963, "events, dear boy, events". The 1965-1969 presidential term was certainly eventful. Johnson's domestic policies, including federal funding of elementary and secondary education, federal health insurance for senior citizens, and other expansions of the federal reach, disillusioned some voters. But the biggest "event" was the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam, which began in earnest in 1965.

By 1968, Johnson had lost much of his support. On March 31 of that year, he announced he would not run for president in 1968. In that same speech, he announced the beginnings of the U.S.'s standing down from its military commitment to South Vietnam.

Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination, after a contentious campaign that saw, among other things, the assassination of one of Humphrey's rivals, Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York.

The Republican nominee was Richard Nixon. After losing the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy, and the 1962 California gubernatorial election to Pat Brown, Nixon moved to New York, joined a law firm there, and patiently planned his comeback. He was talked about as a contender for the 1964 Republican nomination but, in what certainly seems in retrospect a wise move, he bided his time. He rather easily won the 1968 Republican nomination; his main opponent was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

The third-party candidate was George Wallace, then the former and future governor of Alabama. At his first gubernatorial inauguration in 1963, he said: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Between that inauguration and his 1968 presidential candidacy, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been enacted. For the first time, the federal government possessed the tools to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were ratified in the wake of the Civil War, and were intended, respectively, to give freed African American slaves equal protection of the laws, and voting rights.

I did not find in Wallace's 1968 platform an explicit pledge to repeal those acts, but that is at least strongly implied by such planks as:

Reestablishment of the authority and responsibility of local government by
returning to the states, counties and cities those matters properly falling
within their jurisdiction and responsibility.

the Federal Government has adopted so-called "Civil Rights Acts,"
particularly the one adopted in 1964, which have set race against race and class
against class, all of which we condemn.

One can speculate about what combination of ambition and conviction brought Wallace to his decision to launch a third-party candidacy. But it is clear that he was setting out a policy position separate from those of the major-party candidates.

Humphrey was a consistent supporter of the type of federal actions that Wallace condemned. I wrote about Humphrey's 1948 convention speech here. In 1964, Humphrey was Senate floor manager for proponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nixon had been seen as a moderate on racial issues. During his presidency, when the issues shifted from elimination of Jim Crow laws, and impediments to African American voting, to such issues as affirmative action, and the so-called "busing" issue (sending children to public schools outside their neighborhood, in order to achieve racial balance), Nixon to a large degree sided with southern conservatives. But that's different from advocating rollback of the 1964-5 civil rights legislation.

Nixon won the general election with 301 electoral votes, to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace. The popular vote was very close, with 43.42% for Nixon to 42.72% for Humphrey. Wallace received 13.53% of the vote, a much higher proportion than Strom Thurmond had garnered in his similar third-party run in 1948. Wallace won a fair number of votes outside the south, although all of his electoral votes were southern.

Never again was there to be a major segregationist third-party run. Wallace ran for president as a Democrat in 1972 and 1976, failing to win his party's nomination in both of those years. Wallace, as was generally the case with major white southern politicians who retained significant support in the 1970s and onward, moderated his position on racial issues. He won further gubernatorial elections in Alabama in 1970, 1974 and 1982, despite being paralyzed after an assassination attempt in 1972.

Nixon won the electoral votes of Florida, Virginia, both Carolinas, and Tennessee in 1968. He then swept every southern state in his 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. With the exception of 1976, when Georgian Jimmy Carter won a huge majority of southern electoral votes, Republicans have dominated the south ever since. Even in 2000, when Al Gore of Tennessee was the Democratic presidential nominee, his Republican opponent George W. Bush made a sweep of the south, including Gore's home state. Gore won a plurality of the popular vote, but the bulk of his support was outside his home region.

What does "Progressive" mean?

I was trying to turn the title of this post into another play on what "is" is, but much to the relief of President Clinton, it didn't seem to want to stretch that far, so I'll proceed to the subject at hand.

Henry Wallace of Iowa, who was vice president during Franklin Roosevelt's third term, and also served in the Cabinet under both Roosevelt and Truman, ran for president in 1948 as the Progressive candidate.

That was the same third-party label under which Theodore Roosevelt ran in 1912 (and Sen. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin in 1924, a candidacy that I'm not including in this series of posts), but it meant something different.

The Progressive movement that Roosevelt led was a center-right faction that wanted to maintain free enterprise and relatively small government, while expanding the federal role in some areas. The Henry Wallace candidacy in 1948 was significantly further to the left.

Wallace's candidacy, as was the case with Thurmond's candidacy that same year, reflected an ideological split within the Democratic Party. In this case, the split mainly involved foreign policy. The Progressives wanted to maintain the close relationship with the Soviet Union that grew out of our alliance with that regime during World War II. Truman had, by contrast, begun waging the Cold War that characterized, in different stages, with greater or lesser intensity, the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union until the latter's demise in 1991. The Cold War faction among the Democrats saw the wartime alliance as a marriage of convenience that the U.S. no longer had any interest in maintaining, once the Soviets had made clear their belligerence toward American interests after 1945.

In the meantime, the word "progressive" has generally been used more in the Wallace sense than the Roosevelt sense.

In what is considered a political miracle, Harry Truman won a full term as president in 1948. As I alluded to earlier, 1948 was expected to be a Republican year. Republicans had, in the mid-term election of 1946, regained majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. A mid-term gain by the "out-party" is often said to predict a similar change in the White House two years later. I plan later to write about how this has been shown to be an unreliable indicator.

Truman won with 303 electoral votes. His Republican opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, received 189 electoral votes. Thurmond and Wallace garnered relatively few votes, receiving 2.41% and 2.37% of the popular vote, respectively. Because Thurmond's votes were concentrated geographically in the southeast, he received 39 electoral votes. By contrast, Wallace's support was dispersed among more states, so he was shut out in the electoral college. (Closer to this year's November election, I will write more about the "winner-take-all" aspect of electoral votes within most of the states.)

In contrast to the Republicans' problem in 1912, the Democratic vote in 1948 was not sufficiently split up to bring defeat. The combined votes of Wallace and Thurmond were far less on a percentage basis, and significantly less on an absolute basis, than Roosevelt's in 1912. Truman almost won an absolute majority of the popular vote; he got 49.55% to Dewey's 45.07%.

There were other leftist third-party challenges in later elections, led by such figures as Eugene McCarthy and Ralph Nader. While Nader's 2000 candidacy may have had a decisive effect on the outcome, no subsequent leftist challenge was considered as significant as Wallace's in 1948. But, as we shall see in the next post in this series, another Wallace ran as a third-party candidate 20 years later, but that was another southern-based candidacy.

Truman savored his 1948 victory, taunting those who said it couldn't be done (not to mention those who said it hadn't been done; the Chicago Tribune infamously proclaimed Truman's defeat in a banner headline the morning after the election). But his full term did not go well. He plunged to what are still record-law poll ratings, in the midst of an unpopular war, in which he was thought by many to have made major mistakes. (Sound familiar?)

Truman was constitutionally eligible to seek another full term in 1952, because the presidential term limit amendment that had been ratified in 1951 did not apply to him. However, it would have been politically impossible. Truman waited until early 1952 to announce a decision that he had apparently made long before: that he would not run in 1952.

Truman became such a folk hero by the time of his death in 1972 (and that sentiment has continued to this day) that many people have either forgotten, or never knew, how reviled he was during his presidency. What that means for certain of his successors remains to be seen.

Photo: Library of Congress

A Four-Way Race

The next presidential election that I'll write about that involved third-party candidacies, is 1948. The Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman, won that election, despite its being by all indications a Republican year, and despite not one, but two leading Democratic politicians pursuing third-party candidacies.

The first was J. Strom Thurmond, then serving as governor of South Carolina as a Democrat. His amazing longevity is evidenced by the fact that he was still in public office six years ago. Thurmond became a senator in 1954, and switched to the Republican Party in 1964. When he left the Senate in 2003, he held the record for the longest tenure in that body, since surpassed by Robert Byrd.

Some background to the Thurmond presidential candidacy: Franklin Roosevelt's four landslide presidential victories between 1932 and 1944 were based on a large but volatile coalition. One element was southern segregationists, whose positions on other issues ranged from populist to conservative. The other element consisted of liberals, largely outside the southeast, with heavy support from organized labor, whose economic and political influence was still on the rise.

It's generally presumed that Roosevelt's sympathies would have been in favor of racial equality, but in practice he was very cautious on that set of issues, which enabled him to hold that coalition together. After 1945, which saw both Roosevelt's death and the end of World War II, the coalition became more difficult to sustain.

As I noted here, Truman moved decisively to integrate the armed forces in 1948. The party platform adopted by the 1948 Democratic National Convention included the following:

The Democratic Party is responsible for the great civil rights gains made in recent years in eliminating unfair and illegal discrimination based on race, creed or color. The Democratic Party commits itself to continuing its efforts to eradicate all racial, religious and economic discrimination. We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution. We highly commend President Harry S. Truman for his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights.

As a result, a large bloc of southerners ostentatiously walked out of that convention. (The conventions were televised that year for the first time, albeit to a small audience, so that heightened the drama.) They met separately, and nominated Thurmond for president on the States' Rights Democratic ticket, but they were more popularly known as the Dixiecrats.

An emerging star of the Democratic Party made a major speech in favor of the civil rights plank in the platform at their 1948 convention. The mayor of Minneapolis, who was a U.S. Senate candidate that year, said:

To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

That mayor was Hubert Humphrey, who went on to represent Minnesota in the Senate for a total of 23 years in two separate periods, and to serve one term as vice president. Perhaps one could compare that speech to Barack Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, as another forum for a new U.S. Senate candidate to be introduced to a national audience. Later this year, we will know whether Obama gets any closer to the White House than did Humphrey.

Reverberations from Thurmond's 1948 candidacy continued to be felt for many years. Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, was pressured to resign his position as Senate Republican leader in 2002, after publicly stating that the U.S. would have been better off, had Thurmond won in 1948. Thurmond changed with the times, abandoned his segregationist positions, and won respect as an elder statesman. Thus, it was to be expected that a Republican leader would praise him as he was nearing retirement, but to praise the Dixiecrat platform, which Lott's remarks could be intepreted as doing, was by 2002 unacceptable.

More to come on the other third-party candidate, and the 1948 result.

How Strong Do You Feel?

I've written a lot about the two-party system. In a variation on that theme, I will do a series of posts on four 20th century presidential elections in which third parties made a strong showing. In a sense, those third-party movements are the exceptions that prove the rule that a two-party system is the persistent norm of American electoral politics. None of these third-party movements survived for very long and posed any serious threat to the two-party system.

The first is Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 attempt to return to the White House under the Progressive Party banner. At one point, Roosevelt proclaimed that he felt as strong as a bull moose, which resulted in his movement being nicknamed the Bull Moose ticket.

Some background: after Roosevelt was elected to a full term in 1904 (he had been McKinley's running mate in 1900 and had become president when McKinley was assassinated in 1901) he pledged not to run again in 1908. He saw that as complying with the spirit of the two-term tradition that George Washington had begun by declining to seek re-election to a third term in 1796. In Roosevelt's time, that limit was merely customary; it would not be written into the Constitution until 1951.

Roosevelt quickly regretted that pledge, in that it made him a lame duck from the beginning of that term, and thereby limited his effectiveness. But he stuck to his pledge, and anointed William Howard Taft as his successor. The electorate agreed, and Taft took office in 1909.

Roosevelt became disenchanted with Taft. Roosevelt represented the Progressive faction within the Republican Party, with policy positions such as greater federal regulation of business, and expansion of the national park system as part of a more general advocacy of conservation measures regarding western lands. Taft was part of a more conservative Republican faction.

Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination against Taft in 1912. He then launched his third-party candidacy. The obvious result was that, with the Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won with an electoral vote landslide of 435, to 88 for Roosevelt and 8 for Taft. Wilson, however, received only 41.84% of the popular vote. It was the only time a Republican presidential candidate finished third in the entire history of that party.

I wrote here about the end of the Roosevelt story.

I'm writing this largely from memory, and I'm sure most of my recollections come from Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris.