10 March 2020 — 1033 mdt

Greens on the ballot turn Dems a bright hue

Seven Montanans claiming to represent the Green Party have filed for four statewide offices and one legislative district.

Montana’s Green Party has not endorsed any of these candidates.

At least two of the candidates, John Gibney and Gary Marbut, seem to have little legitimate claim to sharing the Green Party’s values and platform.

The Green Party is not on the ballot of its own accord

The Green Party is on the ballot in Montana thanks to the efforts of a non-Green Party petition drive financed by dark money. Conservative interests probably are behind the petition drive given the conventional wisdom that Greens draw votes from Democrats, and Libertarians draw votes from Republicans.

I think the conventional wisdom is wrong, but Montana’s Democrats do not, and therefore are deeply worried that their candidates could lose because of Green Votes. Two years ago, the MDP persuaded a court to throw the Greens off the ballot, an approach I set to verse:

That will be harder to do this time than in 2018, but if the MDP thinks it has a snow cone’s chance in Hades of getting the Greens off the ballot, look for another pilgrimage to a friendly judge begging that the Greens be booted from the ballot.

The history of Green Party voting in Montana

On 24 April 2018, I posted an analysis of the Green Party’s electoral fortunes in Montana. My conclusion, that Democrats had little or no good reason to fret about Greens on the ballot, is below. I encourage you to read the old post, however, as it has additional information and graphs.

Would a Green Party candidate steal Democratic votes (24 April 2018)?

That’s the conventional wisdom, just as it’s the conventional wisdom that Libertarians draw votes away from Republican candidates. In the 2000 election, for example, [Ralph] Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida while Bush’s margin over Gore was 537 votes. Had 0.56 percent of Nader’s voters in Florida punched their ballot for Gore, George W. Bush would not have won the presidency.

The conventional wisdom, however, must be tempered with the knowledge that not all, or even most, votes cast for a third party or independent candidate will revert back to one of the major parties if the third party or independent is not on the ballot. In their 2005 paper, The Roots of Third Party Voting: the 2000 Nader Campaign in Historical Perspective, Neal Allen and Brian Brox conclude:

A vote cast for a Green Party candidate is a vote taken away from a Democrat only if voting is a zero-sum game — and the only case zero sum case I can imagine would be an election in which everyone voted, and was required to vote, write-ins were not allowed, and only Democrats and Green were on the ballot. Otherwise, voting is not a zero sum game. Votes for a Green Party candidate can be cast without a single Democrat’s defection from his party’s candidate; votes for a Libertarian can be cast without a single Republican’s defection from his party’s candidate. Keeping Greens or Libertarians off the ballot does not mean their supporters will vote for a major party candidate instead. If a Green Party candidate is not on the ballot, that candidates supports have several options:

• Not voting.
• Voting for the closest ideological match on the ballot.
• Voting for a third party or independent on the ballot.
• Voting for the major opponent of the closest ideological match (example: voting for Bush, not Gore, if Nader is not on the ballot).
• Casting a write-in vote.

Montana’s Democratic Party, haunted by the memory of Nader’s alleged effect on the 2000 election, and happily wedded to the conventional wisdom, fears that Tester, who won by narrow pluralities in 2006 and 2012, will lose liberal votes, and possibly the election, if a Green Party candidate is on the ballot. I can’t, and won’t, say those fears are groundless. But I do think they approach the threshold of panic — and I think the conventional wisdom is wrong.