Why This Year is Different With Regard to Voting Third Party

As so many people have stated since Donald Trump became the presumptive GOP nominee for president, he is not a typical nominee, and this is not a typical year. Voting for a third-party candidate and abandoning the Republican nominee in the general election, once unthinkable to many conservatives, has become the final possible course of action to stop Trump from winning the Presidency (assuming he officially wins the Republican nomination in Cleveland).

If he is the nominee, it remains to be seen to what extent he will reshape the party. If he wins, I think it likely that he will have a significant long-term, possibly permanent effect on the party platform, and what overarching philosophies become acceptable for future nominees to federal and state offices. If, on the other hand, Trump loses to Hillary Clinton, presumably in dramatic fashion, I think it equally likely that his nomination will have a negligible long-term impact with regard to the platforms of the party and of future candidates. The party as a whole would remain that of limited government and free markets. Of course, it will take years for the Trump effect to be clear either way.

But until it does become clear, it would be a mistake for conservatives to see the 2016 election as the new normal in terms of abandoning a Republican nominee who isn’t sufficiently conservative. The fact remains that there will never be a candidate, or indeed any person, with whom we agree 100%. Compromises will have to be made in terms of deciding which candidates we will support in the general election, in order to prevent an even worse candidate from being elected.

The fundamental difference between this presidential election and all the other times—at both the national and state level—the GOP has nominated a less-than-conservative candidate is that this is one of those rare instances in which there is truly no difference between the two major party nominees. In 2008, John McCain was no conservative (nor is he today), and was opposed fervently by many conservatives in the primaries. But there was also no doubt that he was both more conservative and possessing of better personal character than Barack Obama. The same is true of Mitt Romney, Bob Dole, or indeed any other Republican nominee for president over the past few decades.

The same cannot be said today. There is literally no difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, from policy positions and governing philosophy to moral character, and so the normal arguments for supporting a moderate nominee must be tossed aside. Trump is not merely a moderate in the McCain mold; he is a liberal in the mold of both Barack Obama and the very woman he is running against.

For good or ill—and there are strong arguments to be made for both sides—the political party system in America is, for the time being, an inherently two-party system. As long as one of those parties remains a conservative one in both name and substance, with hundreds of honorable candidates for federal and state offices across the country, working within the system will yield far more effective short- and long-term gains then attempting to work outside it.