Declaration of Independents

The Senate race in Kansas is hostile territory for the Democratic Party: since 1900 it has seen only two of its candidates elected, and a few months ago Chad Taylor was poling at 25 percent and was going the way of his predecessors. Instead, despite Tuesday’s results, the Senate race in Kansas could set a historic precedent for how parties operate in politically hostile states and create a new role for Independent politicians nationwide. 

The Kansas incumbent Sen. Pat Roberts (R) has had an easy run of elections. He has been elected with 62 percent, 82.5 percent, and 60 percent of the vote in Kansas. The closest anyone has gotten to unseating him was Jim Slattery (D) in 2008 with an unintimidating 36 percent. However, on Tuesday he claimed victory again but was only able to muster 53 percent of the vote share. The story of how this happened shows how parties can use our electoral system to flip the tables on so-called “safe” seats.

{mosads}Greg Orman, an Independent running in Kansas, was poling at 23 percent while Taylor polled at 25 percent, a significant amount for an Independent candidate. He is more liberal than the Republicans but more conservative than the Democrats.  He supports universal background checks on gun sales, the Dodd-Frank bill, and campaign finance reform while publically agreeing with several of Rep. Paul  Ryan’s (R-Wis.) entitlement reforms and voting for Mitt Romney in 2012. While he is closer to the Democrats than the Republicans he would not have gotten the nomination because, well, he’s too conservative. 

The way our electoral system works a candidate needs just one more vote than the next candidate to get nominated or elected. Orman’s inability to get the Democratic nomination is American plurality at work, but it gave him a distinct advantage: he avoided becoming just another Democrat in Kansas, appealing to a small part of the electorate, trying to overcome impossible odds. 

This plurality system also gave Orman a significant challenge in the general election. Third-party candidates only hold two of the one hundred seats in the Senate for a reason. Voting for an Independent candidate is usually a waste of a vote since they compete against major parties for support. 

However, with their candidate suffering in the polls the Democratic Party had an epiphany: give up to win the race. There is no consolation prize for finishing second in our political system. So the Democratic nominee, Chad Taylor, decided to pull out of the race, a move that Republicans challenged in court. However, on September 18^th the Kansas Supreme Court decided that the nominee could remove his name from the ballot. All of a sudden plurality was working in the Independent Greg Orman’s favor.   

Why did the Democrats do this? What essentially happened is that they made the third party candidate the alternative to the republican. By removing themselves from the race they opened a large swath of the electorate to the Independent. 

This is median voter theorem at work. Everyone has a set of policies they prefer, and people vote for the candidate they believe holds positions closest to their own. First, Orman gets the support of everyone who would vote Democrat anyway. Then, he widens his base by gaining moderate Republican support from those who believe his views are closest to theirs. While he is not a Democrat it is clearly better for the Democratic Party to withdraw and help the Independent candidate; a partial win is better than a total loss. Democrats will get more of their policies enacted by providing the Independent with a wider voting base than running against the Republican. In Orman they will have a senator with whom they can work with on a number of issues. 

Imagine this working in a state dominated by Democrats such as New York. Despite a tepid response from Democrats, Governor Cuomo’s election has never been in doubt; at the very least Democrats prefer him to a Republican. But what if there was no Republican on the ticket?  Instead put in place an Independent who could be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. All this candidate would need is enough moderate support to contend in an election. Also, this candidate would have the moderate credentials and wide mandate to work with both parties and avoid some of the partisan politics that plague our political system today. 

Such a tactic does require a change in how parties think about winning elections and no one wants to give up. Parties and their political apparatuses exist to win elections. However, the Democratic Party has pulled off a coup in Kansas. In the future, parties facing difficult odds should work to improve the election prospects of Independent candidates they would prefer to the other party. As long as they prefer the Independent to the alternative this makes sound sense. While the parties would have less control over the politician once in power they would actually have a say in who gets elected in polarized states and more of a say over the political process broadly.

Oppenheimer is a research associate at a foreign policy think tank.