Nothing in the US Constitution mandates or guarantees a two-party political system. Yet Americans are accustomed to understanding the political landscape as a binary of Democrats and Republicans; third parties are rarely taken seriously, particularly on the national scale.

Members and candidates of political third parties, like the Green Party, argue that this is bad for democracy. With an increasing share of the electorate -- particularly young people -- growing disenchanted with the existing parties, third parties represent an opportunity to re-engage independent voters in civic life by better representing their worldviews and preferences. That’s why the typical Green Party platform reads like that of a very progressive Democrat, calling for deep investment in transformative climate policy, an end to all wars, and major social safety net expansion, plus electrical reforms that make third party candidates more visible and viable choices in the voting booth. 

In this episode, which was written and recorded before the November 3 election, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Jake Tonkel, a biomedical engineer who ran for San Jose City Council as a member of the Green Party. Jake shared his perspective on the positionality of local and national Green Party candidates in the political sphere, the damaging narrative around spoiler candidates, and the Green Party’s theory of change. Jake also charted a course for elevating the profile of the Green Party, and other non-major parties, through targeted electoral and ballot access reforms. 

Related Resources 

• Video from Vox on the benefits of multi-party systems
• Article by Briahna Joy Gray on “Vote Blue No Matter Who” politics, and their costs to democracy 
• Document from the National Association of Secretaries of State detailing ballot access rules for every state
• CSPAN interview with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins
• Jake Tonkel’s campaign site

Transcript

Howie Hawkins: “We have four pillars: ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence. So we wanted to build a politics around that. And so for the last 36 years now, that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve won about 1200 races. We have about 100 greens in local office now. And really our goal is to build that up, elect thousands as we go into the 2020s and build up from local office to state office to congress. And then when we run somebody for president, they won’t be able to ignore us.” 

Reem Rayef: You might have seen Howie Hawkins, the Green Party Presidential Candidate on the ballot you filled out this election season … 

Colleen Pulawski: ... But you also might not have -- it depends on where you are, and what ballot access rules look like in your state.

RR: Here in California, and in 29 other states, Howie Hawkins and Green Party VP candidate Angela Walker appeared on the ballot alongside Biden & Harris and Trump & Pence. In some of the states and territories where they don’t appear on the ballot, voters who want to vote Hawkins and Walker can do so by writing in their names. But in the remaining states, you can’t vote Green at all -- no write-ins are allowed. 

CP: In terms of delegate math, this means that only 514 delegates of the 538 in the electoral college are actually available to Hawkins and Walker. Of those 514 delegates, 133 would have to come from victories in write-in states -- which, as you might expect, basically never happens.

RR: Ballot access rules -- which determine if and how candidates appear on voters’ ballots -- are different in every state, and tend to be really unfriendly to third parties, like the Green Party, Libertarians, and others. Under the current ballot access rules across the county, it’s hard to imagine ever seeing a non-Republican or non-Democrat in the White House. 

CP: For those of us raised in the US, a two-party system is all we’ve ever known. We might take for granted that it’s an acceptable and democratic way of capturing the political preferences of at least most of the country. But research on voters -- and particularly young voters -- demonstrates that that’s not quite the case. A 2018 survey from Tufts University found that 33 percent of young people aged 18 to 24 identify themselves as independent, compared to the 35 percent who call themselves Democrats and 20 percent who identify themselves as Republicans. 

RR: This is important because, disproportionately, these young Independents won’t come out to vote in elections. Without representing their political preferences -- and they do have political preferences --  in national candidates and on presidential ballots, it’s hard to turn them out. 

CP: That’s why Howie Hawkins, and the Green Party more broadly, have focused their efforts on local and state elections. The long game isn’t to supplant the Democratic Party. It’s to pick up voters who aren’t feeling represented by the Democratic party, and give them some representation in City Councils and Mayor’s Offices and State Legislatures, until the Green Party is a household name that mainstream voters feel comfortable casting their ballots for in higher office elections. 

RR: Right. They’re building local power, while using the national stage of the presidential election to spread the good, Green word. 

CP: I’m Colleen Pulawski

RR: And I’m Reem Rayef. On this episode of Talk Policy To Me -- written in the whirlwind of election season -- we’re talking ballot access and the Green Party. 

CP: Earlier in October, Reem, you sat down with Jake Tonkel, a young candidate for City Council in San Jose, and a proud member of the Green Party for the entirety of his voting life. 

RR: Yes. Jake generously took some time away from his insane campaign schedule to chat with me about some things I’ve been really curious about, as one of those young people who is increasingly feeling like the Democrat umbrella doesn’t sufficiently contain my values and vision of the world. Part of the impetus for this episode was definitely a personal crisis -- How should a Leftist in 2020 in California think about using their vote in a way that reflects their values, and is also grounded in the terrifying potential of four more years of a Trump Administration. 

CP: Totally. What does it mean to vote third party, and to be a third party candidate, within the constraints of a two party system that doesn’t exactly have space for you? This also raises some questions about the Green Party’s -- and all third parties -- theory of change. I think most Green Party candidates don’t run with the intent of being quote “spoiler candidates” or trying to teach Democrats and Republicans a lesson. They’re in it to win, and to grow their numbers through campaigns, and build a more democratic democracy. What’s the short game, and what’s the long game? 

RR: So Jake and I talked about all of this, and more. Let’s get into the interview. Jake Tonkel, Candidate for San Jose City Council. Here we go. 

Reem Rayef: OK, so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how you came to identify yourself as a member of the Green Party. Have you called yourself a member of the Green Party for a long time? What was that journey like? 
 
Jake Tonkel: So I will be 30 after the election in November. And I registered with the Green Party when I turned 18. So it's really been a part of my national political leaning, particularly international policy. The anti-war stance was something that was not talked about in either the Republican or the Democratic Party in any major way. We had expanded our war through basically every president for quite a long time regardless, and certainly expanded our national defense budget, which is now seven hundred billion dollars a year. Didn't take me very long at 18 to have someone in my political leanings point out that for about 10 percent of that we could solve world hunger and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me for us to be building weapons when there are people all over the world that are starving and that continued engagement through the international policy brought me to more local issues around food justice and environmental ecology. How we can develop sustainable micro communities and things that I think are going to be great for us locally in San Jose and hopefully around the United States as well. 

RR: Was there a person or an event or something that first introduced you to the Green Party and made you aware of it? 
 
JT: My mom. When my parents got divorced in 2010, 2011, she went back to UC Santa Cruz and was studying women's studies and sociology, and that got her very heavy into the anti-war movement. And you just rub shoulders with some very amazing Green Party activists at a local level that are trying to push that through mainstream discourse. And so she was kind of in and out of the Green Party registering as a Democrat when she needed to make certain votes. And then unregistering and registering as a Green for, you know, we may get into this, you know, ballot access, stuff like that that are a bit more strategic. So between her and I, we've always kind of walked that line of how do we really be effective with our votes, with our party registration and with how we're talking to the community about these issues. 

JT: I've been involved in the Santa Clara County Green Party for the last five years, pretty heavily, with sitting on the County Council, which is our local leadership team. And so there really wasn't much discussion when I know San Jose's city council elections are nonpartisan. Greens won't show up on the ballot next to my name. And a D or an R won't show up next to my opponent's names either. So it was really a unique opportunity for us to talk about the values which resonate really well, and then introduce people to the fact that I'm not a Democrat. So I've certainly had lots of friends that since running have asked me to change and tried to explain how the party works and how they might be able to help me get elected on a local level. And I will always tell them, you know, there's merit in that strategy as well. But I also have a community of people that have taught me so much through the Green Party that I think it was really important, and particularly when it shouldn't be affecting me in a nonpartisan race, to stay true to my Green Party registration for now. 
 
RR: That piece about the kind of nonpartisan party race feels really important just because you won't get voters who are trying to make some kind of strategic calculation of like "Am I throwing my vote away, what does this mean?" It's just "Whose values do I align with most?" 

RR: And I want to go back to that point you just made; you want to get elected and then we'll kind of introduce voters to the fact that you are not a Democrat, you are a Green Party candidate. So what does that mean? How do you kind of parse out --  what do you think are the most important differences between Democrats and Green Party candidates? Specifically for you? How do you differentiate yourself from a Democratic candidate?
 
JT: It really depends on which wing of the Democratic Party people are coming from. I don't think there's a whole lot of policy difference between myself and a very progressive Democrat. In many cases, I think the main piece is do we ultimately see a multi-party system to be more important than a two party system for getting our community to the same vision that we might hold? I think on a local level, getting people aware, it means just as much as winning an election in some cases. I don't plan to do this to lose in any sense. It's not an informational campaign. We are very close, I think, to winning this seat. But at the same time, I've had so many people when I was at the doors go, "Oh, this will be my first time voting for someone from the Green Party." And you realize that the community is very open to this. It's certainly more mainstream discourse that's not.
 
JT: And then there are small policy pieces that I make higher priority because of my party status, moving to publicly funded elections, moving to ranked choice voting. Removing the spoiler effect, the strategic you know, "If I vote for a Democrat, then the Republican might win." Those are really key for the City of San Jose to move forward in a more community-based vision. And for some weird reason, even though Oakland, I think, has ranked choice, voting in San Francisco, I know has ranked choice voting where women in local elections, where there have been some successful Green candidates through that process. San Jose does not. We're not necessarily quite as openly progressive as Oakland or San Francisco, despite being so close in the Bay Area. And so even when I talk about those things as a Green Party candidate, they are policies within a very mainstream progressive Democratic space or city. They build lots of traction.

CP: Ranked choice voting is something we’ve talked about a little bit on the podcast in prior seasons, but it’s especially important for third party candidates. 

RR: Right. It effectively removes this spoiler effect that Jake mentions, and was a huge topic of national conversation in the presidential election in 2000. When Al Gore narrowly lost to George Bush, many Democrat voters wheeled on Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who won less than three percent of the popular vote, arguing that had those Nader voters gone for Gore, we wouldn’t have had a Bush victory. Even now, it’s not really clear the extent to which that’s true. Third party candidates pull voters from across the political spectrum. Some might not have voted at all in the absence of Nader. Some might even have voted Republican. In the case of the 2000 election, there’s even some evidence that the number of registered Democrats who voted for Bush over Gore is greater than the number of Registered Democrats  who voted for Nader. Ranked choice voting completely eliminates this calculus for voters, by allowing you to vote your values without having to worry about tipping the scales of an election in favor of your least favorite candidate. 

CP: So if we’d had national ranked choice voting in 2000, it’s possible that we would have had a really different outcome. Even more people might have been safe putting down Ralph Nader as their first choice vote, since they could name Al Gore as their second choice. Then, in electoral districts where Nader didn’t win a majority of votes, all of those second choice votes for Gore -- or Bush -- would still have been counted. 

RR: A national ranked choice voting system would be huge for the Green Party. People wouldn’t be afraid of voting for Green Party candidates, and it would also mean that those candidates could spend less time and resources trying to even get their names onto the ballot. 
 
JT:  It'd be pretty easy to get ballot access to any party that gets one percent in a national election in all 50 states. But I think the threshold is five percent, which is why third parties continue to struggle. You have to go, instead of campaigning spend, hours and lots of money getting signatures to then get on the ballot. It changes your focus a little bit from just doing voter outreach, which certainly makes it challenging to get your name out there and get the five percent that you need. Ranked choice voting, in my opinion, is the main piece of it, because you will get an understanding of folks that can research more platforms without just picking democrat or Republican at the end of the day. 

JT: It's a tough strategic discussion, to be honest and the main three pieces are, do we have rank choice voting? What is the threshold for ballot access? And then what is the threshold to get in the presidential debates, which I have to explain to people how much of a disaster the most recent presidential debate was. If there was a third or fourth or fifth candidate up there, I think you would have a much more productive conversation from all the candidates, not just two going at their throats. You would also be able to educate a lot more on where there's overlap in issues. I think a lot of folks just don't even know the Green Party exists in many cases.But if we lowered that threshold from 10 percent to one percent as well, our 15 percent pardon me, to one percent. Or even just invited, you know, a bunch of presidential candidates that made their own tickets because they are established presidential parties or national parties, I think you would see more people gravitate towards a candidate that reflects their values, not towards the candidate that is opposing the candidate that they are most afraid of. 
 
RR: And then I think conversely, the other benefit of multi-party systems and ranked choice voting is that you can't have entire political parties or candidates just discarding the votes of people that they don't think that they're gonna get. So it feels like then candidates have to work for every vote that they want. Because if you're not going to be people's first choice, you could still be their second or third. And that still helps you.
 
JT: I mean, the dialog we see now, mostly through the Democratic Party, is very hateful towards the Green Party in particular, and it's pushed a lot of people away from the Democratic Party. It's had its effect as well. I've knocked on doors from Democrats and I'm the more democratically aligned candidate in terms of policy in my race who just literally won't talk to me because of my party affiliation. The dialog that comes out of the National Democratic Party absolutely affects how people view the Green Party. And if we had ranked choice voting where they knew they were courting third party, particularly progressives, to say, “Hey, mark me second,” you know, that would go a long way. I think it was a major, major strategic blunder for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to not come out openly and say, “Hey, I know I'm not the most progressive candidate. In swing states, I need your vote. In non swing states where you're safe, Like, go ahead. Vote, your values.” I think that would have built a lot of trust between the Green Party and the Democratic Party that is very needed now, as we're looking at a very close presidential election, again, where I think a lot of people are very afraid of having four more years of Donald Trump. 
 
RR: I think in my opinion, something that I've seen in particular Briahna Joy Gray write about, is that third party voters are progressives who are up for grabs. And if Joe Biden wanted them, he could get them by courting them. But he has not tried and Democrats have not tried. And so I feel like it's unfair to place blame and onus on third party voters who are feeling disenfranchised and not talked to by the existing candidates. 
 
JT: Absolutely. I mean, you may see some states where the math works out, but you don't see others where it doesn't and people are still upset. The vice presidential pick in some ways is always in the progressive democratic space or in the progressive third party space has always been a signal [of] who are they trying to court? And, you know, with Tim Kaine back in 2016, it was particularly like we want, you know, Republicans who don't like Trump more so than we want the progressive wing. And that has pissed a lot of people off. At the end of the day as well, it really shows some entitlement that you can run a very centrist platform and then expect progressives to vote for you because of the system that we're in, rather than expect them to then organize outside of your party and try and make something new happen somewhere else. I see both sides. Do you want to go into the Democratic Party and reform? You know, very kind of DSA strategy? Or do you want to move outside? Honestly, we need both for the short term. And I think it's the educational piece. Thank you again for having me on. Educational piece of how do we bring people aware of the fact that particularly in safe states. Absolutely not going to be a problem for many people to vote for the Green Party. But even in swing states, like at some point, you have to build a relationship, build trust before you lose that person's vote entirely. Then the last pieces, there are so many people that don't vote, particularly because they see a broken system. And if you don't have a candidate that's talking about a broken system, you're not going to get those votes either. And we're a very low turnout country in terms of who votes for our president. There's a lot of votes left on the table there that make a much bigger difference than 1.1 percent or 0.9 percent that the third party is getting on the national stage. So we need a lot of discussion and a lot of education on this in the space.

RR: There’s this really helpful graphic I saw while researching this episode that helped explain the benefits of building multiparty political systems, like they have in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s these two massive umbrellas, one representing the republican party and one representing the democratic party, and they’re vying to cover the total voting population. But these umbrellas are bounded in their size -- they have a finite radius of coverage. They can’t exactly expand what they stand for, otherwise they’d lose their meaning. Democrats can’t be for both universal social programs and no social programs. And so every election, party leadership shifts its umbrella to cover the largest population it can, sometimes overlapping with its opposition in an effort to pull some voters away, and largely tending toward the political center. In theory, the same applies to Republicans. When the two party system was first established in the US, these two umbrellas pretty sufficiently covered the bulk of the voting population -- non-immigrant white men with land. Now, that’s not the case. Those younger independent voters we talked about at the beginning of the episode are mostly uncovered, and so they’re mostly not voting. 

CP: So a multiparty system -- say one with seven or eight umbrellas -- does a way better job of covering the diversity of political leanings that we see today. One critique of multiparty systems is that they allow candidates and elected officials to tailor policies to benefit their narrow tranche of support, and as long as that base is larger than any other party’s base, they can do that indefinitely. This is where ranked choice voting comes in. Ranked choice voting forces candidates to fight for every vote. Instead of pursuing only surefire supporters, candidates need to make their case to all voters, because getting people to put you down as their second or third choice could mean victory. 

RR: And I think my favorite thing about this is that states and counties can just decide to start holding ranked choice elections, if people vote in support of it. There’s nothing in our constitution that says “There must be only two parties.” 

CP: Right. So lots of cities across the US run local elections using a ranked choice system. The Mayoral race in Berkeley, for example, was a ranked choice race. In 2021, New York City is going to have ranked choice voting for local seats. And for the first time in a presidential election, the state of Maine did ranked choice voting for the Oval Office this election day. 

RR: As we’re recording this, election results are still coming in, so nothing is set in stone. From what we’ve got so far, Maine’s ranked choice ballots resulted in a composite 3 percent of the voting going to third party candidates, including Howie Hawkins. But the intended benefits of the ranked choice system never came into play; second choices are only counted if no candidate gets an outright majority, and for both of Maine’s districts, that didn’t happen. Trump carried rural, northern Maine, while Biden carried the southern and coastal portion. It’s easy to see how having ranked choice voting for the presidential elections across the US might increase voters’ willingness to vote for non-major parties, and candidates’ willingness to run on non-major party tickets, but there needs to be enough “mainstreaming” of those third parties. 

CP: Jake alludes to this in your interview -- the Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialists of America, strategy of trying to pull democrats to the left from within the party, rather than outside of it. In a ranked choice voting world, it’s easier to imagine Bernie Sanders running as an independent candidate like he’s been his entire life, rather than having to operate within the confines of the Democratic Party. But you also need sufficient buy-in from voters such that the ranked choice system actually kicks in, and no single candidate earns a simple majority. 

RR: This package of reforms that Jake describes -- lower threshold requirements to qualify to get on the ballot + ranked choice voting -- could mean a transformation of our democratic system that permits voters to make ballot box decisions that aren’t driven by fear or guilt, but by vision and values. This cause hasn’t exactly been picked up by major party platforms. 

CP: Candidates in swing states in particular might figure they have a lot to lose; whatever narrow majority they might enjoy in a two party system might disappear with the addition of competition. So, they’ll have to work hard to earn, and keep, every vote.

RR: You know, from a voter perspective, that sounds just fine with me. 

---

CP: Talk Policy to Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. 

RR: Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.

CP: Editing for this episode by Michelle Pitcher.

RR: The music you heard today is by Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Mesiti-Miller. 

CP: I’m Colleen Pulawski. 

RR: And I’m Reem Rayef. Catch you next time.