The election is in 3 weeks, and I think
it's safe to assume that Greg Orman will not be elected the
next governor of Kansas. I'm in a bit of a bubble, but from my
vantage point I haven't seen him catch any kind of fire, either in
terms of endorsements or voter energy. He's polling 10-12%, and I
suspect that when the dust settles he'll get between 7-8% of the
vote. (I have friendly wager going that he won't break 10.)
Ever since there has been talk of him
running, there have been Democrats (and poli sci professors) warning
that his votes will come from the Democratic candidate, and that it
would be impossible for a Dem to win if Orman was in the race. This
is usually accompanied with either pleading or angry demanding that he
drop out, which he has not done. I have never made this argument and
am agnostic on it, and in fact am usually skeptical of the claim that
third party candidates are what defeats major party candidates. Jill
Stein didn't make Hillary Clinton lose, for instance. (Ross Perot
might be the exception that proves the rule.) The argument assumes that
every vote, or the vast majority of votes, that someone like Orman
would get would come from (in this case) Laura Kelly, and I don't
think that's a fair assumption.
Nevertheless, I think Orman is on a
fool's errand, and I want to explain why.
Philosophically I agree with him that there
are vast swaths of the voting public who are not served adequately by
what the major parties have to offer, and that they have rigged the game in their favor. I think this is self-evident. One only has
to look at the strange creature of the moderate Republican,
steadfastly determined to remain a member of a club that doesn't want
him as a member. Or, to take my case, a progressive Democrat,
watching in dismay as (to use only one recent example) the likes of
Chuck Schumer rolls over and gives Trump another 15 federal judgeships
with nary a whisper. Or votes for an increase in the defense budget,
as almost every congressional Democrat did. (That's 2 examples, but grrr.) I absolutely agree that
there are many more gradations of political identity that are not
represented in the two-party paradigm, and I would be happy
(thrilled, even) if there were viable Green Party or Socialist Party
or Labor Party options available. I would also support measures, such
as ranked-choice voting, that would make this more possible.
However, wishing doesn't make it so.
American history is piled high with the carcasses of independent
candidates and third party movements that seemed like a good idea at the
time, or that had a brief constituency and then fell away. The system
is just not set up to accommodate it. To me that makes the project
rather a waste of time. You have to spend so much extra effort to be
viable as an independent or third-party candidate that it's virtually
impossible (not absolutely impossible, but really really rare) to be
successful by that route. Today's crop of Democratic Socialists seem
to have learned this lesson, as they have attempted to gain access to the
Democratic Party ballot line, as opposed to reinventing a wheel that
has failed so many times before.
A local example is a fellow in
Manhattan named Aaron Estabrook, a political activist type
who has been executive director of an organization (a Pac, mostly)
called Save Kansas for the past several years. He has run for office
himself several times, as an independent, and lost (badly) a state
BOE race in 2016 this way. This year he wanted to run for Riley County commissioner, and had to gather
500 signatures to get on the ballot. He gathered more than that but
had many of them thrown out for various reason and lo and behold,
he's not on the ballot. If he had run as a Democrat he wouldn't have
had that extra, onerous procedural step. The question is, what's your
goal? If your goal is to prove the viability of independence, that's fine (not that Estabrook has done that, of course, since he's not on the ballot), but if your goal is to be an elected official, then why would you
give yourself the extra hassle of just getting on the ballot, which
takes a lot of energy but in and of itself doesn't give you any
power? Running as an independent unquestionably detracts from your ability to win elected office. Whether it "should" or not doesn't enter into it. It does.
And that brings us back to Orman, who
does want to prove that independence is a viable political strategy.
Orman's argument in the election is based on 2 factors: first, that
he's an independent and thus is free of the vicissitudes of partisan
politics, and second, that as a business owner he's uniquely
qualified to run the multi-million dollar “business” that is the
Kansas state government. Everybody who runs for office says they're
the most qualified, so I'll leave that one to the side for the
moment, and focus instead on argument 1.
I believe that Orman's strategy is
based on a logical fallacy, to whit: that if there are 300,000
unaffiliated voters in Kansas, they are fed up with the two party
system in a relatively consistent way, and would be motivated by a viable alternative to the party system. But unaffiliated voters are a
heterogeneous group: many, perhaps most, are what we're calling these
days “low-propensity” voters. (When I was younger we called them
“marginal” voters, which sounds pejorative now.) Most of the rest
are fellow-travelers to one of the two major parties, and break that
way in the elections. Some are more “extreme” versions of the
parties, such as people who consider themselves more libertarian or
whatever than the Republican Party. Orman positions himself as the
flagbearer for this group, which isn't a group, in the way that Laura
Kelly is the leader of Kansas Democrats or Kris Kobach (God help us)
is for the Republicans. But – and this is key – nobody elected
Orman to that position. He has no claim to the position other than
his own assertion.
The codicil of this argument is that
this group, which isn't a group, is looking for a rich, white,
moderate business owner to lead them to the promised land. I think
we'll see the flaw in that reasoning when Michael Bloomberg or John
Kasich try this strategy in 2020.
Over a year ago I asked people that I
know in Orman's circle to show me an actual strategy toward
winning this election – where the votes had to come from, both in
geography and in voter profile. They couldn't do it then and I bet
they wouldn't be able to do it now. Orman isn't running a campaign so
much as a crusade, the arguments for which he sees as self-evident,
and that it is only fear or force of habit that prevents people from
acknowledging the obvious truth of his analysis and flocking to his
side. And as his message continues not to resonate, and as this
flocking continues not to occur, his argument for it gets more
annoyed-sounding and shrill.
And this brings me to my main objection
to Orman's project: his inveterate “bothsides-ism”. He claims
that the problem with our politics is partisanship between the two
parties (he compares it to the Hatfields vs. McCoys) and that the
choice between Democrats and Republicans is the choice between
“shingles and the flu.” It's hard for me to express how tone-deaf
I find this framing. I bring this fairly famous quote from Norman
Ornstein and Thomas Mann, from 2012:
The GOP has become
an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically
extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.
The difference between the two parties
is evidenced in the behavior of the two major party candidates in the
Kansas gubernatorial election this year: Kobach is doubling down on
his Trumpian message in the hopes of winning narrowly by motivating
his base, while Kelly is attempting to appeal across the political
spectrum, as evidenced by her recruiting of endorsements from dozens
of former Republican elected officials. Even in Orman's book his
examples of partisan gamesmanship are one-sided – a dozen
examples from the Republicans and one or two examples from the
Democrats, and that's his example of “both-sides.”
(Even Orman's argument that he would be
uniquely positioned to “get things done” in Topeka ring false.
Kelly has relationships with people there and will be able to leverage
whatever remnants of the Dem-Mod R coalition there are to
get things through. Orman, having no base in the legislature, and no
one there having supported him – Doll would be lieutenant governor
- means that neither party will have any reason to help him succeed.)
It needs to be stated clearly: the
reason the political system isn't working is because the Republican
party has been taken over by extreme conservatives who play the
hardest of hardball politics and will break any norm in pursuit of
their goals. Democrats still believe in bipartisanship (as evidenced
by Kelly's strategy) and norms and that's one of the reasons they've
been at such a disadvantage. The fact that some Democrats are moving
left or are objecting loudly to Republican tactics is not evidence of both-sides-ism, and anyone – including Greg Orman – who thinks
that both sides are equally at fault ("shingles vs. flu") in the current state of our
politics is either willfully blind or just not a very good analyst of
politics.
I told Orman a year ago that if he ran
as a Dem he had a very good chance of being the next governor. I
think he would have been fine in that role. He chose not to do that,
and the reasons for that decision, and the arguments he makes in
support of it are, in my opinion, themselves disqualifying. His
political career (as a candidate) in Kansas will end in three weeks,
and his campaign will go into the pile of “it seemed like a good
idea at the time” - even though in this case, it didn't.
