On August 7, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, a Republican, and two-term Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) coasted to easy primary victories in the race for McCaskill’s current Missouri Senate seat. News outlets from the Washington Post to NBC framed the election as a head-to-head race between the candidates, with no predictable outcome. Local news outlets emerged from the woodworks to cover the election set up by the primaries. In a state that Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2016, the Hawley-McCaskill Senate race will be one of the most hotly contested races in the country, and deserves the media coverage it has received. But such coverage has been predominantly inaccurate.
The 2018 Missouri Senate race is not just a race between incumbent Democrat McCaskill and Republican Hawley. Centrist, independent candidate Craig O’Dear will also be running for Senate after submitting over 20,000 signatures from Missouri citizens to get his name on the ballot — more than double the number of signatures required by state law. O’Dear is a business litigation attorney and community leader in Kansas City who has demonstrated his viability as a candidate through the sheer number of people who fought to put his name on the ballot. He is running on a moderate platform, devoted to working across the aisle to promote political progress.
According to the media, however, O’Dear is not running. Several publications have run profiles on O’Dear and his platform, but when one types “Missouri Senate race 2018” into a search engine, the only articles that appear cover the Republican and Democratic nominees. O’Dear has been counted out since the moment he entered the race.
O’Dear is not alone in this lack of coverage. A movement of centrist, independent candidates is sweeping the nation, from Neal Simon for Senate in Maryland to Terry Hayes for governor in Maine to a full slate of independent candidates for the Colorado state legislature. Backed by Unite America, a centrist organization seeking to provide support for independent candidates in an effort to overcome the partisan divide in the United States, these candidates are gaining traction when they speak to voters, but finding the social and formal barriers to electing an independent nearly insurmountable.
Complaints about hyper-partisanship are omnipresent in the United States today, with neither major political party offering a viable solution. The centrist, independent movement could overcome this partisan tension, but it is being preemptively counted out by social and formal political constraints that American voters must overcome.
Mitigating the Media
Such counting out begins with a lack of media attention for independent candidates. Joel Searby, owner of the Sycamore Lane company — a political consulting group that focuses on statewide independent races — and former manager of independent candidate Evan McMullin’s presidential campaign in 2016, explained to the HPR how press coverage for his independent candidates this cycle has declined as their races grew more contentious. “Out of the gate,” Searby explained, “the coverage was good. But pretty quickly, that cynicism set in.” Searby went on to note that the media sets very high barriers to what it means for a candidate to be gaining traction, meaning that independent candidates frequently get left behind, even when they are steadily gaining support.
Nonetheless, Searby was quick to comment that this dismissiveness may come from “a deeply entrenched, knee-jerk reaction by reporters to see every race as a two-way race.” Though Searby sympathizes with where journalists are coming from, he commented that such reporting is “not an informed, thoughtful approach.” To combat the issue, he suggested that strategists for independents must be “relentless” in getting coverage for their candidates and “push back” in the social media space when a race is portrayed as a two-way race so early in the electoral process. Searby’s comments make an important point: How can voters choose a third option, when it appears as if only two exist?
Bridging the Psychological Divide
Low media coverage is not, however, entirely to blame for the barriers to the independent movement. The psychological barriers to voting for an independent in an entrenched two-party state pose some of the largest obstacles to even the most viable candidate. According to a 2015 Pew Research study, 39 percent of American voters identify as Independent, outnumbering those who identify as Democrats (32 percent) and those who identify as Republicans (23 percent). This is the highest number of Independent voters in over 75 years, and it continues to increase.
Though this trend indicates that American voters are tired of hyper-partisanship, electing independents has not become easier, especially in closely contested races. Independent candidates run the risk of being labelled “spoilers,” who hand the election to one candidate by pulling votes from the other. This mentality leads unaffiliated voters to choose party candidates, if only to ensure that the lesser of two evils is elected, or to avoid “wasting” their votes.
Structural Solutions
While social barriers frequently prevent the election of independent candidates, structural reform can be crucial to future independent success. Electoral reform presents one of the most promising paths to ensuring the viability of independent candidates.
The current United States electoral system of first-past-the-post voting means that candidates must only win a plurality of the vote, or the most votes of any candidate, to be elected into office, rather than a majority, or more than half of all votes. This frequently leads to elected officials who are not representing a majority of voters in a particular area, while also contributing to the spoiler argument.
Ranked-choice voting presents a solution to these issues. Under a ranked-choice system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no first-choice candidate receives a majority of the votes in the first round, a second round is held. The candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is removed from the running, and his or her votes are transferred to the candidate’s voters’ second-choices. The process is repeated until a candidate with a majority emerges. Maine used ranked-choice voting in its statewide primary elections for the first time in June 2018, and it is used in numerous cities across the United States.
Evan Falchuk, a former independent gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts and member of the Advisory Board of Voter Choice Massachusetts — which is working to institute ranked-choice voting in the state of Massachusetts — commented to the HPR that ranked-choice voting presents “a brilliant solution to the problem we have in this country of people believing that their vote doesn’t really matter.” In fact, according to Falchuk, “ranked-choice voting is the single best structural reform that can fix our democracy, without a doubt.”
Drawing from his experience as a former independent candidate, Falchuk asserted that there are structural barriers meant to box out unaffiliated and third-party candidates that have been “created by Democrats and Republicans in a bipartisan way.” According to Falchuk, ranked-choice voting could eliminate such barriers. Falchuk also noted that voters “like having more choices. They like knowing that candidates have to appeal to more voters because they have to get 50 percent.” When asked to respond to the argument that ranked-choice voting is confusing to voters, Falchuk commented that ranked-choice voting is “different, not difficult” and that the data “doesn’t back up” such a claim.
A ranked-choice system eliminates both the spoiler argument and the notion of the wasted vote, which could prove crucial in overcoming the psychological barriers to voting for an independent candidate. No candidate becomes a “spoiler,” because if the candidate does not receive a majority, their votes will be transferred. Moreover, no vote is ever wasted, because it constantly transfers.
Against the Establishment
Ranked-choice voting alone, however, cannot eliminate all barriers to electing independents. Though voters may be more likely to choose independent candidates, independents will still be up against a two-party system that has been entrenched for centuries, fighting candidates who have the resources a party backing can provide.
All hope is not lost for underdog independents though, especially with groups like Unite America. Founded just two years ago, Unite America has endorsed two dozen independent candidates across the country for the 2018 election. Unite America is “a movement of Democrats, Republicans, and independents who are committed to bridging the growing partisan divide in order to tackle our largest challenges and leave a better country to future generations.” The organization is working to build “the grassroots community, donor network, and electoral infrastructure to help independent candidates run winning campaigns.” By providing independent candidates with traditional party resources without forcing them to swear allegiance to a party platform, Unite America is opening the door for a new generation of independent candidates devoted to representing the people rather than the parties.
The key to electing independents, though, will be exposure and innovation, such as that proposed by Win My Vote, a nonpartisan voter engagement platform that brings voters, candidates, and organizations together to discuss, debate, and make decisions on how to vote. Voters can make “ballots” with their choices for each race in which they are eligible to vote, see ballots from other voters and trusted sources, and communicate directly with candidates. In an interview with the HPR, Jim Gillis, the founder of Win My Vote, compared the platform to “a modern day Constitutional Convention.”
Motivated to “build a better voter guide,” Gillis created Win My Vote as a platform for candidates to communicate directly with the masses without having to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigning. Gillis envisions this platform as one that will level the playing field where voters can see “a schoolteacher, a retired mailman, a billionaire, and a doctor, and it doesn’t really matter who spent five million dollars on their campaign because they are all right there, side by side.”
Creating this kind of a level playing field is crucial to unaffiliated candidates because it mitigates the necessity of party backing. Putting principle over party is an impossible task for the American voter without this level playing field, but accessible and inclusive options for all creates a system based on equality, validation, and affirmation of civil rights.
Assuming the Risk
The centrist, independent movement in modern America is up against countless obstacles, but they are not insurmountable. Instituting structural reforms like ranked-choice voting while building a support network for independent candidates is crucial to overcoming the psychological barriers that have previously kept the movement at bay.
Still, the final burden rests on American voters who must teach themselves to be open-minded and accept positive change, even when it is uncomfortable. Griping about hyper-partisanship in the United States will not make it go away, but the independent movement might. It is incumbent upon the American people to take that chance.