There’s no denying that 2016 has been a strange year of political theater. The Democratic nomination for president has been handed to a woman for the first time in history. And as luck would have it, not just any woman, but a former First Lady. Meanwhile the Republican nomination has been claimed by a man who has never held an elected office or a government position -- the first time such a thing has happened since 1940.
To put a cherry on top, the two major party candidates currently both garner unfavorable ratings with between 50 and 60 percent of the American people: an unprecedented occurrence in any era of American politics.
Lost in all the nay-sayings and bad blood of the current presidential election, that majority unfavorable rating is what should be key. The majority of Americans want neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton to represent them on the world stage, yet the two major party candidates currently garner some 80% of the vote. This would make sense if the United States were some sort of autocratic government that only allowed the Democrat and Republican Parties to exist, but despite what both sides of the aisle insist, America isn’t a dictatorship. The United States is still a republic, and in a republic there are always other options.
This is why the display of major American third-parties, and primarily that of Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, in the upcoming presidential debates is so important.
Currently, the Presidential Debate Commission has in place a rule limiting the number of participants in its major presidential debates to those candidates garnering 15% or more of the vote in five polls prior to the election. This 15% threshold is an easy one for both the Democrats and Republicans to hit. They are organizations that date back to the 19th century and have a powerful brand and name recognition. The same can’t necessarily be said for the Libertarian Party (est. 1971) or the Green Party (est. 1984) which lack major national apparatuses, organization,and funding.
Yet just because a party is new to the political scene, doesn’t mean its ideas should be swept under the rug.
Establishing a minimum threshold as a cutoff for which candidates get into the debates and which ones do not is a spectacular idea. Hundreds of people run for president every year, most as small independent or regional candidates. Letting every candidate under the Sun that has some vague dream of sitting in the Oval Office onto the debate stage would be foolhardy.
However, 15 percent is too high a threshold. By setting the bar there (a metric established after Ross Perot’s success in the 1990s and set before the 2000 election) the Commission is essentially saying that at least 15 out of every 100 Americans must support a given candidate. Given the difficulty in getting 15 people to agree on anything, as well as the starting disadvantage third-parties have as far as funding and advertising power, 15 percent seems an incredibly high number.
The irony of the debate is that being included in it would give third-parties exactly what they seem to lack most: exposure and legitimacy. One of the major arguments used against third parties in the current American political system is that they’re castoffs with no hope of winning. Given the chance to challenge the major parties on equal footing would show that these parties aren’t just fringe groups, but actually associations that have the potential to govern extremely effectively; in an election where one candidate has consistently been characterized as a racist and a bigot and the other as a liar and a crook, presenting a national audience with legitimate alternatives is a necessity.
A debate is a discourse. It’s a forum where ideas can be hashed out, where ideological rivals must come face to face to confront one another, and where people really have a chance to compare messages side-by-side. Normally, America only gets to see two messages. The biggest and the loudest, but only two messages all the same. This is folly. America is a republic, and in a republic there are always other options.