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[tigron-x.livejournal.com]

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[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> I have already listed a couple of reasons for why more people voting third party can have a
> strategic effect either on policies or the major parties.

Perhaps they were in different threads. Can you point me at them?

I agree that when any third party gets some small traction, it may attract the attention of the big two, who may seek to incorporate some measure of the attractive position so as to gain voters, perhaps leading to some implementation of the policy which attracted those voters in the first place. That's a 'good thing', since ultimately we should be concerned about implementing policies rather than getting certain people elected or granting certain parties dominance.

But it makes just as much logical sense to say that when a constituency exits a main party to vote for a third party, they may instead drive the main party they left further from their position, as it attempts to poach the more moderate members of the other party to make up the difference, or some other entirely different constituency, such that their policy preferences become even more irrelevant. As an example, I think the existence of the Libertarian third party has a lot to do with the Evangelical social conservative hijacking of the Republican party in the 70's and 80's.

Instead of seeing the GOP co-opt Libertarian policy to re-aquire their vote, extreme fiscal conservative constitutional literalists saw instead that the GOP would pay lip service to their position, while courting social conservatives by actually implementing policy, man of which were abhorrent to Libertarians, which had previously been largely a wing of the Republican party.

So, the usefulness of a third parting voting tactic appears largely unproven to me.