Bloomberg's Declaration

Few observers of the American political scene were all that surprised by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement that he had abandoned his affiliation with the Republican Party and registered as an independent. After all, Bloomberg was a Democrat until 2001, and it was widely assumed he became a Republican that year solely to seek the Mayoralty unburdened by the competition he would face in the crowded Democratic primary. While he was the genial host for the 2004 Republican convention, his views on many social questions are markedly more liberal than those of most GOP activists; he is pro-choice, supportive of same-sex marriage, and a strong proponent of stringent restrictions on gun ownership. For some time speculation that he might run as an independent for the White House in 2008 has flourished, and the New York Times has confirmed that his advisers have been planning a possible third-party bid for two years.

The political environment of 2008 may be more propitious for a serious third-party candidacy than any recent election, particularly if the Republican standard-bearer is identified by the electorate with George W. Bush’s unpopular stance on Iraq and the Democrats nominate the polarizing and charmless Hillary Clinton. Bloomberg’s personal wealth would also permit him to fund a competitive race from his own resources. Yet unless the candidates of both parties choose to inflict grievous injuries on themselves, the odds against Bloomberg’s winning would be long. Not only does each established party begin with a base of roughly a third of the American electorate (the Republicans actually close to 40%, the Democrats to 25%), but most states are solidly in one column or the other. The natural constituency for an independent candidacy may be close to that for either major-party nominee, but it is distributed so that winning the electoral votes of enough individual states to secure a plurality in the Electoral College remains difficult.

Bloomberg has said he would not consider a third-party bid unless he had a realistic chance of victory. It is more likely that he would affect the race much as the other significant independent candidates have, by demonstrating the political appeal of his positions and thereby compelling one of the existing parties to adopt them, if only out of crass self-interest. In America’s recent political history, we have seen this happen in the case of Ross Perot, whose 1992 candidacy demonstrated the presence of a sizeable constituency for deficit reduction, and who at one point was polling strongly enough that his victory was not completely out of the question; as Perot’s personal eccentricities were reported, many of those attracted by his candidacy ultimately reconsidered.

Yet the eventual winner, Bill Clinton, put deficit reduction at the heart of his economic policy. While the tax increases this entailed, along with missteps on other issues, damaged his popularity in the short term, by 1996 Clinton’s taming of the deficit, and other moves to the centre allowed him to recapture the support of that half of the 1992 Perot vote that normally went Democratic. Bob Dole’s failure to win back the half that was habitually Republican was central to the failure of his campaign. (Ralph Nader’s 2000 candidacy fits the pattern less comfortably; had the majority of his supporters plumped for Al Gore, he would have won. But Nader affected the outcome only because Bush and Gore were more closely matched in popular support than is usually the case, allowing his small share of the vote to matter. )

Bloomberg’s record in New York is mixed but by no means discreditable. He has not undone Rudy Giuliani’s accomplishments in reducing crime, has governed with a degree of fiscal prudence, and at least begun to reform the city’s dysfunctional school system. He has shown himself open to innovative and progressive ideas on occasion, as seen in his support for taxing commuter traffic to reduce congestion and fund improvements to the municipal transport infrastructure. There is, to be sure, a worrying tendency to nannyism in the bans on transfats and smoking in restaurants which his administration has introduced. Yet the prospect of a Bloomberg candidacy has aroused some public and considerable journalistic interest because he speaks to that segment of the electorate (socially liberal, fiscally conservative, not unduly averse to the use of force in international affairs but disappointed by Bush’s handling of Iraq, inclined to appreciate problem-solving pragmatism in its political leaders) that is worst served by the hyperpartisanship and polarization of the current moment in American politics. These are the voters who dislike the predictable choice between a Republican and a Democrat neither of whom is prepared to break with the least defensible of his party’s orthodoxies.

At first glance, a Bloomberg campaign would seem to offer these voters an option closer to their own ideological leanings, as well as an opportunity to show both parties the size of the constituency for fiscal prudence, enlightened social attitudes, and a reduction in the heat of partisan combat. It is, after all, hard for either party to win without taking at least a significant share of this vote, something that should encourage both to woo it.

The problem with this scenario is that the two parties are not equally dependent upon the centrist vote. As David Plotke of the New School University has calculated, a conservative Republican starting with a core vote in the high 30s needs slightly more than one moderate vote in five to win. It takes an egregiously clumsy campaign to do worse than that. A liberal Democrat with a base of some 25% needs at least two out of three if not three out of four. Early analyses suggest that Bloomberg would do more damage to the Democratic nominee. His own base is in New York, a state without which no Democrat can win the Presidency. The other states where he would do well include much of the Northeast and California; these too are part of the Democratic electoral base. Many of the solidly Republican states are Republican by wide margins, particularly in the South. Here, Republicans can safely dispense with most of the moderate vote. Elsewhere, including some Western and a few Midwestern states, the Republican advantage is declining, as the 2006 midterm election results demonstrated.

But a third-party candidacy that makes indispensable Democratic states competitive and wins a few of them could allow an orthodox and partisan Republican, in the mold of George W. Bush where that mold is most problematic, to win with only the electoral votes of the solidly Republican states. In that case, Bloomberg would have helped produce another political triumph by that brand of Republicanism which he and most of his supporters hold largely culpable for what repels them in American political life today.