While we may want innovative, establishment-baiting, economic populists, we usually settle. The few progressive organizations that take politics seriously do the same. Candidate-centered campaigns are piecemeal, ad hoc affairs. Progressive group coalitions each concerned with single or related issues such as housing, abortion rights or the environment are constantly reconstituting themselves, drawing on shifting reservoirs of campaign volunteers, donors and resources, depending on which self-selected candidates present themselves in a given election. Voters avoid wasting their votes by casting their ballots for a third party that has no chance of winning, since that party s vote will not translate into any formal voice in government.
Third parties can be harmful, leading to conflict between potential allies.
Most pragmatic groups won t give up opportunities for immediate reforms in order to build a third party. The third option for progressives is to continue working in grassroots movements and ignore electoral politics altogether the route most housing groups take. Many activist Shunsters let the candidates fight it out and then attack the winner with protest demonstrations, letter-writing and lawsuits. However, the weakness in this approach is that it implicitly threatens public officials with defeat but does nothing to carry out the threat. The past 20 years have shown that politicians catch on, realize that the threats are empty, and take the groups demands less seriously.