After watching Republican leaders endorse Donald Trump for president, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called on “thoughtful conservatives” to start a “New Republican Party — a center-right party liberated” from narrow-minded politicians, talk show hosts and special interest groups. “If you build it,” he promises, “they will come.”
Ray Metcalfe will probably disagree. In 1986, he tried to do that in Alaska. But over the course of two decades almost no one came. And voices like Friedman, and the news media in general, are partly to blame because they treat third parties as an irrelevant sideshow.
When Metcalfe started the Republican Moderate Party here, he sought to remove the special interest influence of the religious right. Even if he hoped to rebuild Alaska’s GOP, he recognized there would be a transition period where his third party would have to win “enough seats to deny each of the other parties a majority.” That would let them help “form a coalition absent radicals from the Left or the Right.”
The quotes come from Metcalfe’s 1998 run for governor on a platform he described as “moderately conservative on fiscal issues and moderately liberal on social issues, with a twist of Libertarianism.” He finished fourth with six percent of the vote.
But four years later the Republican Moderate Party’s nominee for governor couldn’t even muster one percent. And throughout its history they managed to elect only one representative to the Legislature. When Metcalfe realized his dream was over he became a Democrat. And now he’s running for the U.S. Senate as one.
It’s Metcalfe’s third bid for Congress, though he’s never won a primary. If he succeeds this time he’s hoping conservatives will help him win the general election by splitting their vote between Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Margaret Stock, a lifelong Republican running as an independent.
Like Metcalfe in 1986, Stock feels the GOP has moved too far to the right. For instance, the party’s position on immigration isn’t aligned with “challenging our complex immigration laws in order to provide more humane and rational policies,” work which earned her a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.
But unlike Metcalfe, Stock won’t run as a Democrat because she blames both parties for the hyper-partisan gridlock in Congress. And for similar reasons, 16 other individuals are making independent bids for the state Legislature.
But Alaska’s GOP chairman Tuckerman Babcock isn’t buying it. He calls them all Democrats “trying to pull one over on the voters and make it appear that they’re somehow neutral.” Of course, that’s a convenient campaign soundbite intended to sow mistrust for any candidate opposing his party’s members.
According to Babcock, “there are only two teams” in American politics. He’d like it to stay that way. And Freidman would, too. “America needs a healthy two-party system,” he wrote, “a healthy center-right party to ensure that the Democrats remain a healthy center-left party.” But unlike Babcock, he says we’ve only got one because the GOP is morally bankrupt.
There’s a problem though with Freidman’s implication that the Democrats are and should remain a center-left party. It excludes candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders. And that would silence the voices of the 12 million people who voted him.
One can easily argue that Sanders isn’t a real Democrat. Until he declared his candidacy for the presidency, he was an Independent who called himself a democratic socialist.
Why didn’t he run as an Independent? Probably because he recognized the futility of such a campaign. Not in terms of money but exposure. As Sanders, and Trump for that matter, argued throughout the primary season, the two-team game is rigged because the media ignores Independents and candidates put forth by the Green and Libertarian parties.
Instead, the two outsiders played by the party rules and earned almost 45 percent of total votes cast. Had they run as Independents in the general election, and the media treated them as viable candidates during the entire campaign, it’s conceivable they could have won those and much more.
Let me argue this from another perspective. For more than a decade the majority of people in this country haven’t approved of how Congress or either party has run the country. By extension, that’s an indictment against our two-party system. That’s why more than just the candidates of the two major parties should be heard.
And if those rules are changed, just maybe we’ll elect more people like Gov. Bill Walker, who is trying to govern with his “Alaska First Unity” pledge to put interests of the people and state ahead of the parties.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
