It’s not very often a special election to fill an empty Senate seat holds the entire fate of the country in its hands. But this week the country will watch closely as Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) goes up against Massachusetts State Senator Scott Brown (R) to see if Democrats can retain the filibuster-proof 60 seats they currently hold in the Senate. The seat was left empty when Senator Ted Kennedy passed away. The outcome of health care reform could very well rest on the shoulders of the states of Massachusetts.
That’s why the emergence of a third candidate in the election could spell trouble for both sides of aisle. A candidate named Joe Kennedy (of no relation to the famed Kennedy clan) is running, and he refers to himself as the Tea-Party candidate. He is not your run-of-the-mill “Tea-Party” candidate either. Instead, he is a Tea-Party candidate who has alienated most of his fellow Tea-Party members (who have taken an official stand in support of Brown) by speaking out against both the wars and the Defense of Marriage Act. He has also won few fans on the left by speaking in favor of abolishing the Department of Education.
Normally a candidate such as Kennedy wouldn’t be much more than a blip on the radar of either party but with the race between Coakley and Brown so incredibly close it would only take a few vote siphoned away by Kennedy to make or break the election for either side.
This certainly wouldn’t be the first time a third party candidate has had an impact on U.S. history by affecting the outcome of an election.
As far back as 1844, third party candidates have been playing a part in presidential elections and their outcome. In 1844 a member of the “Liberty Party" siphoned off enough votes (that would have gone to Henry Clay) to edge James Polk into the White House. In more recent third party spoilers had a major impact on recent history. In 1992 a Texas billionaire named H. Ross Perot won19,781,065 popular votes, despite dropping out of the race four months before the election. Historians believe those were just enough votes to help Bill Clinton win the White House.
In 2000 Green Party candidate Ralph Nader took 97,421 votes. And in what turned out to be the most controversial elections of all time, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by a measly 537 votes. Nader's total impact on the outcome has never really been proven, mainly because of faulty voting equipment accusations, disenfranchised voters, and a controversial decision by the Supreme Court to halt a recount for the election in Florida.
If you look at how much has happened in the United States in the last nine years since the 2000 election it’s difficult to imagine how incredibly different a world we would be living in if things had just gone a few votes in the other direction.
Though a virtual unknown like Joe Kennedy may not seem like a big threat to either party, history has shown that the third party candidate can indeed determine the course of history for us all.
