NJ Convervative Party makes room at the table
A writer over at Blue Jersey thinks the newly formed New Jersey Conservative Party is going to be a force to be reckoned with. I’m sure he will find an ethusiastic following…but whether or not they will be in sufficient number to truly change things in NJ politics is doubtful.
I’m not knocking Illions, whose passion I admire (even as I disagree with him on many issues). It’s just that our system is set against his success. The simplest explanation is to cite Duverger’s Law, named after the French political scientist who studied democratic and social institutions . Basically, Duverger discovered a connection between “Single member district plurality” (SMDP) systems and the existence of two party systems. A “plurality” exists when someone gets more votes than their competitors, but not enough to reach an actual majority (defined as 50% of the vote, plus one more vote). This means there is no literal minimum percentage a person needs to take office.
The basic idea is this – throughout the population, ideology is spread around on a continuum. If you have two choices about who to put in office, the candidates will congregate around the centerline. This means that each one is trying to gain just large enough of a following to beat the other guy. This type of centrism generally upsets purists, and so they tend to get fed up and splinter off. When they run a candidate, they tend to run one who splits the support on their side of the centerline. As a result, they usually make sure that their least acceptable alternative wins.
Not always, though. So we can’t just write the NJCP off. However, it seems likely to me that there are not enough NJCP partisans to rack up the 30% or so of the vote they would need to win a single seat. I could be wrong, of course. We’ll have to watch and see.
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