Measuring the Brownlow Effect
I believe that calculating the effects of a third party candidate is just about never a function of simply allocating all of the third party candidate’s votes to one of the major party candidates, and oddly enough it seems this letter writer to the Oregonian who tries to do just that knows that too.
Has anyone noticed that Gordon Smith would have won this last election if Measure 65 had been in place? Sunday’s Oregonian reported unofficial election results: Merkley, 817,932; Smith, 766,508; Brownlow, 87,533.
If Measure 65 — the so-called “open primary” measure — had been the law, then only Merkley and Smith would have been on last week’s ballot.
It is not unreasonable to speculate that, driven by idealogical reasons, Brownlow voters would have voted for Smith (or not at all). Had that occurred, the results would have been quite different: Smith would have beaten Merkley, 854,041 to 817, 932, a margin of 36,109 votes.
BILL SNOUFFER
Southwest Portland
Brownlow believes he threw the election to Smith, but third party candidates tend to believe they’re important — something that goes in two directions, Brownlow believing he didn’t spoil the election or Nader insisting that he didn’t spoil the 2000 election and drew from Republicans (“I am not a mere spoiler”).
Merkley: 48.9%
Smith:Â 45.8%
Brownlow:Â 5.2%
Wipe Brownlow off the election and you can expect a good number of his votes to have gone for Smith (It is not unreasonable to speculate that, driven by idealogical reasons, Brownlow voters would have voted for Smith), a rather large number of his votes to just disappear into the ether (or not at all — and with that Snouffer undermines his own argument), and a smaller but still decent number to go for Merkley. What is telling is that Smith was concerned enough about Brownlow to run advertisements touting what an extreme Liberal Brownlow is, pointing to some views which are, strictly speaking out of the mainstream of the, quote-in-quote “fringe” of congressional Democrats but in a large gathering of Democrats you can probably find a few who hold to them, along the lines of “Bush must be tried for war crimes”. (Oddly enough for Brownlow, I believe outside the purview of the One World Government of the UN.)
You would also have the effect with Brownlow out of the race of some in that 5.4 percent bracket voting for whoever has the better hair, or looks better in a grainy black and white photograph, or whose name spills off the tongue better at a random moment. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum politics, gotta make a choice and the Bright Colors (whatever Bright Colors those may be) are no longer an option.
All of this is to say, wipe Brownlow’s name off the ballot, run the same campaigns (a bit confusingly in this thought experiment, with the candidates still acting as though Brownlow were on the ballot), and…
Merkley wins. Now, change the results down to — maybe a one or one point five percentage difference between Smith and Merkley and the same 5.2 percent for Brownlow, and we have a different ballgame to consider.