I read this Ned Foley’s June 18, 2023 blog post on electionlawblog.org:

https://www.electionlawblog.org/?p=136930

Two comments:

I did not know about Jack Santucci’s recently published book “More Parties or No Parties” until I read this blog post. I knew Jack some years ago when he was either an intern or employee of FairVote (I was Treasurer of FairVote at the time), and I thought very highly of him. I have ordered the book and will read it. I am interested in seeing this “across-the-board dissatisfaction” claim fleshed out. I suspect that this dissatisfaction is only with the mentioned “parties and interest group coalitions,” and not with voters.

Regarding the claim of lack of voter education, I do not know what Arlington County, Virginia has done in this regard, but, during my nearly 25 year tenure as FairVote Treasurer, I recall Philip Macklin.

Dr. Macklin, who passed at the age of 82 in 2008, was a Physics professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He was also a strong advocate of electoral reform, specifically Multiwinner RCV, also known as Single Transferable Vote. Before many people over the years, Dr. Macklin played what I think was a FairVote-produced video explaining the Multiwinner RCV vote counting process. My recollection is it was about 12 minutes long.

Dr. Macklin said of all the people who saw the video at his presentations, only one person claimed that she did not understand the counting process after seeing it.

My own experience in speaking on this subject and playing that video was the same.

Danielle Chesebrough is the Mayor of Stonington, Connecticut, although the term technically is “First Selectman”. She is up for re-election on November 7, 2023, and she intends to run for re-election as the nominee of the Forward Party. The election is partisan. In 2021 she was re-elected as the nominee of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

In the 2021 election, she will face a Republican nominee and a Democratic nominee. She has always been a registered independent since she has been in politics. Thanks to Scott Muller for the information that she intends to be a Forward candidate.

On the weekend of June 17-18, two well-known pundits opined about “spoilers” and said they believed that Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate in 1948, injured President Harry Truman in his race for re-election against Republican Thomas Dewey.

Joan Walsh, who often writes for The Nation, said in an interview that left parties “always” injure Democratic nominees. She did not specifically mention the 1948 election.

Jonathan B. Chait specifically wrote that in the 1948 election, Truman failed two “spoiler” candidates, Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Chait said that in an article for the Intelligencer. He also writes for New York magazine.

Neither Walsh nor Chait seem aware of the research conducted by Samuel Lubell about the 1948 presidential election, research that is set out in his 1950 book “The Future of American Politics.” Lubell had been a pollster and then a political scientist. His research showed that Harry Truman would have lost the 1948 election if Henry Wallace had not run. During the 1944 presidential election, Lubell found, approximately two million Democrats had voted for Republican nominee Thomas Dewey, because they were strongly anti-Communist and they observed that the Communist Party (which had temporarily become the Communist Political Association during 1944) was strongly in favor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. A large share of these Democrats were Polish and they were very much opposed to Communism because of Stalin’s treatment of Poland. But in 1948, these voters observed that the Communist Party was strongly backing Henry Wallace and attacking Truman. So they felt comfortable returning to the Democratic Party and voting for Truman. Henry Wallace polled 1,157,326 votes. Even assuming all of them would have voted for Truman if Wallace had not run, their loss for the Democrats was far outweighed by the 2,000,000 voters who switched from Dewey to Truman.