This is the way. It is possible and unlikely to have a third party win under the right conditions, like with how the Republican Party became a national party after Lincoln was elected as a third party candidate. But ultimately there will always only be two parties with the outdated FPTP voting method. If only George Washington knew about and pushed for a better voting system than FPTP.
I don't think they really existed yet in his era. You've got to remember that Australia, a much younger country, invented the secret ballot. It was known as the "Australian Ballot" for a long time.
Better systems existed but to your point, they were not well known.
Leaders today, with access to Wikipedia if not researchers with Nobel prizes, do NOT have this excuse.
Well yes, obviously. The issue with today is that the incumbency of the system makes it hard to change
I don't think they really existed yet in his era
In 1294-1621 the election of the Pope used Approval voting. Venice also used it.
Australia, a much younger country, invented the secret ballot
The election of the Pope required secret ballot since 1621. And the concept existed since Ancient Greece and was used in elections and courts of Roman Republic.
IMO, it's not the full story to say the Republican party was a third party that year. The previous opposition to the Democrats had a rift and came apart. I think you are underselling what "the right conditions" are. This is more like a new party filling a void.
That year the Democrats themselves (regressives as this was well before Southern Strategy) split into two. Running both a candidate for "states' rights" style slavery and another for "fuck you, slavery everywhere" style slavery.
In Australia government funding is distributed to political parties based on the number of first preference votes they get as well so even if your first choice doesn't get in, you still helped them by putting them first.
Yeah, even getting a party 1 seat can be great. They are required to be heard. They can raise issues which the other parties must address.
FPTP is not real democracy for this reason.
I like CGP Grey and all, but power dynamics is an important aspect of poltics. An aspect he completely ignores in favour of spreadsheet thinking.
Yeah so proportional representation systems kinda suck. Israel has one and it ended up with a conservative party making concessions to far right crazies to form a coalition. Sure minorities are in the parliament, but they have zero power because the only thing that matters is the backroom negotiations between parties to form a coalition.
The biggest problem with FPTP is the name. Really we should call it a community representation system (which is what it is) and call proportional representation system a "party coalition" system, which is what it actually is. In a party coalition system the negotiations between party leaders to form coalitions is all that matters, everyone else is just there to fill seats which are owned by the parties.
In a community representation system each seat is own by a representative of the community who can vote against their party or leave their party. Parties are incentivized to keep the community leaders happy or they could lose seats.
If you want third parties, it's better to go with a ranked choice system. That gives people more choice over who represents their community, and allow them to have compromise options in case their top choice doesn't get enough votes. You don't actually have to give parties full ownership of the seats (making them redundant) to have more options.
An aspect he completely ignores in favour of spreadsheet thinking.
That's bc he explains each concept mostly in isolation of others, leaving other concepts for separate videos themselves. But in e.g. Rules for Rulers, he very much discusses power dynamics. And I thought he had another one - in addition to the more mathematical one - illustrating FPTP using the animal kingdom, where technically people might assume one thing to be true, but based on power dynamics in practice it never is.
So watch Rules for Rulers yet if you haven't - it may change literally everything about your understanding, as it did mine.
rules for Rulers, outlining necessary considerations involved with any path forward - i.e. it works against anyone and especially those who ignore this principle
I also generally prefer a Condorcet Method (ranked choice, single winner) over mixed-member-proportional, but either one would be a massive improvement over our current system.
I'll take Approval voting, even.
Switzerland has a good system, just copy it.
(Yes, not the same country, size difference and so on and on but its still a thousand times better than the US system)
Yeah so proportional representation systems kinda suck. Israel has one
If you're going to use a genocidal cult as your counter-example to democracy, why not just talk about the nazis?
But but, building a real third party from the ground up in local elections and/or changing our voting system from first past the post takes a lot of time and real effort. That's a lot of hard work. It's a lot harder than just showing up to one election every 4 years and casting a vote that makes you feel like you're special and smarter than everyone else.
except that you could end up with a 3rd entrance by doing that ... eventually
No you won't.
But if you put the door in while building the house (local and primary elections) you'll have installed it at the right time.
I think you'd have brain damage way before you get to that point
so not only would you have an extra door you'd still be smarter than people voting 3rd party in a first past the post system. Win/Win
Depends on how cheap the drywall is.
You may avoid brain damage, but your get cancer form the dust on the way through.
Especially if you ram that not-door long, hard, deep, and strong enough, really get up in there and penetrate that wall. If you run out of steam you could even switch to an electric appliance, but in that case be gentle (though not too gentle...).
Um.... I'm not sure where this is going, and at this point I'm afraid to continue? š
I'm here for it
Vote me again, daddy!
You'll get a boatload of spoiler effect elections until people start voting tactically again. Third parties need to start locally and not participate in the presidential elections for a long time.
There is a path to voter reform by creating hung parliament and require voter reform in a coalition agreement. Once dominant running for governor or a senator becomes possible.
Primary elections are how parties change. Primary elections are how the Republican party became what it is today. They are often the highest-leverage vote you can cast if you're in a solid district.
Yup. People don't realize there is already a not horrible approximation of runoff voting that still avoids the spoiler effect.
And just look at what happened when Sanders realized that. He went from being a meme about how nobody watches C-SPAN to one of the more influential politicians on the Left.
Well I'd say it's still pretty bad with the super delegates and such. But yeah it's runoff system of sorts and people should pay more attention to it.
But a lot of the "system is broken" angst comes from people being not happy over who the majority of people vote for. But that's just democracy, baby.
But the Electoral College, yeah that shit is broken.
Primaries are still subject to spoiler effects and such.
In my very blue state this year where the top two in the primary go on to the general, there was a local position which had a whole bunch of well qualified Democrats vs just a couple of Republicans. (Incumbent not running)
The dem vote was split enough that we very nearly had just the two Republicans in the general. Like less than 60 votes away.
And there are scenarios under runoff voting where similar can occur (e.g. two seats, 2 right wing, 4 left wing) and is where the "election theory" aspect of things that certain folk are still bitching about (because that is the most important thing to have happened in the past 8 years, clearly). The party needs to take the results of the primary and downselect who actually runs to avoid splitting their own vote.
No voting system is perfect. But people should really understand what we have and what their NEED improves and fails to improve rather than just insisting "new is better".
Primary elections arenāt democratic either (see party delegates). I feel like people who say this are rarely politically engaged in their communities. Same with the people who say to get involved in local city politics to make change.
Ultimately youāre supporting a facist system that is historically atrocious and currently financially supporting a genocide almost singlehandedly but go ahead and keep telling people that the best way to maintain some semblance of moral character is to vote in this sham.
You'd need to grow the third party / greens by having them become a viable party in local elections and state elections first. The greens have failed to do that. Which means they have no chance except to spoil the election.
Big money donors will never allow green candidates to get into significant office. Money runs politics and billionaires own entire state houses these days
True. I think about it now as a kind of physics problem. You have political energy measured in dollars on each side. Volunteers to help bring the political message across for free can be converted into dollars too. There are a lot of people concerned or outright scared out of their minds about environmental concerns like climate change. One sight has multiple orders of magnitude more political energy to spend. For example on counter measures, or boosting extreme vegan voices to cause disruption, advertising or media stories or think tanks or lobbyists. And the "technology" to manage this political energy is rapidly advancing too. So no amount of "this is the right / wrong choice" argument is going to change anything. There is only power.
There are big money donors, which are not billionaires. The most common one are unions.
"Why would I vote for a primary party candidate who supports ranked choice voting when I can just throw my vote away on a third-party candidate that will never be elected? I've got principles!"
Because apparently throwing your vote away will somehow convince politicians to move left or something, despite all the evidence that it won't.
The Republicans move right during the general, and are sometimes pulled that way by the libertarian candidate (or rfk jr).
The Dems usually don't get pulled left because they're so focused on moving to the right during the general to try to get the moderate republican vote
The only evidence we have is that not enough people vote third party.
I have high hopes but my logical side says they can just be pandering like any of the other politicians: they know people support it, they know it will fail. They look good for backing it even tho they aren't worried about changing the status quo either
IIRC two states and several major cities have also successfully implemented rank choice, and in every case it's been because of Democrats.
As more and more local governments make the change, it'll become more popular and gain more support on the national level.
Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won't go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.
Second, sure, it's a low risk bill because they know it won't go anywhere, but damn isn't it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?
My point (i.e. the "high hopes" part) is that this sounds legit and awesome. I do my best to be an optimist, but I have been burned way to many times to not concede that there may be ulterior motivation afoot.
I hear you. Didn't mean for that to come across as an attack on you.
Apologies, in my previous comment I hadn't read clearly enough and misunderstood. I have deleted it.
Right wing people tend to be subservient and just fall in line and vote Republican. People on the left tend to be less pragmatic and can be enticed to vote for Green or whatever even when it's obvious they won't win "because of my principles!" Someone voting Green or whatever will be very likely to choose the Democrat candidate down the list of choice before the GOP candidate. When the votes are tallied they will end up with more votes with a ranked choice system than they'd have with the current system.
The real reason why this won't happen is if the GOP have a majority since it is very much against their interests.
The DNC exists to protect incumbents. Don't be fooled, the Dems (elected officials, not voters) don't want ranked choice.
Well someone is being fooled, that's true.
Right wing people tend to be subservient and just fall in line and vote Republican. People on the left tend to be less pragmatic
People are always saying this, but is there actually evidence that it's true? The Libertarian Party regularly gets more votes than the Greens, so if anything it seems like the opposite is true. Ross Perot got the most votes of any third party candidate in history, and in both the elections he ran in, Bill Clinton won. In 2016, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of a third party run if he didn't get the nomination, and it appeared to be a serious possibility.
So is this claim just based on vibes or what?
It's been a long time since Ross Perot.
I'm basing it on trends. We saw with RFK being offered whatever he wanted as soon as it looked like he was going to take more votes from Trump than Harris. He dropped out and backed Trump. While not all of his supporters might not automatically go vote for Trump (just as not all Libertarians won't pick R for their second choice) it probably helped.
The Libertarians got what? 1/3 of the votes in 2020 than they did in 2016? Seems like they're on the decline to me.
We're seeing more of a push by various internet influencers (who knows who's paying them, LOL) to push people on the left towards voting third party. And maybe I've spent too much time on lemmy, but it seems to be working. People want to vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.
It's probably exhausting for campaign workers to have to constantly explain they shouldn't vote third party as it might result in Trump getting in. It would be far easier to say "sure I kinda like [Third Party Candidate] too, but I like [Democratic Candidate] more because blah blah blah, but the most important thing is you go out and vote!" and be fairly confident that vote will cascade down to their candidate. The whole "don't vote third party" schtick that's going on now may just result in that person not voting at all.
A lot of emphasis now is in getting turnout. If a third party candidate can energize some turnout whose votes will cascade down to the Dem candidate, that means the third parties are helping them instead of hurting them. And what people think now about how voting third party will push the Dems more towards that position would actually be true. Right now it's not true but the internet is teaching them otherwise.
It sounds like you're basing it entirely off personal experience. But your personal experience probably doesn't give you a representative cross section of Americans.
The Greens also got 1/3 of the votes in 2020 as 2016, both times being about 1/3 of the Libertarian party.
There's also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd. There was tons of infighting over the speaker and whatnot. Trump himself was obviously controversial, and I mentioned the threat of him running third party. If Republican voters would just line up to vote for anybody, the establishment would've never allowed things to splinter to the degree they have, they'd kick people out of the party and the voters would go for whoever they offered instead. I don't see how any of that is explainable if what you're saying is true.
I feel like part of that narrative is just seeing the right run shitty candidates and seeing right wingers vote for them, but that's because the voters have different values and preferences. They still care quite a bit about the things they do care about, and break rank when they don't get their way, and much more so than people in the left do from the numbers I'm seeing.
But your personal experience probably doesnāt give you a representative cross section of Americans.
Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It's only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it's all for show.
Thereās also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd.
Yeah but they didn't form a new party did they? And I don't think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they'd know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.
Most people don't know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don't really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don't even know about it?
Want to build a viable third party for presidential elections? Start small at the city/county level and eventually you will have candidates at the state/federal level. Today's city council is tomorrow's senator/president. Does it really surprise anyone that a relatively unknown and unproven candidate outside of the two major parties doesn't get any traction in a federal election?
That takes money, lots of it and the 2 main parties have huge corporate donors who will never give money to an environmental party
That's already the goal of state chairs for third parties.
Falwell made himself a big deal in the GOP by getting his troops to show up at every single local Republican event with enough votes to make sure that they got everything they wanted. It started small with sheriffs and county clerks, and then Congress members.
Exactly. Anytime a small party runs a presidential campaign it's not only a waste of time but it's a waste of money and resources that could have gone to actual races that could affect actual change. Plus they help to delegitimize and demoralize the movements.
The GOP pushed both the Greens and the Libertarians to siphon votes from the Dems.
I've yet to meet a Libertarian who wasn't just a lazy Republican.
I knew a few back in college but good Lord they were naive. He was a sweet kid but one of them thought we can get rid of the military and just use mercenaries.
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein. It's a really good science fiction novel and the handbook for a lot of Libertarians.
You can read and enjoy it as a story, but if you examine it you'll see all the hoops the author had to jump through in order to make his society work.
One of the most glaring examples is that there are almost no guns in a prison where machine tools are readily available.
I was a youth at that time and my only memory of the Moral Majority is the boob scene in Airplane! š¤·āāļø
one of my earliest memories
This doesn't work for the left because cults are a right-wing phenomenon. Lying and brainwashing people is inherently authoritarian.
By that logic, every Union is a cult. All I said was that people should organize and show up and vote.
I was a proud third party voter for a long time but changed my mind after watching CGPGreyās video about first past the post. Itās not really ABOUT trying to change minds but FPTP voting rules really do mean that a two party system is bound to very basic human psychology.
It's not even psychology, it's just the optimal strategy.
Game theory, which is just maths, matters more than psychology, even
If you watched that video you probably realized we are using the worst possible voting system and are actively advocating for reforming the American voting process?
Any chance I get!
Many countries with FPTP have multi-party systems, including Canada and the UK.
Yet we still always have the Liberals or the Conservatives in power... the power always ends up consolidated anyway, at least here in Canada.
Don't think of it as politics, think of it as a regime. They control the political process and switch spots based on public sentiment.
The political process is a charade as long as people keep voting in polarized way. The propaganda is there to keep us polarized. Most Anglo sphere appears to be infected at this point.
That makes sense logically. At the end of the day people lead toward groups with shared views. A lot of the issue tend to be yes/no like answers which creates two parties
Individual constituencies are still two party, it's just not necessarily always the same two.
If only there was some kind of proven road map where countries who has been dominated by their ruling elite using the two party trick went on to form a kind of labour movement that forced a third choice on the ruling class....
Actually most people are not aware. So its better to spell it out.
glances at the current state of the UK Labour party
It's been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I've also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France's En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.
And then there's always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they're persistently terrorized into voting the "safe" centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.
The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is "electable" because they can win the support of the conservative national media.
People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.
Its a doomed system.
Hey bro... just for vote my guy tho, trust me bro. You are not a bigot, is u?
The labour party is certainly flawed but you have to remember all they've given the people of the UK, in the brief times they've been in power (relatively speaking).
I'm not claiming it will fix everything but I would argue that the UK and just about every country thats had a labour movement that got into power benefited from it. Well, the 99% did.
Unless you know when the revolution is coming, it might be better to make alternative arrangements. Short of running to the hills and joining a commune, we're quite deliberately not given any other option than to vote for better oppression.
The labour party is certainly flawed but you have to remember all theyāve given the people of the UK
You're going to have to fill me in, because it seems Keir took office and immediately declared that there is no money left in the banana stand.
They couldn't even restore funding to the H2 connection from Manchester to London, and that's shit that was already paid for.
True or not, it would take something very special for the new Labour government to have already of given things to the people of the UK, seeing as Parliaments only been back for 2 weeks, don't you think?
I mean, I have moderate expectations at best. I hope they don't make things worse but, at the same time, I also think they'll fall well short of achieving time travel.
Were you expecting time travel? I think you might be disappointed, if so.
I also think theyāll fall well short of achieving time travel.
It's crazy when something as simple as rejecting the Cass Report and ending the instructional abuse of Trans People is equated with SciFi tiers of impossibility.
I'm sure that made sense, followed on naturally from the conversation and didn't just sound like unhinged ranting and deflections in your head, at least.
Oh no. JK Rowling has entered the chat.
Grow up
Some of these third party people could get elected to the senate if they tried, but have to try for the top job with no experience because their ego can't take that they don't know everything.
I could get elected to senate probably, if I was willing to spend fifteen years doing local and state office first. Ain't nobody got that kind of time I got hospital bills
Politicians have that kind of time. It's paid for by their owners.
Yeah and their corporate owners aren't going to back an environmental anti war candidate
I'm pro- turning food into compost. I'd like to help our constituents and anyone who does that.
Tbf, they have before. Ron Paul for instance was a Libertarian who ran as a Republican and won, and they do run for local offices a lot (at least the Libertarians, never seen a local Green on the ballot), they just also put forth a presidential candidate because if they can get like 5% or 15% of the vote (I can't remember which) they get federal funding and have to get included in the next debates instead of the debates only being R vs D.
Idk about the other third parties, but the Libertarians are doing exactly that.
If I run hard enough, I'll put a me shaped hole in the wall though.
Okay Wile E. Coyote.
Only as long as the you shaped hole is lucky enough to avoid any studs.
You mean in the USA? I guess the more viable path is to campaign to fix their democracy from within the democratic party. And then make new parties.
Yes that has worked really well so far
To be far the US has seen many different parties come and go.
Spliting from within the party is the usual way.
Whoever splits to the left will just be considered the new "spoiler 3rd party" by the mainstream liberals
If you can create a successful grassroots political party in an environment where your party members and constituents are constantly attacked, murdered, bombed, jailed, tortured, votes faked, votes destroyed, and vote miscounts, you can definitely pull it off in the USA.
It took Pakistan only 20 years to cause a collapse of their corrupt 2 party system and challenge the military dictatorship. People never believed PTI would mount any sort of challenge, but they did by building a solid populist movement, despite facing all of the above.
The "you must vote the lesser evil" is a fallacy that both parties in the USA perpetuate in an attempt to convince you to believe 3rd party voting is a waste of time.
You can't just sit back and complain about the rigged system like "but muh first past the poll voting" as if either Democrats or Republicans will change the system in any way to make it easier for their rivals.
This is exactly why I dislike the Democratic party in particular so much. They are a corporate monolith that pretends to care about your leftist demands by handing out pennies worth of change to get your vote, then the second they refuse to actually significantly change something you demand, they have the audacity to blame you, the voter, for not sucking up to their shitty policies when they inevitably lose the election.
Current case in point: "There is no genocide in Gaza, and we believe we can win without our constituents because our opponent is a mentally insane baby ".
Shittiest take on this community by far.
They have a first past the post parliamentary system, derived from the UK. The US has a separation of powers between its executive branch and its legislative branch.
The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system open non-partisan primary to select the top two final candidates followed by a general election between these two candidates for each election to elect a representative or president.
It helps mitigate the flaws of the ranked choice system to have it stop at the final two and let the voters choose between these final two choices. It helps get candidates that are at the center of voter opinion distribution.
This means the hard work of mobilizing together and working across partisan lines, recruiting the majority of Americans that are pro-democracy in each and every state.
The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system
Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you're going to keep getting the same results.
What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state's Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you'll never see a non-conservative state senate and you're unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor's mansion.
That's not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.
Shittiest take on this community by far.
It's an myriad of reasons from what I can tell. Americans are conditioned to think along the status quo lines even if there is certain degree of freedom of thought. The American corporate media carves the political landscape to intentionally but subtly influence folks to pick either only Democrats or Republicans.
Another reason is that, I suppose rugged invidualism won out in the American society for better mobilisation. As you rightly pointed out, there just isn't grassroots activism among American people (not counting civil and lgbt rights which are undoubtedly grassroots activism and successful ones at that). But this isn't what it used to be. Before and in the early 20th century, there have been other third political parties still gaining respectable number of votes, the last one being the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debbs. He won a respectable 1 million votes as a presidential candidate while campaigning from prison during World War I.
Not sure what happened why political grassroots activism that could counter either Democratic and Republican parties died out, but my guess is that the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century may have had a hand to convince people to stick with two parties, as well as heavy emphasis on individualistic values.
I tried making a similar argument on Facebook in 2016 when Trump won.
I didn't vote for either of the top two, but I did vote 3rd party. I voted on someone that i felt would be just as good a fit as the other two at that time. I wanted change, and tried to get so-called friends to change the way they thought about voting. Some of those people were the kind to say "my vote doesn't matter. They'll elect whomever they want in office."
I even went so far as to draw a very shitty comic that pointed out the other options on the ballot, and how we as a society could push for political change BY VOTING.
Sigh.... I was called a classless human being by an immigrant from the UK I went to college with. Her friends, and even one professor kept blowing up my DMs calling me trash for not supporting Clinton. That election really showed me the true colors of people. Since then i just tell people i am "unaffiliated" when they ask which party i support.
Vote for my guy OR ELSE!
I plan to Vote for the Head Cheeto in Charge this year. His saving grace is Tulsi Gabbard.
just write him in a "Cheeto" ;)
aka vote 3p
There aren't any good options for 3p this time around :'(
this instance is well known for takes like these when it comes to politics unfortunately. its better to not engage with any sort of political posts on here.
I'm not gonna answer that question. I don't have the perfect answer ready for you.
Instead I will tell you what happens when you vote third party in FPTP. Okay, you have a .nl TLD so I guess ssyou're either in a much better electoral situation or just picked it because it's cool, but I will use the example of the upcoming US presidential election.
Now, let's say the race is really even and it's over. Flipping just one of several key battleground states would've placed Harris in the lead, but unfortunately, Trump won. You look at the votes in your state: Trump won by under 600 votes. Nearly 100,000 people voted for a third party candidate that's actually to the left of Harris. They would've preferred Harris, but because they voted third party, they elected Trump.
If this sounds familiar, that's what happened in 2000. Al Gore could've won. Should've won. But 3rd party candidate Ralph Nader was further left of him and received a bunch of votes that needed to go to Gore. In Florida, he had nearly 100k votes, and the difference between Bush and Gore was literally triple digits. And it wasn't even the only state where Gore lost because of the Spoiler Effect
It's an inherent flaw of the FPTP system and yes, it sucks. It means a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.
Smaller elections. Get state representatives, win a few seats in the house, a few senatorsā¦ When your party actually contributes to governing then you can discuss running for president. Until then you wonāt beat Nader or Perot
And I will repeat the same thing I told the other person who said this. Who should I vote for? What politicians are supporting and advocating for reforming US elections? The answer is none of them, because they'd be lambasted and shunned for trying to upend the status quo.
We need to demand approval choice voting. Every time we hear anything about third parties in this country, we need to use it as a launch pad to tall about approval choice voting
I'm going to hold my nose and vote for Kamala but I won't shame people who can't bring themselves to do it.
And this criticism of 'the greens only show up every 4 years' is in bad faith. The greens run in other elections as well, you just only hear about the presidential elections because that's the only time they get some media attention.
This list has a bunch of school board members, city councillors, even a mayor on it. They do run in local elections, and even win sometimes.
And this criticism of 'the greens only show up every 4 years' is in bad faith.
No, it's really not. The Mayor of Galesburg, IL, a town of 30.000 is the highest office any green politician holds in the US. This is fucking ridiculous.
By their own admission, only 130 Greens are currently in office in highly influential positions such as Zoning Board of Appeals Alternate or Cemetery Trust Fund Committee. This party is a fucking joke. And that's the party whose presidential candidate accepts an invitation from Putin.
I'm "lucky" enough to live in a state where my vote doesn't matter at all. I'm completely free to not vote for genocide. What an awesome "democracy".
This is the same tone set by the people who whined that we were refusing to vote for Biden and oh look now Biden isnāt in the race anymore because we refused to accept him.
Keep accepting the one candidate that they spoon in front of us without asking if we actually want that one
This is the same tone set by the people who whined that we were refusing to vote for Gore and oh look Nader didn't win Bush did.
Gore won the vote. The election was stolen by the supreme court and Roger Stone it was not the fault of a 3rd party at all if the law had been followed gore would have been given Florida
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
It's a little different because people complained, Pelosi (aka the party listened) acted.
I our current political system, the game theory just doesn't work for much besides a two party system.
Exactly.
Its applying leverage to the party saying meet these criteria or get spoiled. It's basically a union for protest votes, and it's effective. Which makes it extremely important in the current two party system because it's the only way certain issues will get addressed.
Yeah absolutely how can I ever vote against war and imperialism if both parties are in favor of giving endless money to defense contractors?
You're basically saying I have to force myself to vote for the American military death machine in every single election or I'm a bad person and maybe you have a point but if you have to make that argument I think you should have a long look in the mirror
Biden didn't drop out because some online leftists refused to vote for him, he dropped out because big donors that back the Democrats wanted him to.
I dunno about this analogy. I think the doctor proved that with enough time, anything can become a door.
By the time you knock a hole in the wall with your own body, you're gonna be a bloody pulp.
They're referring to Doctor Who, a fictional "time lord" who used many theoretical lifetimes to bash a hole in an impenetrable wall, dying many times over (not a big issue for him), if I recall correctly.
That must have been the old Doctor Who, because I don't remember seeing an episode like that.
But that's a very Doctor Who style plot line lol
In fact it was "Heaven Sent" Peter Capaldi. Series 9, episode 11. 28 November 2015.
Ah, that would explain it. I checked out once Capaldi joined.
He really grew on me over time.
I'm rewatching it again, this time with my girlfriend because she hasn't seen it yet. We're currently 3/4 of the way through Matt Smith's doctor.
So maybe this time he will grow on me.
Excellent. Enjoy.
American shower thoughts
There will never be an acceptable time to vote third party according to liberals. Unless you're fine with an infinite state of groveling towards people in power. If we can't even push them left on genocide when it could cost the election, we can't move them left on anything. The status quo is fine for people who have the resources to deal with it and people not effected by Police brutality and other negative effects.
The way to push them left is to actually push them leftāprotesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.
But voting in a presidential election doesnāt push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental feedback process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary oneāthereās no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians signaling their response with legislation. This leaves the media in full control of the political process by interpreting for each side what the other āmeansā: because the votes and bills in themselves are devoid of meaning beyond their real effects, the media is free to insert whatever meaning suits them.
Third parties are mathematically impossible until we ditch first past the post voting:
https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
We need our vote to be a list, not a checkbox.
This is the way. It is possible and unlikely to have a third party win under the right conditions, like with how the Republican Party became a national party after Lincoln was elected as a third party candidate. But ultimately there will always only be two parties with the outdated FPTP voting method. If only George Washington knew about and pushed for a better voting system than FPTP.
I don't think they really existed yet in his era. You've got to remember that Australia, a much younger country, invented the secret ballot. It was known as the "Australian Ballot" for a long time.
Better systems existed but to your point, they were not well known.
Leaders today, with access to Wikipedia if not researchers with Nobel prizes, do NOT have this excuse.
Well yes, obviously. The issue with today is that the incumbency of the system makes it hard to change
In 1294-1621 the election of the Pope used Approval voting. Venice also used it.
The election of the Pope required secret ballot since 1621. And the concept existed since Ancient Greece and was used in elections and courts of Roman Republic.
IMO, it's not the full story to say the Republican party was a third party that year. The previous opposition to the Democrats had a rift and came apart. I think you are underselling what "the right conditions" are. This is more like a new party filling a void.
That year the Democrats themselves (regressives as this was well before Southern Strategy) split into two. Running both a candidate for "states' rights" style slavery and another for "fuck you, slavery everywhere" style slavery.
In Australia government funding is distributed to political parties based on the number of first preference votes they get as well so even if your first choice doesn't get in, you still helped them by putting them first.
Yeah, even getting a party 1 seat can be great. They are required to be heard. They can raise issues which the other parties must address.
FPTP is not real democracy for this reason.
I like CGP Grey and all, but power dynamics is an important aspect of poltics. An aspect he completely ignores in favour of spreadsheet thinking.
Yeah so proportional representation systems kinda suck. Israel has one and it ended up with a conservative party making concessions to far right crazies to form a coalition. Sure minorities are in the parliament, but they have zero power because the only thing that matters is the backroom negotiations between parties to form a coalition.
The biggest problem with FPTP is the name. Really we should call it a community representation system (which is what it is) and call proportional representation system a "party coalition" system, which is what it actually is. In a party coalition system the negotiations between party leaders to form coalitions is all that matters, everyone else is just there to fill seats which are owned by the parties.
In a community representation system each seat is own by a representative of the community who can vote against their party or leave their party. Parties are incentivized to keep the community leaders happy or they could lose seats.
If you want third parties, it's better to go with a ranked choice system. That gives people more choice over who represents their community, and allow them to have compromise options in case their top choice doesn't get enough votes. You don't actually have to give parties full ownership of the seats (making them redundant) to have more options.
That's bc he explains each concept mostly in isolation of others, leaving other concepts for separate videos themselves. But in e.g. Rules for Rulers, he very much discusses power dynamics. And I thought he had another one - in addition to the more mathematical one - illustrating FPTP using the animal kingdom, where technically people might assume one thing to be true, but based on power dynamics in practice it never is.
So watch Rules for Rulers yet if you haven't - it may change literally everything about your understanding, as it did mine.
Edit - references:
FPTP explanained mathematically
gerrymandering explained separately
rules for Rulers, outlining necessary considerations involved with any path forward - i.e. it works against anyone and especially those who ignore this principle
I also generally prefer a Condorcet Method (ranked choice, single winner) over mixed-member-proportional, but either one would be a massive improvement over our current system.
I'll take Approval voting, even.
Switzerland has a good system, just copy it. (Yes, not the same country, size difference and so on and on but its still a thousand times better than the US system)
If you're going to use a genocidal cult as your counter-example to democracy, why not just talk about the nazis?
No, no, THIS time protest-voting to allow fascism will work to usher in a real left-wing movement in this country, promise! /s
Yeah, fascist government are known for doing some voting reforms after all
But but, building a real third party from the ground up in local elections and/or changing our voting system from first past the post takes a lot of time and real effort. That's a lot of hard work. It's a lot harder than just showing up to one election every 4 years and casting a vote that makes you feel like you're special and smarter than everyone else.
except that you could end up with a 3rd entrance by doing that ... eventually
No you won't.
But if you put the door in while building the house (local and primary elections) you'll have installed it at the right time.
I think you'd have brain damage way before you get to that point
so not only would you have an extra door you'd still be smarter than people voting 3rd party in a first past the post system. Win/Win
Depends on how cheap the drywall is.
You may avoid brain damage, but your get cancer form the dust on the way through.
Especially if you ram that not-door long, hard, deep, and strong enough, really get up in there and penetrate that wall. If you run out of steam you could even switch to an electric appliance, but in that case be gentle (though not too gentle...).
Um.... I'm not sure where this is going, and at this point I'm afraid to continue? š
I'm here for it
Vote me again, daddy!
You'll get a boatload of spoiler effect elections until people start voting tactically again. Third parties need to start locally and not participate in the presidential elections for a long time.
There is a path to voter reform by creating hung parliament and require voter reform in a coalition agreement. Once dominant running for governor or a senator becomes possible.
Primary elections are how parties change. Primary elections are how the Republican party became what it is today. They are often the highest-leverage vote you can cast if you're in a solid district.
Yup. People don't realize there is already a not horrible approximation of runoff voting that still avoids the spoiler effect.
And just look at what happened when Sanders realized that. He went from being a meme about how nobody watches C-SPAN to one of the more influential politicians on the Left.
Well I'd say it's still pretty bad with the super delegates and such. But yeah it's runoff system of sorts and people should pay more attention to it.
But a lot of the "system is broken" angst comes from people being not happy over who the majority of people vote for. But that's just democracy, baby.
But the Electoral College, yeah that shit is broken.
Primaries are still subject to spoiler effects and such.
In my very blue state this year where the top two in the primary go on to the general, there was a local position which had a whole bunch of well qualified Democrats vs just a couple of Republicans. (Incumbent not running)
The dem vote was split enough that we very nearly had just the two Republicans in the general. Like less than 60 votes away.
And there are scenarios under runoff voting where similar can occur (e.g. two seats, 2 right wing, 4 left wing) and is where the "election theory" aspect of things that certain folk are still bitching about (because that is the most important thing to have happened in the past 8 years, clearly). The party needs to take the results of the primary and downselect who actually runs to avoid splitting their own vote.
No voting system is perfect. But people should really understand what we have and what their NEED improves and fails to improve rather than just insisting "new is better".
Primary elections arenāt democratic either (see party delegates). I feel like people who say this are rarely politically engaged in their communities. Same with the people who say to get involved in local city politics to make change.
Ultimately youāre supporting a facist system that is historically atrocious and currently financially supporting a genocide almost singlehandedly but go ahead and keep telling people that the best way to maintain some semblance of moral character is to vote in this sham.
You'd need to grow the third party / greens by having them become a viable party in local elections and state elections first. The greens have failed to do that. Which means they have no chance except to spoil the election.
Big money donors will never allow green candidates to get into significant office. Money runs politics and billionaires own entire state houses these days
True. I think about it now as a kind of physics problem. You have political energy measured in dollars on each side. Volunteers to help bring the political message across for free can be converted into dollars too. There are a lot of people concerned or outright scared out of their minds about environmental concerns like climate change. One sight has multiple orders of magnitude more political energy to spend. For example on counter measures, or boosting extreme vegan voices to cause disruption, advertising or media stories or think tanks or lobbyists. And the "technology" to manage this political energy is rapidly advancing too. So no amount of "this is the right / wrong choice" argument is going to change anything. There is only power.
There are big money donors, which are not billionaires. The most common one are unions.
"Why would I vote for a primary party candidate who supports ranked choice voting when I can just throw my vote away on a third-party candidate that will never be elected? I've got principles!"
Because apparently throwing your vote away will somehow convince politicians to move left or something, despite all the evidence that it won't.
The Republicans move right during the general, and are sometimes pulled that way by the libertarian candidate (or rfk jr). The Dems usually don't get pulled left because they're so focused on moving to the right during the general to try to get the moderate republican vote
The only evidence we have is that not enough people vote third party.
https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/
I have high hopes but my logical side says they can just be pandering like any of the other politicians: they know people support it, they know it will fail. They look good for backing it even tho they aren't worried about changing the status quo either
IIRC two states and several major cities have also successfully implemented rank choice, and in every case it's been because of Democrats.
As more and more local governments make the change, it'll become more popular and gain more support on the national level.
Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won't go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.
Second, sure, it's a low risk bill because they know it won't go anywhere, but damn isn't it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?
My point (i.e. the "high hopes" part) is that this sounds legit and awesome. I do my best to be an optimist, but I have been burned way to many times to not concede that there may be ulterior motivation afoot.
I hear you. Didn't mean for that to come across as an attack on you.
Apologies, in my previous comment I hadn't read clearly enough and misunderstood. I have deleted it.
Why wouldn't Democrats want ranked choice?
Right wing people tend to be subservient and just fall in line and vote Republican. People on the left tend to be less pragmatic and can be enticed to vote for Green or whatever even when it's obvious they won't win "because of my principles!" Someone voting Green or whatever will be very likely to choose the Democrat candidate down the list of choice before the GOP candidate. When the votes are tallied they will end up with more votes with a ranked choice system than they'd have with the current system.
The real reason why this won't happen is if the GOP have a majority since it is very much against their interests.
The DNC exists to protect incumbents. Don't be fooled, the Dems (elected officials, not voters) don't want ranked choice.
Well someone is being fooled, that's true.
People are always saying this, but is there actually evidence that it's true? The Libertarian Party regularly gets more votes than the Greens, so if anything it seems like the opposite is true. Ross Perot got the most votes of any third party candidate in history, and in both the elections he ran in, Bill Clinton won. In 2016, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of a third party run if he didn't get the nomination, and it appeared to be a serious possibility.
So is this claim just based on vibes or what?
It's been a long time since Ross Perot.
I'm basing it on trends. We saw with RFK being offered whatever he wanted as soon as it looked like he was going to take more votes from Trump than Harris. He dropped out and backed Trump. While not all of his supporters might not automatically go vote for Trump (just as not all Libertarians won't pick R for their second choice) it probably helped.
The Libertarians got what? 1/3 of the votes in 2020 than they did in 2016? Seems like they're on the decline to me.
We're seeing more of a push by various internet influencers (who knows who's paying them, LOL) to push people on the left towards voting third party. And maybe I've spent too much time on lemmy, but it seems to be working. People want to vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.
It's probably exhausting for campaign workers to have to constantly explain they shouldn't vote third party as it might result in Trump getting in. It would be far easier to say "sure I kinda like [Third Party Candidate] too, but I like [Democratic Candidate] more because blah blah blah, but the most important thing is you go out and vote!" and be fairly confident that vote will cascade down to their candidate. The whole "don't vote third party" schtick that's going on now may just result in that person not voting at all.
A lot of emphasis now is in getting turnout. If a third party candidate can energize some turnout whose votes will cascade down to the Dem candidate, that means the third parties are helping them instead of hurting them. And what people think now about how voting third party will push the Dems more towards that position would actually be true. Right now it's not true but the internet is teaching them otherwise.
It sounds like you're basing it entirely off personal experience. But your personal experience probably doesn't give you a representative cross section of Americans.
The Greens also got 1/3 of the votes in 2020 as 2016, both times being about 1/3 of the Libertarian party.
There's also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd. There was tons of infighting over the speaker and whatnot. Trump himself was obviously controversial, and I mentioned the threat of him running third party. If Republican voters would just line up to vote for anybody, the establishment would've never allowed things to splinter to the degree they have, they'd kick people out of the party and the voters would go for whoever they offered instead. I don't see how any of that is explainable if what you're saying is true.
I feel like part of that narrative is just seeing the right run shitty candidates and seeing right wingers vote for them, but that's because the voters have different values and preferences. They still care quite a bit about the things they do care about, and break rank when they don't get their way, and much more so than people in the left do from the numbers I'm seeing.
Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It's only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it's all for show.
Yeah but they didn't form a new party did they? And I don't think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they'd know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.
Most people don't know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don't really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don't even know about it?
If people vote in the primaries for candidates who support ranked choice voting, then yes.
What primary? What candidate? I can't even find somebody who doesn't support genocide much less rank choice.
Check at the state level. A few states have introduced ranked choice, your state may have someone in the mix trying to make it a thing where you live!
Want to build a viable third party for presidential elections? Start small at the city/county level and eventually you will have candidates at the state/federal level. Today's city council is tomorrow's senator/president. Does it really surprise anyone that a relatively unknown and unproven candidate outside of the two major parties doesn't get any traction in a federal election?
That takes money, lots of it and the 2 main parties have huge corporate donors who will never give money to an environmental party
That's already the goal of state chairs for third parties.
Look up The Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell.
Falwell made himself a big deal in the GOP by getting his troops to show up at every single local Republican event with enough votes to make sure that they got everything they wanted. It started small with sheriffs and county clerks, and then Congress members.
Exactly. Anytime a small party runs a presidential campaign it's not only a waste of time but it's a waste of money and resources that could have gone to actual races that could affect actual change. Plus they help to delegitimize and demoralize the movements.
The GOP pushed both the Greens and the Libertarians to siphon votes from the Dems.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/10/metro/jill-stein-new-hampshire-ballot-republican-help/
I've yet to meet a Libertarian who wasn't just a lazy Republican.
I knew a few back in college but good Lord they were naive. He was a sweet kid but one of them thought we can get rid of the military and just use mercenaries.
"The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" by Robert A. Heinlein. It's a really good science fiction novel and the handbook for a lot of Libertarians.
You can read and enjoy it as a story, but if you examine it you'll see all the hoops the author had to jump through in order to make his society work.
One of the most glaring examples is that there are almost no guns in a prison where machine tools are readily available.
I was a youth at that time and my only memory of the Moral Majority is the boob scene in Airplane! š¤·āāļø
one of my earliest memories
This doesn't work for the left because cults are a right-wing phenomenon. Lying and brainwashing people is inherently authoritarian.
By that logic, every Union is a cult. All I said was that people should organize and show up and vote.
I was a proud third party voter for a long time but changed my mind after watching CGPGreyās video about first past the post. Itās not really ABOUT trying to change minds but FPTP voting rules really do mean that a two party system is bound to very basic human psychology.
It's not even psychology, it's just the optimal strategy.
Game theory, which is just maths, matters more than psychology, even
If you watched that video you probably realized we are using the worst possible voting system and are actively advocating for reforming the American voting process?
Any chance I get!
Many countries with FPTP have multi-party systems, including Canada and the UK.
Yet we still always have the Liberals or the Conservatives in power... the power always ends up consolidated anyway, at least here in Canada.
Don't think of it as politics, think of it as a regime. They control the political process and switch spots based on public sentiment.
The political process is a charade as long as people keep voting in polarized way. The propaganda is there to keep us polarized. Most Anglo sphere appears to be infected at this point.
That makes sense logically. At the end of the day people lead toward groups with shared views. A lot of the issue tend to be yes/no like answers which creates two parties
Individual constituencies are still two party, it's just not necessarily always the same two.
If only there was some kind of proven road map where countries who has been dominated by their ruling elite using the two party trick went on to form a kind of labour movement that forced a third choice on the ruling class....
Actually most people are not aware. So its better to spell it out.
glances at the current state of the UK Labour party
It's been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I've also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France's En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.
And then there's always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they're persistently terrorized into voting the "safe" centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.
The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is "electable" because they can win the support of the conservative national media.
People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.
Its a doomed system.
Hey bro... just for vote my guy tho, trust me bro. You are not a bigot, is u?
The labour party is certainly flawed but you have to remember all they've given the people of the UK, in the brief times they've been in power (relatively speaking).
I'm not claiming it will fix everything but I would argue that the UK and just about every country thats had a labour movement that got into power benefited from it. Well, the 99% did.
Unless you know when the revolution is coming, it might be better to make alternative arrangements. Short of running to the hills and joining a commune, we're quite deliberately not given any other option than to vote for better oppression.
You're going to have to fill me in, because it seems Keir took office and immediately declared that there is no money left in the banana stand.
They couldn't even restore funding to the H2 connection from Manchester to London, and that's shit that was already paid for.
True or not, it would take something very special for the new Labour government to have already of given things to the people of the UK, seeing as Parliaments only been back for 2 weeks, don't you think?
I mean, I have moderate expectations at best. I hope they don't make things worse but, at the same time, I also think they'll fall well short of achieving time travel.
Were you expecting time travel? I think you might be disappointed, if so.
It's crazy when something as simple as rejecting the Cass Report and ending the instructional abuse of Trans People is equated with SciFi tiers of impossibility.
I'm sure that made sense, followed on naturally from the conversation and didn't just sound like unhinged ranting and deflections in your head, at least.
Oh no. JK Rowling has entered the chat.
Grow up
Some of these third party people could get elected to the senate if they tried, but have to try for the top job with no experience because their ego can't take that they don't know everything.
I could get elected to senate probably, if I was willing to spend fifteen years doing local and state office first. Ain't nobody got that kind of time I got hospital bills
Politicians have that kind of time. It's paid for by their owners.
Yeah and their corporate owners aren't going to back an environmental anti war candidate
I'm pro- turning food into compost. I'd like to help our constituents and anyone who does that.
Tbf, they have before. Ron Paul for instance was a Libertarian who ran as a Republican and won, and they do run for local offices a lot (at least the Libertarians, never seen a local Green on the ballot), they just also put forth a presidential candidate because if they can get like 5% or 15% of the vote (I can't remember which) they get federal funding and have to get included in the next debates instead of the debates only being R vs D.
Idk about the other third parties, but the Libertarians are doing exactly that.
If I run hard enough, I'll put a me shaped hole in the wall though.
Okay Wile E. Coyote.
Only as long as the you shaped hole is lucky enough to avoid any studs.
You mean in the USA? I guess the more viable path is to campaign to fix their democracy from within the democratic party. And then make new parties.
Yes that has worked really well so far
To be far the US has seen many different parties come and go.
Spliting from within the party is the usual way.
Whoever splits to the left will just be considered the new "spoiler 3rd party" by the mainstream liberals
768 votes wth is wrong with Americans bruh
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Tehreek-e-Insaf
If you can create a successful grassroots political party in an environment where your party members and constituents are constantly attacked, murdered, bombed, jailed, tortured, votes faked, votes destroyed, and vote miscounts, you can definitely pull it off in the USA.
It took Pakistan only 20 years to cause a collapse of their corrupt 2 party system and challenge the military dictatorship. People never believed PTI would mount any sort of challenge, but they did by building a solid populist movement, despite facing all of the above.
The "you must vote the lesser evil" is a fallacy that both parties in the USA perpetuate in an attempt to convince you to believe 3rd party voting is a waste of time.
You can't just sit back and complain about the rigged system like "but muh first past the poll voting" as if either Democrats or Republicans will change the system in any way to make it easier for their rivals.
This is exactly why I dislike the Democratic party in particular so much. They are a corporate monolith that pretends to care about your leftist demands by handing out pennies worth of change to get your vote, then the second they refuse to actually significantly change something you demand, they have the audacity to blame you, the voter, for not sucking up to their shitty policies when they inevitably lose the election.
Current case in point: "There is no genocide in Gaza, and we believe we can win without our constituents because our opponent is a mentally insane baby ".
Shittiest take on this community by far.
They have a first past the post parliamentary system, derived from the UK. The US has a separation of powers between its executive branch and its legislative branch.
The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system open non-partisan primary to select the top two final candidates followed by a general election between these two candidates for each election to elect a representative or president.
It helps mitigate the flaws of the ranked choice system to have it stop at the final two and let the voters choose between these final two choices. It helps get candidates that are at the center of voter opinion distribution.
This means the hard work of mobilizing together and working across partisan lines, recruiting the majority of Americans that are pro-democracy in each and every state.
Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you're going to keep getting the same results.
What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state's Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you'll never see a non-conservative state senate and you're unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor's mansion.
That's not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.
It's an myriad of reasons from what I can tell. Americans are conditioned to think along the status quo lines even if there is certain degree of freedom of thought. The American corporate media carves the political landscape to intentionally but subtly influence folks to pick either only Democrats or Republicans.
Another reason is that, I suppose rugged invidualism won out in the American society for better mobilisation. As you rightly pointed out, there just isn't grassroots activism among American people (not counting civil and lgbt rights which are undoubtedly grassroots activism and successful ones at that). But this isn't what it used to be. Before and in the early 20th century, there have been other third political parties still gaining respectable number of votes, the last one being the Socialist Party led by Eugene Debbs. He won a respectable 1 million votes as a presidential candidate while campaigning from prison during World War I.
Not sure what happened why political grassroots activism that could counter either Democratic and Republican parties died out, but my guess is that the proliferation of mass media in the 20th century may have had a hand to convince people to stick with two parties, as well as heavy emphasis on individualistic values.
I tried making a similar argument on Facebook in 2016 when Trump won.
I didn't vote for either of the top two, but I did vote 3rd party. I voted on someone that i felt would be just as good a fit as the other two at that time. I wanted change, and tried to get so-called friends to change the way they thought about voting. Some of those people were the kind to say "my vote doesn't matter. They'll elect whomever they want in office."
I even went so far as to draw a very shitty comic that pointed out the other options on the ballot, and how we as a society could push for political change BY VOTING.
Sigh.... I was called a classless human being by an immigrant from the UK I went to college with. Her friends, and even one professor kept blowing up my DMs calling me trash for not supporting Clinton. That election really showed me the true colors of people. Since then i just tell people i am "unaffiliated" when they ask which party i support.
Vote for my guy OR ELSE!
I plan to Vote for the Head Cheeto in Charge this year. His saving grace is Tulsi Gabbard.
just write him in a "Cheeto" ;)
aka vote 3p
There aren't any good options for 3p this time around :'(
this instance is well known for takes like these when it comes to politics unfortunately. its better to not engage with any sort of political posts on here.
Also
What's fake about the effect a FPTP voting system creates?
LOL and how do you suppose we make third parties viable? Thoughts and prayers?
Not by voting for people in elections they canāt win. Vote at the local and state level or in primaries for people who will enact voting reform.
Like who?
I don't know where you live so I don't have any relevant suggestions, sorry.
Changing the voting system so that third parties are actually possible.
You need a cardinal voting system, otherwise you'll fall prey to Durverger's Law and Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
I favor STAR, it's the best system designed to date.
I'm not gonna answer that question. I don't have the perfect answer ready for you.
Instead I will tell you what happens when you vote third party in FPTP. Okay, you have a .nl TLD so I guess ssyou're either in a much better electoral situation or just picked it because it's cool, but I will use the example of the upcoming US presidential election.
Now, let's say the race is really even and it's over. Flipping just one of several key battleground states would've placed Harris in the lead, but unfortunately, Trump won. You look at the votes in your state: Trump won by under 600 votes. Nearly 100,000 people voted for a third party candidate that's actually to the left of Harris. They would've preferred Harris, but because they voted third party, they elected Trump.
If this sounds familiar, that's what happened in 2000. Al Gore could've won. Should've won. But 3rd party candidate Ralph Nader was further left of him and received a bunch of votes that needed to go to Gore. In Florida, he had nearly 100k votes, and the difference between Bush and Gore was literally triple digits. And it wasn't even the only state where Gore lost because of the Spoiler Effect
It's an inherent flaw of the FPTP system and yes, it sucks. It means a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.
Smaller elections. Get state representatives, win a few seats in the house, a few senatorsā¦ When your party actually contributes to governing then you can discuss running for president. Until then you wonāt beat Nader or Perot
And I will repeat the same thing I told the other person who said this. Who should I vote for? What politicians are supporting and advocating for reforming US elections? The answer is none of them, because they'd be lambasted and shunned for trying to upend the status quo.
We need to demand approval choice voting. Every time we hear anything about third parties in this country, we need to use it as a launch pad to tall about approval choice voting
I'm going to hold my nose and vote for Kamala but I won't shame people who can't bring themselves to do it.
And this criticism of 'the greens only show up every 4 years' is in bad faith. The greens run in other elections as well, you just only hear about the presidential elections because that's the only time they get some media attention.
This list has a bunch of school board members, city councillors, even a mayor on it. They do run in local elections, and even win sometimes.
No, it's really not. The Mayor of Galesburg, IL, a town of 30.000 is the highest office any green politician holds in the US. This is fucking ridiculous.
By their own admission, only 130 Greens are currently in office in highly influential positions such as Zoning Board of Appeals Alternate or Cemetery Trust Fund Committee. This party is a fucking joke. And that's the party whose presidential candidate accepts an invitation from Putin.
I'm "lucky" enough to live in a state where my vote doesn't matter at all. I'm completely free to not vote for genocide. What an awesome "democracy".
Thereās a caveat: That statement only applies to a house thatās designed to only have 2 viable doors.
It applies to any house that isnāt designed to infer your intended goal and automatically rebuild itself to suit.
The wall will wear down eventually. I think.
Sure, but you're going to hurt yourself a whole lot more and have a fucked up wall doing so. Not an ideal way of doing it.
This is the same tone set by the people who whined that we were refusing to vote for Biden and oh look now Biden isnāt in the race anymore because we refused to accept him.
Keep accepting the one candidate that they spoon in front of us without asking if we actually want that one
This is the same tone set by the people who whined that we were refusing to vote for Gore and oh look Nader didn't win Bush did.
Gore won the vote. The election was stolen by the supreme court and Roger Stone it was not the fault of a 3rd party at all if the law had been followed gore would have been given Florida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
It's a little different because people complained, Pelosi (aka the party listened) acted.
I our current political system, the game theory just doesn't work for much besides a two party system.
Exactly.
Its applying leverage to the party saying meet these criteria or get spoiled. It's basically a union for protest votes, and it's effective. Which makes it extremely important in the current two party system because it's the only way certain issues will get addressed.
Yeah absolutely how can I ever vote against war and imperialism if both parties are in favor of giving endless money to defense contractors? You're basically saying I have to force myself to vote for the American military death machine in every single election or I'm a bad person and maybe you have a point but if you have to make that argument I think you should have a long look in the mirror
Biden didn't drop out because some online leftists refused to vote for him, he dropped out because big donors that back the Democrats wanted him to.
no it isn't.
I dunno about this analogy. I think the doctor proved that with enough time, anything can become a door.
By the time you knock a hole in the wall with your own body, you're gonna be a bloody pulp.
They're referring to Doctor Who, a fictional "time lord" who used many theoretical lifetimes to bash a hole in an impenetrable wall, dying many times over (not a big issue for him), if I recall correctly.
That must have been the old Doctor Who, because I don't remember seeing an episode like that.
But that's a very Doctor Who style plot line lol
In fact it was "Heaven Sent" Peter Capaldi. Series 9, episode 11. 28 November 2015.
Ah, that would explain it. I checked out once Capaldi joined.
He really grew on me over time.
I'm rewatching it again, this time with my girlfriend because she hasn't seen it yet. We're currently 3/4 of the way through Matt Smith's doctor.
So maybe this time he will grow on me.
Excellent. Enjoy.
American shower thoughts
There will never be an acceptable time to vote third party according to liberals. Unless you're fine with an infinite state of groveling towards people in power. If we can't even push them left on genocide when it could cost the election, we can't move them left on anything. The status quo is fine for people who have the resources to deal with it and people not effected by Police brutality and other negative effects.
The way to push them left is to actually push them leftāprotesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.
But voting in a presidential election doesnāt push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental feedback process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary oneāthereās no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians signaling their response with legislation. This leaves the media in full control of the political process by interpreting for each side what the other āmeansā: because the votes and bills in themselves are devoid of meaning beyond their real effects, the media is free to insert whatever meaning suits them.
I don't know what the right time is, but it's definitely not presidential elections.
That's 100% the right time lol. They get ballot access and funding from these elections.
Yes but the other two doors open straight into hell.