And how do you propose escaping the two party system?
(Hint: voting 3rd party without changing how elections happen first is mathematically equivalent to throwing away your vote for the better of two evils and helping the worse evil. And there is very definitely a better and a worse.)
(Hint: voting 3rd party without changing how elections happen first is mathematically equivalent to throwing away your vote for the better of two evils and helping the worse evil. And there is very definitely a better and a worse.)
Hint: this is incorrect in all possible mathematical ways.
If 34% of any election goes to a third party, that third party will win FPTP. It takes that low of a percentage to win a majority.
Actually it would happen if every person who thought like you voted third party. Or, instead of courting either dem or republican voters, a third party targeted non-voters exclusively since they’re still the majority voting block.
I mean this honestly, how do we understand what the issues of non voters are? Is there a consistent populace that never votes or is it a variable pool? Has it been shown that non voters care about entirely different issues than voters?
It’s like that blue-or-red button thing that’s been going around.
The critical mass of people willing to vote that way (and this assumes there’s only one 3rd party that everyone in question agrees is better) would have to exist first before they would be willing to vote that way.
We’re more than a decade past that critical mass existing. No human being wanted to see Hillary Clinton in office. There were zero genuine supporters of hers amongst the working class. She was an awful human being during the Clinton years - literally the worst woman in US politics up to that point, on the same level as Margaret Thatcher.
And absolutely no one really supported Donald Trump except as a protest to establishment politics. Trump 1 didn’t have the cult yet, and I think a lot of people forget that. He was just a clown outsider that was voted in as a protest against the ridiculous number of exact same ‘things’ in skin suits that participated in the RNC Primary, and their near exact counterpart that was Hilary Clinton.
That’s why Donald Trump won the first time. He was the third party. Except he chose to run under the republican party banner because he knew he could guarantee 20% of Americans would vote for any Republican because of the work the party did in the 1970s and 80s becoming the party of American Christianity.
Why did Harris fail? Because she promised to be Biden 2.0. Why did Biden win his first term but was projected to lose by the worst margins in US history for his second term? Because people wanted something different. Biden proved to be Donald Trump but quiet.
It’s not “helping” the worse evil. It’s helping neither.
If third-party voters and non-voters “helped the worse evil” then the worse evil has won every election in recent history in a landslide victory. In reality, removing them from the equation has no impact on which of the major parties gets more votes.
It’s only if you assume that a party is entitled to people’s votes that the word “help” could possibly be used. And that’s not how anything works. No one is entitled to my vote.
The first step to dismantling the two party system is to replace the currently entrenched parties. You can’t change the two-party dynamic, but you can certainly swap one of the parties out for another. Where do you think the Republican Party came from?
And how do you propose escaping the two party system?
(Hint: voting 3rd party without changing how elections happen first is mathematically equivalent to throwing away your vote for the better of two evils and helping the worse evil. And there is very definitely a better and a worse.)
Hint: this is incorrect in all possible mathematical ways.
If 34% of any election goes to a third party, that third party will win FPTP. It takes that low of a percentage to win a majority.
And that simply isn’t going to happen. (Without at least one major party collapsing and not being on the ballot.)
Actually it would happen if every person who thought like you voted third party. Or, instead of courting either dem or republican voters, a third party targeted non-voters exclusively since they’re still the majority voting block.
I mean this honestly, how do we understand what the issues of non voters are? Is there a consistent populace that never votes or is it a variable pool? Has it been shown that non voters care about entirely different issues than voters?
My impression is that most of them just don’t care about politics (or much else).
They realize their material needs are ignored regardless who’s in office.
I’ll agree with that.
It’s like that blue-or-red button thing that’s been going around.
The critical mass of people willing to vote that way (and this assumes there’s only one 3rd party that everyone in question agrees is better) would have to exist first before they would be willing to vote that way.
We’re more than a decade past that critical mass existing. No human being wanted to see Hillary Clinton in office. There were zero genuine supporters of hers amongst the working class. She was an awful human being during the Clinton years - literally the worst woman in US politics up to that point, on the same level as Margaret Thatcher.
And absolutely no one really supported Donald Trump except as a protest to establishment politics. Trump 1 didn’t have the cult yet, and I think a lot of people forget that. He was just a clown outsider that was voted in as a protest against the ridiculous number of exact same ‘things’ in skin suits that participated in the RNC Primary, and their near exact counterpart that was Hilary Clinton.
That’s why Donald Trump won the first time. He was the third party. Except he chose to run under the republican party banner because he knew he could guarantee 20% of Americans would vote for any Republican because of the work the party did in the 1970s and 80s becoming the party of American Christianity.
Why did Harris fail? Because she promised to be Biden 2.0. Why did Biden win his first term but was projected to lose by the worst margins in US history for his second term? Because people wanted something different. Biden proved to be Donald Trump but quiet.
It would happen if the public grew some proverbial balls and voted third party. It’s really that simple.
It’s not “helping” the worse evil. It’s helping neither.
If third-party voters and non-voters “helped the worse evil” then the worse evil has won every election in recent history in a landslide victory. In reality, removing them from the equation has no impact on which of the major parties gets more votes.
It’s only if you assume that a party is entitled to people’s votes that the word “help” could possibly be used. And that’s not how anything works. No one is entitled to my vote.
The first step to dismantling the two party system is to replace the currently entrenched parties. You can’t change the two-party dynamic, but you can certainly swap one of the parties out for another. Where do you think the Republican Party came from?
You ask a question then imply you have the only correct answer.
Not saying I have a correct one, I just hate counterproductive wrong ones.
That said, I think the most feasible option for now is transforming the existing party via primaries. Look at the success of NY as an example.
Long term the goal should be to move away from FPTP voting. (I’m a fan of score voting, or approval, but pretty much anything else would be better)