Analysis | The problem for third parties? America is not a political free market.
Analysis | The problem for third parties? America is not a political free market.
Americans are deeply frustrated with politics. They see the country heading in the wrong direction. They are regularly forced to choose between two candidates they don’t particularly like. Between 40 and 50 percent of the country identifies not as Democrat or Republican but as independent.
Here is what it takes to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania. Read through that, noting the difference between candidates for “political parties” and “minor political parties.” Imagine you are thinking about putting forth a challenge to an incumbent state officeholder but don’t want to run as a Democrat or a Republican. What are the odds that you get tripped up by the rules?
The problem, of course, is that Americans have strong views about specific things on which they are often not going to be willing to compromise. The Forward essay criticizes the far left for wanting to get rid of guns and the far right for wanting to get rid of gun laws. But that’s not where the parties are, because the parties are responsive to the coalitions they’ve built. If you simply take some independents and sit them down — much less partisans! — you’re going to very quickly find a lot of important issues on which there is not a reachable consensus. Then what?
We need an alternate voting system, not a takeover of a major political party. At least ranked choice voting or maybe STAR voting.
I'm not going to totally disagree with you here, which is why I neither upvoted nor downvoted your comment. I think your chance for RCV or STAR increases if you take over a major party, because frankly, you're going to need to counter the old, dead weight that will fight tooth and nail to tear down your RCV framework. As much as I like Governor Polis in Colorado, he's still working with the people fighting to shut down RCV by making it so we have to jump through various hoops before RCV can be implemented State Wide.
We also have to be careful at the Federal level. RCV can work nicely for House and Senate, but we have a Constitutional Problem at POTUS that will take serious coordination at the State and Federal level to patch out. I'd hate for our current House to pick our POTUS because Harris got 269 votes, Stein got 25, and Trump got the rest. That's mandated by the constitution to go to the House, where Trump will be selected. We gotta fix that before we try to push RCV.
Maybe it's just because I've got a project manager's mind and see all the dependencies that I'm not calling immediately for RCV, though I am a fan of RCV, for sure, and will be voting for it in November.
I think your chance for RCV or STAR increases if you take over a major party, because frankly, you’re going to need to counter the old, dead weight that will fight tooth and nail to tear down your RCV framework.
Agree 100%. Get pro-election reform candidates in the major party primaries for local offices, and get them voted in. Then move up to state offices. It has to come from the states up, it will be rejected in the courts if it's a push down from the federal level.
I think your chance for RCV or STAR increases if you take over a major party
This is totally wrong. RCV is already in place in a few places, and on the ballot in multiple states in November.
You don't have to have anyone from the existing parties on board to enact RCV. You can gather signatures, put an initiative on the ballot, vote, and presto. I don't even really agree that "both sides" are trying to fight tooth and nail to prevent RCV (it is mostly one side in particular that's doing that), but in any case it's besides the point.
Check fairvote.org, see if it's on the ballot for you, if so vote. If not then try to sign up with a group working to make it happen in your state.
The idea that most voters are disheartened with "both sides" and that's what's wrong with politics right now is actually pretty much backwards from the statistics -- people are getting involved more and more in every recent election, which kind of makes sense since "one side" is so actively and obviously dangerous right now -- but again, that's even kind of besides the point. The point is, keeping FPTP and pushing for a third party is going to produce exactly the opposite of whatever the third party you're pushing is advocating, because what you're going to do is split the vote with whichever their ideological neighbor is. Reform of the voting system is the only approach that makes sense, and it's currently happening at actually a pretty surprising pace.
The two big brands are malignant monopolies that nobody likes? That's exactly how free market capitalism works.
This is an older article, but it's relevant to what's going on right now. My analysis follows in this comment:
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Third Parties don't work in the USA. Quite simply, it goes back to my whole '100 kid SGA election' example. Even if Bookish Girl was 100% legit and was really running to keep Nerd Boy from winning because he's actually a bad guy, he'd be a spoiler to her if she was the one with 48 votes behind her name and bookish nerd boy had 3 voting for him. But the example of being picked by Cheerleader to siphon away 3 votes from Nerd Boy so Cheerleader could win is exactly how Jill Stein and the Green Party are working. It was exactly how (RFK) Junior was running, until it became clear he was going to attract more votes from Trump than Harris, and what is he doing? Getting out of the race so he doesn't get Harrs elected!
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Third parties have the problem of not forming a broad consensus. Americans are stuck in their ways, and like their parties. Even the liberals are conservative in the notion of 'going with what just works.' Forming a broad consensus is necessary to win in the model of government we have, which is why we've had two major parties since right after our founding.
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There is a real faction of 'ratfuckers' who are here to split our vote and disrupt our election. Their goal is the conversion of the USA into a Fascist state, and they will use every tool in the box to fuck us out of our votes and fuck us into the Fascist state they want, and Third Parties are one of those tools.
If you want real change to the USA, you've got to do what Trumpets did -- take over the other major party in America, build a coalition by growing beyond your single issue, and slowly but surely turn the party into the vehicle for your ideals. If you can't convince more than a fringe party that your ideas are good and worth running on, you won't win in America, or, frankly, anywhere else.
Inb4 .ml downvote brigade arrives :/
It’s really frustrating knowing how many people just refuse to understand the 3p dynamic here in the states, and as a result, vote in ways that are ultimately actively harmful to their own interests and goals.
I find that they get outshouted roughly on a 2 to 1 ratio if engagement from the rest of Lemmy is good about posting/interacting. That tells me I'm doing a better job of connecting to people and pushing the ideas I want pushed. It's a small effort, but I'm just one person, but if we end up with Harris this November and Trump and his shitheads are sent packing, all's good, as an old German textbook I had was titled ("Alles Gute" but same deference).
Thanks for replying!
I would go so far as to say that we are increasingly seeing, globally, that "third parties don't work" period.
I think it was France where, just a month or two back, basically the entire Left had to unite to prevent the country from descending into fascism (and... jury is still out on whether they succeeded). And we have seen similar in other parliamentary governments where third parties historically thrive.
Because if one side of the political spectrum has twenty different parties each with different goals but the other side has basically one party? Guess which one wins?
Which... is not dissimilar from what we already see. republicans are basically united around christofascism. Democrats are constantly at each other's throats over what gets funded and what doesn't. And that is why it is a constant struggle to unite people enough to make a difference. Like, while I have issues with how things were handled (by all sides), Sanders swallowing his pride and actually running as a Democrat (rather than abusing party swapping to get rid of competition in local elections...) was massively important for shifting the DNC a lot farther Left. Could have been better but...
Oh, that username hits me right in the fails. Let me guess. The rest of it is 'missed the shot, awakened the whole pod, and my squad went down in a hail of alien gunfire'? 🤣
Anyway, yeah, I pointed France out in another post. Third Parties end up hurting the majority party closest to them on the scale, and cause the country to fall to the opposite Major Party. In the best of circumstances, it results in things you hold dear to be torn down and things you detest to be built up, and when the opposite party has a heavy xenophobic fascist core? Well, people far closer to home to you than any Palestinian ever could be will suffer, as will you yourself. It's fine if you can make yourself into a martyr alone (fly over to Gaza and help them directly), but when you make other people into victims because your chosen faction wasn't put ahead of everyone else? That is serious psychopath behaviour right there.
Well put. I'll also add that in left-leaning communities there's almost always more attention being paid to dark money flowing into our elections from groups like AIPAC than there is being paid to dark money flowing into our elections via third parties. Dark money is certainly a corrupting influence if it gets injected directly into the campaign process for one of the two major parties, but it's equally troublesome that third parties are frequently (if not always) funded from the ground up by an opposing party specifically for the purpose of ratfucking an election. Whether or not third parties are in on the game or simply willingly ignorant stooges, their effect is always the same. And the fact that they're essentially invisible except during presidential election cycles provides a strong bit of evidence for the latter.
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