“Hey, let’s vote for a candidate who literally cannot win from a party that hasn’t done the necessary work to become nationally viable because I don’t want to be part of the two party problem even though if we do so it will guarantee that a felon rapist who incited an insurrection, stripped women of a human right, and illegally attempted to overturn an election will win.” - Dipshit 3rd Party Voters
Just as stupid as Trump supporters, as far as I’m concerned.
Well, they got what we told them they’d be getting. Why aren’t they celebrating?
But you’re SUPPORTING GENOCIDE when you vote for the candidate most likely to get the fewest people killed! While the people of Palestine are about to be annihilated, my own right to marry is about to be taken away, and all of my trans friends are going to lose access to the drugs that keep them from killing themselves, I can rest easy knowing that I didn’t engage with the system at all
Nope. Voting for the slightly less evil politician doesn’t mean you support genocide anymore than pulling the lever means you support innocent people being run over by trolleys.
Nope, voting for (supporting) a politician who commits genocide MEANS YOU SUPPORT GENOCIDE. You people stop voting for those politicians, and guess what, THEY DON’T GET INTO OFFICE, AND WE DON’T HAVE GENOCIDES.
And enough with the trolley problem. Reality’s not a fucking trolley problem. There are millions of individuals with an infinite array of choices in front of them. You frame anything in terms of two immoral choices and you can “justify” taking the least immoral of the two, but guess what, the fucking framing isn’t correct, because there’s allllllllllllll the different paths the trolley can go down, and allllllllllllll the other people also pulling levers, and the SUM of your choices is what determines the outcome, not your individual choice alone.
There were exactly two paths the trolley could go down as of November. You can pretend there weren’t, but the only option any individual had other than Harris or Trump was to assassinate one or both, and I’m not interested in getting iced by the SS
Unless you think there’s some magic number of comments you can make on the internet that will somehow convince enough voters to ditch the two main parties. Of course, you would have to be incredibly naive to believe in that magic number.
There were exactly two paths the trolley could go down as of November.
Objectively false. More than three paths literally on the ballot. Ignoring the pre-November time frame. Ignoring the possibility of write-ins. You are deliberately leaving things out in your framing - you’re lying.
What did Hitler do? Spew rhetoric, tour around, and orchestrate/direct resources into genocide. That is precisely what the U.S. president and Congress have done. You may want to pretend the imaginary national line between Netanyahu and Biden somehow means Biden’s hands are clean, but he has funded, armed, rhetorically supported, militarily supported, and blocked nearly every ceasefire effort at the UN Security Council against the genocide. It is a U.S. genocide, and everyone following it is completely aware of that. Why is it that you think State Department officials are resigning, and Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire? It would be far quicker to name the U.S. politicians who aren’t complicit in the genocide. Between Congress and the presidency, depending on how strict you want to be, that’s between 1 and maybe 30 (Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, etc.)
Not even addressing that historically you don’t even need to dispel that national boundary. Not even under George W. Bush. Yet alone the genocide of the Native Americans.
Start with Biden. Blinken. Linda Thomas Greenfield. Her Deputy ambassador…Robert Wood. Matthew Miller. Vedant Patel. Brian Mast. Lindsey Graham. Mitch McConnell. Chuck Schumer. John Fetterman. Marco Rubio. Elise Stefanik. Did you even read my message? Fucking all of them.
The fact that you respond like that is fucked. Bad faith commenter, missing soul, we’re done.
So instead of the most reasonable candidate that has a chance of winning, you voted for someone else who had no chance of winning?
Thanks for making everything worse.
Genocide trumps all other “issues”. If you are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands to millions of innocents to annihilation, your “stances” on every other issue are hollow rhetoric meant for your own advancement, and the difference of having you in power over anyone else is microscopic. Not understanding that genocide means a politician is pure evil is the fucking pinnacle of “dumb”.
I am willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands to save millions. You’re willing to sacrifice millions to say you kept your hands clean. Don’t act like you’re the morally correct one.
I am not willing to sacrifice anyone. Were it not for people like you, no one would be sacrificed at all. You have no vision for a way out of perpetual war and subjugation, rather, you condemn the rest of us to it.
If you think the death of people matters then why wasn’t the climate your big issue? That will definitely kill millions (predictions on current path are that it will kill or displace over a billion). Don’t get all high and mighty about your issue when it’s not even close to being the biggest one
Point A. Mathematically, the third party voters did not cost you the election. Not in terms of the raw popular vote comparison, not in terms of the electoral college vote comparison.
Point B. No candidate is owed your vote. A “third party” candidate must be judged on the same merits as a “first”/“second” party candidate. The first and second party candidates are both complicit in genocide and/or genocidal incitement. They are literally war criminals. The only argument you can make for the preference of the first/second party candidates is not based on merit, but popularity alone. It’s circular logic to justify a population voting for a candidate on the basis of popularity - “we must vote for them because we’re voting for them”. This only appears to make sense when viewed in terms of an individual choice, but the logic completely breaks down when viewed in terms of group behavior. I cannot stress enough that this is an absolutely basic question in terms of civic engagement in a so-called “representative democracy”, and yet a staggering amount of you have not even thought about it.
Start from scratch on the logic. What is the ENTIRE framework we’re using to select candidates, as a population? When compared against other frameworks, how do we evaluate which framework is ideal, based on its long-term consequences for a society? If you have not already thoroughly answered this question for yourself, you are not qualified for this discussion in the first place.
Point B: This is wrong and you’ve obscured the idea.
" we ( potential third party voters ) must vote for them because we ( left voters as a whole ) are voting for them "
It’s not circular logic, they are two different groups.
So as someone who wants the DNC ( and the GOP ) to disappear, here’s what I think are the important questions:
At what point does a third party become viable?
How do you build support for a third party when the spoiler effect is real and everyone knows it?
IMO a good idea would be a threshold system. So anyone can join the party and say, " I will vote if there are X commited voters ". If not, the party stands down. They get to build support without spoiling the vote.
This is all theoretical of course since the US may have just had it’s last election.
I have an answer for 1. and that answer is “Never”. a third party is never viable as long as we have First Past the Post voting.
As for 2, you don’t put any effort into third parties until after we fix the voting system. You work within the system and push for voting reform, or else it will never happen, and we’ll be stuck with First Past the Post forever.
The game plan is to push for one of two options, either Approval or STAR. Those two voting systems are the only Condorcet compliant systems that can fix our mess of an election system. There are some other fixes that come afterward, like ditching Primary elections (they’re not needed under Approval or STAR) and ditching the electoral college, but those can come after we fix the core problem.
To reiterate, you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it. You must hijack one of the two parties and use that to fix things. The same way the Evangelical racists hijacked the Republican Party in the 70s and 80s.
you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it.
So, so many people simply can’t grasp this. They want to use some imaginary cheat code to get what they want, immediately. That’s not how this, or a lot of things in life, work. Change in politics comes from lots and lots of effort from within the system to change the system. That or violent revolution. But the catch with violent revolution is that in the chaos that ensues, worse forces can fill the vacuum. Not to mention all the dead people.
I’d argue that violent revolution never results in something better. Those worse forces will Always move to seize power.
Violent protest is good, that coupled with people talking shit out like reasonable adults can result in something good, but there’s always that point where some unelected jackass comes in to murder the old guard, and then slaughter anyone who was working within the system to make things better.
Point B is not “wrong”, and you have not showed it is. The population as a whole is responsible for selecting the best candidate. These subdivisions, “right”, “left” and “really left” or however you want to depict them, are just cultural constructs (yes, like the election system itself) that affect people’s decision making on how to vote. Like any other idea.
How does a third party “become viable”? Define “viability”. Any party is “viable” in this system with a few votes on ballot petitions, associated paperwork, and the population voting for them. Again, this points to circular logic. It creates an impossible, circular dilemma if a population is deciding not to vote for a party because they think the population is deciding not to vote for a party. As long as they have that literally insane mentality, the third party is impossibly out of reach, like any other religious or irrational mentality, or any mentality in general, that successfully govern’s people’s behavior. What else do you want to hear? A “third party” becomes viable when they realize the insanity of that thinking and reject it.
How does a third party “become viable”? Define “viability”. Any party is “viable” in this system with a few votes on ballot petitions, associated paperwork, and the population voting for them.
Hmmm. I wonder how a population comes to vote for a 3rd party in significant enough numbers to win a national election. Hmmmm. This is a tough one. How could that possibly happen?
I’m going to spitball here. Maybe a 3rd party would have to start by supporting city/county/state 3rd party candidates across the country so that over time that 3rd party eventually has an actual presence, let’s say, in the House of Representatives, which boosts name recognition even more, so that one day maybe there’s even some in the Senate and then, holy shit, all of a sudden there’s an actual chance at winning a presidential election.
It’s comical to state that all the population has to do is vote for them, without grasping that all these other steps don’t need to happen first. I’m going to run the Barbie Party candidate in 2028 and when they don’t win, I’m going to blame the populace for not voting for them.
Uh-huh, and yet some of the population ARE aware of these candidates without being spoon-fed their “name recognition”. So if social and conventional news media filter out all candidates but those of a preferred uniparty, those should be ignored? Bullshit, wrong.
All of that is fine and dandy except we live in reality.
Reality is a cold hearted bitch. The actual choices were between the status quo, with the occasional bone thrown out way, and billionaire backed fascism, where all of us will be actively fucked for at least the next four years, and likely longer because the fascists are unlikely to ever allow elections where they have a chance of losing.
Those were the only choices, not voting or voting third party was exactly the same as voting for the fascists. Congratulations, you did it, Trump won.
Start from scratch on the logic. What is the ENTIRE framework we’re using to select candidates, as a population? When compared against other frameworks, how do we evaluate which framework is ideal, based on its long-term consequences for a society? If you have not already thoroughly answered this question for yourself, you are not qualified for this discussion in the first place.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Point B would be true in a world where the US is a properly functioning and fair democracy. It is not. Elections are popularity contests, and the easiest way to become vastly more known and popular than other candidates is by throwing money at it. Without big donors, your party doesn’t stand a chance. At best you have zero impact, at worst you act as a spoiler candidate and get the exact opposite of what you want in power.
In such a system, candidates aren’t owed your vote. You owe your neighbors to vote in such a way that potential harm is minimised. A 3rd party vote, if unviable, is never that. In the US electoral system, it doesn’t make sense to vote for someone, it makes sense to vote against someone. Which is a deeply sad reality and shows that the US is in dire need of electoral reform.
Again. I am excruciatingly well aware of the “realities” of the U.S. electoral system. They are handicaps that are currently preventing the best candidate from being selected. None of them change the fact that the population is responsible for selecting the best candidate. Of course the handicaps exist, that’s why we’re not selecting the best candidate. That does not somehow release us of the responsibility of selecting the best candidate. That makes literally no sense.
That does not somehow release us of the responsibility of selecting the best candidate.
You never had that responsibility in the first place, the US electoral system never bestowed that upon you. That privilege goes to party chairs and big donors. You have the responsibility of selecting the least worst option, which is similar but fundamentally different.
The only way to get this responsibility is through extensive electoral reform, but the money in politics has decided against that so you’re not getting it. And you have next to no viable way of getting it anyway.
You never had that responsibility in the first place, the US electoral system never bestowed that upon you. That privilege goes to party chairs and big donors. You have the responsibility of selecting the least worst option, which is similar but fundamentally different.
Clearly I’m talking about how the system must work, and you’re talking about how the system has been manipulated. These are separate topics. And the current manipulation, for all its problems, has not eliminated the ability to choose from voters. Save for the 1 or 2 states where they actively said they’re discard a specific write-in candidate (which I doubt is constitutional).
Point A. Mathematically, the third party voters did not cost you the election.
But they could have in any given election. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but I didn’t crash, so it didn’t affect me…this time. Well guess what? This time we crashed. It just didn’t happen to be their fault…this time. This time the seat belt was voters who didn’t vote.
Point B. No candidate is owed your vote.
It isn’t about owing. It’s about acknowleding that only two parties have the possibility of winning and adulting up and voting for the one CLOSEST to your ideals. The one whose voting history makes the most sense for whatever social/economic class you fall under. Not holding out for an impossibility or going bust with the option FURTHEST from your ideals.
The only argument you can make for the preference of the first/second party candidates is not based on merit, but popularity alone.
I guess we’re living in a reality where voting history doesn’t matter.
The “spoiler effect”, “lesser of two evils” logic is irrelevant. The population, under a “representative democracy” system, must follow a process by which they select the BEST candidate and elect them. That is the only rational course. Not splintering off by the millions, and then even an overwhelming majority, into the psychotic logic that you must vote for a politician based on whether or not their party affiliation won the previous election. THAT REMOVES ALL ACCOUNTABILITY FROM THE POLITICAL SYSTEM.
It isn’t about owing. It’s about acknowleding that only two parties have the possibility of winning and adulting up and voting for the one CLOSEST to your ideals.
That is not “adulting up”, that is compromising the fate of humanity to mass murderers. And you STILL have not addressed the issue that the entire population is fully capable of voting for ANYONE, specifically, PEOPLE WHO AREN’T MASS MURDERERS. That the best course of action, absolutely INDISPUTABLY, is to SELECT AND THEN VOTE FOR THE BEST CANDIDATE. Not the SECOND TO WORST CANDIDATE.
Just stop replying to me. This is absolutely disgusting and you’re flat out creeping me out at this point.
A) The third party voters convinced a lot of people not to vote.
B) You owe it to yourself to vote for the better option. All that over complication you’re doing is meaningless. Third parties can’t win. In reality the choice was Trump or not-Trump.
The only argument you can make for the preference of the first/second party candidates is not based on merit, but popularity alone.
I mean yeah, obviously. Anyone over the age of 22 should have been able to tell you that the only two candidates with a chance of winning in '24 were the Republican or the Democrat.
It’s circular logic to justify a population voting for a candidate on the basis of popularity - “we must vote for them because we’re voting for them”.
We (my peers) must vote for them because we (the rest of the country) are voting for them.
It seems like you don’t understand the simple fact that most americans genuinely like the Democrat or the Republican. They don’t get elected because everyone has deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is going to vote for them, they get elected because the average person sees Trump or Biden and says “I like that guy.”
I mean yeah, obviously. Anyone over the age of 22 should have been able to tell you that the only two candidates with a chance of winning in '24 were the Republican or the Democrat.
How is that “chance” determined?
We (my peers) must vote for them because we (the rest of the country) are voting for them.
Everyone is making this decision. Not just your peers. You cannot simply brush aside the fact that the entire population, for each individual in it, is making a voting decision based on some mental process they have.
It seems like you don’t understand the simple fact that most americans genuinely like the Democrat or the Republican. They don’t get elected because everyone has deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is going to vote for them, they get elected because the average person sees Trump or Biden and says “I like that guy.”
There’s certainly a large element of that. I would argue because, as Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” They only view their candidate in the context of “the other” candidate, with a tightly controlled narrative around them. For the huge contingent of the population trapped in this bubble of idiocy, the topic, and the comparisons to non-genocidal politicians, must be forced. You cannot allow yourself to be kettled by this trick that they play, and forced into a decision where the parameters are manufactured for you. There is no escape from that.
Does their predisposition to falling for cult of personality, “politicians shaking hands and kissing babies despite the fact that they’re mass murderers” tactics, somehow release them of their civic responsibility? No. They have the same responsibility as all of us in a democracy. They have completely failed. So what is the path to fix this? Rehabilitate your thinking. Rehabilitate their thinking. Get us back to the level where people understand what it means to participate in a democracy and taking responsibility for what they have to do, instead of being cowed into choosing between preselected candidates complicit in genocide.
“Hey, let’s vote for a candidate who literally cannot win from a party that hasn’t done the necessary work to become nationally viable because I don’t want to be part of the two party problem even though if we do so it will guarantee that a felon rapist who incited an insurrection, stripped women of a human right, and illegally attempted to overturn an election will win.” - Dipshit 3rd Party Voters
I tell them this every time, but they act like I’M the problem.
Don’t tell them they’re taking the wrong action, tell them they’re taking the right action at the wrong time.
The key to getting more 3rd party support is to start 4 years ago, right after the last major election. The second best time to start is today, right after a major election. The WORST time to start supporting a third party candidate is right before a major election in a swing state with no party presence. Tell them to get to work. They won’t get to be another major party, and they won’t change the electoral system, but they can scare a major party into adopting one, maybe two of their policy positions. Sorry but that’s just the best you can hope for if you’re trying to change the system by voting.
Don’t tell them they’re taking the wrong action, tell them they’re taking the right action at the wrong time.
I do. All the time.
I cannot express to you how many times before the election I typed comments explaining that it makes sense for them to vote 3rd party in local/state elections, but not in presidential elections now or in the foreseeable future. It takes time and a lot of effort.
They don’t care. It’s like talking to a brick wall. They want what they want and they want it now and if they don’t get it then we get to have an anti-democratic felon rapist as president.
They’re effectively children and now that we have an anti-democratic felon rapist as our president I’m done being nice to them.
They’re children that can’t grasp that you can’t just cheat code your way to a 3rd party president. Work actually has to be done over a long period of time before that reality becomes possible.
“We’ve given up on real change and accepted the fake change the system literally manufactures to pacify us, that’s part of growing up and how the world really works”
“Hey, let’s vote for a candidate who literally cannot win from a party that hasn’t done the necessary work to become nationally viable because I don’t want to be part of the two party problem even though if we do so it will guarantee that a felon rapist who incited an insurrection, stripped women of a human right, and illegally attempted to overturn an election will win.” - Dipshit 3rd Party Voters
Just as stupid as Trump supporters, as far as I’m concerned.
Well, they got what we told them they’d be getting. Why aren’t they celebrating?
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Thanks for helping Trump win! Palestine is so saved. This whole thing wasn’t about you feeling morally superior at all.
But you’re SUPPORTING GENOCIDE when you vote for the candidate most likely to get the fewest people killed! While the people of Palestine are about to be annihilated, my own right to marry is about to be taken away, and all of my trans friends are going to lose access to the drugs that keep them from killing themselves, I can rest easy knowing that I didn’t engage with the system at all
Yes, voting for politicians who commit genocide is supporting genocide. Let’s get that out of the way.
Nope. Voting for the slightly less evil politician doesn’t mean you support genocide anymore than pulling the lever means you support innocent people being run over by trolleys.
Nope, voting for (supporting) a politician who commits genocide MEANS YOU SUPPORT GENOCIDE. You people stop voting for those politicians, and guess what, THEY DON’T GET INTO OFFICE, AND WE DON’T HAVE GENOCIDES.
And enough with the trolley problem. Reality’s not a fucking trolley problem. There are millions of individuals with an infinite array of choices in front of them. You frame anything in terms of two immoral choices and you can “justify” taking the least immoral of the two, but guess what, the fucking framing isn’t correct, because there’s allllllllllllll the different paths the trolley can go down, and allllllllllllll the other people also pulling levers, and the SUM of your choices is what determines the outcome, not your individual choice alone.
There were exactly two paths the trolley could go down as of November. You can pretend there weren’t, but the only option any individual had other than Harris or Trump was to assassinate one or both, and I’m not interested in getting iced by the SS
Unless you think there’s some magic number of comments you can make on the internet that will somehow convince enough voters to ditch the two main parties. Of course, you would have to be incredibly naive to believe in that magic number.
Objectively false. More than three paths literally on the ballot. Ignoring the pre-November time frame. Ignoring the possibility of write-ins. You are deliberately leaving things out in your framing - you’re lying.
Name an American politician that has committed genocide.
Andrew Jackson.
Fair point!
What did Hitler do? Spew rhetoric, tour around, and orchestrate/direct resources into genocide. That is precisely what the U.S. president and Congress have done. You may want to pretend the imaginary national line between Netanyahu and Biden somehow means Biden’s hands are clean, but he has funded, armed, rhetorically supported, militarily supported, and blocked nearly every ceasefire effort at the UN Security Council against the genocide. It is a U.S. genocide, and everyone following it is completely aware of that. Why is it that you think State Department officials are resigning, and Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire? It would be far quicker to name the U.S. politicians who aren’t complicit in the genocide. Between Congress and the presidency, depending on how strict you want to be, that’s between 1 and maybe 30 (Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, etc.)
Not even addressing that historically you don’t even need to dispel that national boundary. Not even under George W. Bush. Yet alone the genocide of the Native Americans.
bUt hITLeR!!!
So…. You can’t name one. Thanks for playing.
Start with Biden. Blinken. Linda Thomas Greenfield. Her Deputy ambassador…Robert Wood. Matthew Miller. Vedant Patel. Brian Mast. Lindsey Graham. Mitch McConnell. Chuck Schumer. John Fetterman. Marco Rubio. Elise Stefanik. Did you even read my message? Fucking all of them.
The fact that you respond like that is fucked. Bad faith commenter, missing soul, we’re done.
Try again.
And you’re done because you have nothing. Listen dude… You swung, you missed. You’re not exempt from being called out, or being made to own your shit.
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Absolutely tremendous brain energy
I simply voted for the person opposed to genocide. This isn’t actually a democracy, so it’s not like my vote mattered anyways.
So instead of the most reasonable candidate that has a chance of winning, you voted for someone else who had no chance of winning?
Thanks for making everything worse.
Who’d you vote for?
I voted PSL. I’m in a state where it was completely inconsequential.
Excellent
Single issue voters = duuuuuuuumb.
People who say “voting doesn’t matter” = duuuuuuuuumb.
Genocide trumps all other “issues”. If you are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands to millions of innocents to annihilation, your “stances” on every other issue are hollow rhetoric meant for your own advancement, and the difference of having you in power over anyone else is microscopic. Not understanding that genocide means a politician is pure evil is the fucking pinnacle of “dumb”.
I am willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands to save millions. You’re willing to sacrifice millions to say you kept your hands clean. Don’t act like you’re the morally correct one.
I am not willing to sacrifice anyone. Were it not for people like you, no one would be sacrificed at all. You have no vision for a way out of perpetual war and subjugation, rather, you condemn the rest of us to it.
Were it not for people like me, Trump would still have been elected. Were it not for people like you, an alternative may have had a chance.
No, people like you willing to sacrifice others are those who voted for both Harris and for Trump.
If you think the death of people matters then why wasn’t the climate your big issue? That will definitely kill millions (predictions on current path are that it will kill or displace over a billion). Don’t get all high and mighty about your issue when it’s not even close to being the biggest one
You will find the same acquiescence to the fossil fuel industry across the aisle as well. In actions, not in speech.
How compelling.
Point A. Mathematically, the third party voters did not cost you the election. Not in terms of the raw popular vote comparison, not in terms of the electoral college vote comparison.
Point B. No candidate is owed your vote. A “third party” candidate must be judged on the same merits as a “first”/“second” party candidate. The first and second party candidates are both complicit in genocide and/or genocidal incitement. They are literally war criminals. The only argument you can make for the preference of the first/second party candidates is not based on merit, but popularity alone. It’s circular logic to justify a population voting for a candidate on the basis of popularity - “we must vote for them because we’re voting for them”. This only appears to make sense when viewed in terms of an individual choice, but the logic completely breaks down when viewed in terms of group behavior. I cannot stress enough that this is an absolutely basic question in terms of civic engagement in a so-called “representative democracy”, and yet a staggering amount of you have not even thought about it.
Start from scratch on the logic. What is the ENTIRE framework we’re using to select candidates, as a population? When compared against other frameworks, how do we evaluate which framework is ideal, based on its long-term consequences for a society? If you have not already thoroughly answered this question for yourself, you are not qualified for this discussion in the first place.
Absolutely right on point A.
Point B: This is wrong and you’ve obscured the idea. " we ( potential third party voters ) must vote for them because we ( left voters as a whole ) are voting for them " It’s not circular logic, they are two different groups.
So as someone who wants the DNC ( and the GOP ) to disappear, here’s what I think are the important questions:
IMO a good idea would be a threshold system. So anyone can join the party and say, " I will vote if there are X commited voters ". If not, the party stands down. They get to build support without spoiling the vote.
This is all theoretical of course since the US may have just had it’s last election.
I have an answer for 1. and that answer is “Never”. a third party is never viable as long as we have First Past the Post voting.
As for 2, you don’t put any effort into third parties until after we fix the voting system. You work within the system and push for voting reform, or else it will never happen, and we’ll be stuck with First Past the Post forever.
The game plan is to push for one of two options, either Approval or STAR. Those two voting systems are the only Condorcet compliant systems that can fix our mess of an election system. There are some other fixes that come afterward, like ditching Primary elections (they’re not needed under Approval or STAR) and ditching the electoral college, but those can come after we fix the core problem.
To reiterate, you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it. You must hijack one of the two parties and use that to fix things. The same way the Evangelical racists hijacked the Republican Party in the 70s and 80s.
So, so many people simply can’t grasp this. They want to use some imaginary cheat code to get what they want, immediately. That’s not how this, or a lot of things in life, work. Change in politics comes from lots and lots of effort from within the system to change the system. That or violent revolution. But the catch with violent revolution is that in the chaos that ensues, worse forces can fill the vacuum. Not to mention all the dead people.
I’d argue that violent revolution never results in something better. Those worse forces will Always move to seize power.
Violent protest is good, that coupled with people talking shit out like reasonable adults can result in something good, but there’s always that point where some unelected jackass comes in to murder the old guard, and then slaughter anyone who was working within the system to make things better.
Point B is not “wrong”, and you have not showed it is. The population as a whole is responsible for selecting the best candidate. These subdivisions, “right”, “left” and “really left” or however you want to depict them, are just cultural constructs (yes, like the election system itself) that affect people’s decision making on how to vote. Like any other idea.
How does a third party “become viable”? Define “viability”. Any party is “viable” in this system with a few votes on ballot petitions, associated paperwork, and the population voting for them. Again, this points to circular logic. It creates an impossible, circular dilemma if a population is deciding not to vote for a party because they think the population is deciding not to vote for a party. As long as they have that literally insane mentality, the third party is impossibly out of reach, like any other religious or irrational mentality, or any mentality in general, that successfully govern’s people’s behavior. What else do you want to hear? A “third party” becomes viable when they realize the insanity of that thinking and reject it.
Hmmm. I wonder how a population comes to vote for a 3rd party in significant enough numbers to win a national election. Hmmmm. This is a tough one. How could that possibly happen?
I’m going to spitball here. Maybe a 3rd party would have to start by supporting city/county/state 3rd party candidates across the country so that over time that 3rd party eventually has an actual presence, let’s say, in the House of Representatives, which boosts name recognition even more, so that one day maybe there’s even some in the Senate and then, holy shit, all of a sudden there’s an actual chance at winning a presidential election.
It’s comical to state that all the population has to do is vote for them, without grasping that all these other steps don’t need to happen first. I’m going to run the Barbie Party candidate in 2028 and when they don’t win, I’m going to blame the populace for not voting for them.
Uh-huh, and yet some of the population ARE aware of these candidates without being spoon-fed their “name recognition”. So if social and conventional news media filter out all candidates but those of a preferred uniparty, those should be ignored? Bullshit, wrong.
All of that is fine and dandy except we live in reality.
Reality is a cold hearted bitch. The actual choices were between the status quo, with the occasional bone thrown out way, and billionaire backed fascism, where all of us will be actively fucked for at least the next four years, and likely longer because the fascists are unlikely to ever allow elections where they have a chance of losing.
Those were the only choices, not voting or voting third party was exactly the same as voting for the fascists. Congratulations, you did it, Trump won.
I saw these responses coming and worded my comment correspondingly. Read. More. Carefully.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
Point A is absolutely true.
Point B would be true in a world where the US is a properly functioning and fair democracy. It is not. Elections are popularity contests, and the easiest way to become vastly more known and popular than other candidates is by throwing money at it. Without big donors, your party doesn’t stand a chance. At best you have zero impact, at worst you act as a spoiler candidate and get the exact opposite of what you want in power.
In such a system, candidates aren’t owed your vote. You owe your neighbors to vote in such a way that potential harm is minimised. A 3rd party vote, if unviable, is never that. In the US electoral system, it doesn’t make sense to vote for someone, it makes sense to vote against someone. Which is a deeply sad reality and shows that the US is in dire need of electoral reform.
Again. I am excruciatingly well aware of the “realities” of the U.S. electoral system. They are handicaps that are currently preventing the best candidate from being selected. None of them change the fact that the population is responsible for selecting the best candidate. Of course the handicaps exist, that’s why we’re not selecting the best candidate. That does not somehow release us of the responsibility of selecting the best candidate. That makes literally no sense.
You never had that responsibility in the first place, the US electoral system never bestowed that upon you. That privilege goes to party chairs and big donors. You have the responsibility of selecting the least worst option, which is similar but fundamentally different.
The only way to get this responsibility is through extensive electoral reform, but the money in politics has decided against that so you’re not getting it. And you have next to no viable way of getting it anyway.
Clearly I’m talking about how the system must work, and you’re talking about how the system has been manipulated. These are separate topics. And the current manipulation, for all its problems, has not eliminated the ability to choose from voters. Save for the 1 or 2 states where they actively said they’re discard a specific write-in candidate (which I doubt is constitutional).
But they could have in any given election. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but I didn’t crash, so it didn’t affect me…this time. Well guess what? This time we crashed. It just didn’t happen to be their fault…this time. This time the seat belt was voters who didn’t vote.
It isn’t about owing. It’s about acknowleding that only two parties have the possibility of winning and adulting up and voting for the one CLOSEST to your ideals. The one whose voting history makes the most sense for whatever social/economic class you fall under. Not holding out for an impossibility or going bust with the option FURTHEST from your ideals.
I guess we’re living in a reality where voting history doesn’t matter.
Oh, now it’s “could have”.
The “spoiler effect”, “lesser of two evils” logic is irrelevant. The population, under a “representative democracy” system, must follow a process by which they select the BEST candidate and elect them. That is the only rational course. Not splintering off by the millions, and then even an overwhelming majority, into the psychotic logic that you must vote for a politician based on whether or not their party affiliation won the previous election. THAT REMOVES ALL ACCOUNTABILITY FROM THE POLITICAL SYSTEM.
That is not “adulting up”, that is compromising the fate of humanity to mass murderers. And you STILL have not addressed the issue that the entire population is fully capable of voting for ANYONE, specifically, PEOPLE WHO AREN’T MASS MURDERERS. That the best course of action, absolutely INDISPUTABLY, is to SELECT AND THEN VOTE FOR THE BEST CANDIDATE. Not the SECOND TO WORST CANDIDATE.
Just stop replying to me. This is absolutely disgusting and you’re flat out creeping me out at this point.
Removed by mod
A) The third party voters convinced a lot of people not to vote.
B) You owe it to yourself to vote for the better option. All that over complication you’re doing is meaningless. Third parties can’t win. In reality the choice was Trump or not-Trump.
It’s like talking to flat earthers man. They honest to God believe a 3rd party candidate for president can win at this point in American history.
How do you introduce common sense to a brick wall?
I mean yeah, obviously. Anyone over the age of 22 should have been able to tell you that the only two candidates with a chance of winning in '24 were the Republican or the Democrat.
We (my peers) must vote for them because we (the rest of the country) are voting for them.
It seems like you don’t understand the simple fact that most americans genuinely like the Democrat or the Republican. They don’t get elected because everyone has deluded themselves into thinking everyone else is going to vote for them, they get elected because the average person sees Trump or Biden and says “I like that guy.”
How is that “chance” determined?
Everyone is making this decision. Not just your peers. You cannot simply brush aside the fact that the entire population, for each individual in it, is making a voting decision based on some mental process they have.
There’s certainly a large element of that. I would argue because, as Noam Chomsky said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” They only view their candidate in the context of “the other” candidate, with a tightly controlled narrative around them. For the huge contingent of the population trapped in this bubble of idiocy, the topic, and the comparisons to non-genocidal politicians, must be forced. You cannot allow yourself to be kettled by this trick that they play, and forced into a decision where the parameters are manufactured for you. There is no escape from that.
Does their predisposition to falling for cult of personality, “politicians shaking hands and kissing babies despite the fact that they’re mass murderers” tactics, somehow release them of their civic responsibility? No. They have the same responsibility as all of us in a democracy. They have completely failed. So what is the path to fix this? Rehabilitate your thinking. Rehabilitate their thinking. Get us back to the level where people understand what it means to participate in a democracy and taking responsibility for what they have to do, instead of being cowed into choosing between preselected candidates complicit in genocide.
I tell them this every time, but they act like I’M the problem.
Don’t tell them they’re taking the wrong action, tell them they’re taking the right action at the wrong time.
The key to getting more 3rd party support is to start 4 years ago, right after the last major election. The second best time to start is today, right after a major election. The WORST time to start supporting a third party candidate is right before a major election in a swing state with no party presence. Tell them to get to work. They won’t get to be another major party, and they won’t change the electoral system, but they can scare a major party into adopting one, maybe two of their policy positions. Sorry but that’s just the best you can hope for if you’re trying to change the system by voting.
I do. All the time.
I cannot express to you how many times before the election I typed comments explaining that it makes sense for them to vote 3rd party in local/state elections, but not in presidential elections now or in the foreseeable future. It takes time and a lot of effort.
They don’t care. It’s like talking to a brick wall. They want what they want and they want it now and if they don’t get it then we get to have an anti-democratic felon rapist as president.
They’re effectively children and now that we have an anti-democratic felon rapist as our president I’m done being nice to them.
If your actions aren’t directly helping to prevent Republicans gaining control, then you’re part of the problem
They’re children that can’t grasp that you can’t just cheat code your way to a 3rd party president. Work actually has to be done over a long period of time before that reality becomes possible.
But children don’t have patience.
Angsty teens who think they’re the only ones angry enough to change the world.
Angtsy teens who don’t realize the adults are angry too, we’re just used to these painful truths.
“We’ve given up on real change and accepted the fake change the system literally manufactures to pacify us, that’s part of growing up and how the world really works”
Kinda proving my point aren’t ya?