we have a 2 party system because we have "Winner Take All, First Past The Post" voting.
FPTP voting will always result in a duopoly because whichever side breaks ranks and goes 3rd party loses _everything_ to whichever side doesn't. Search YouTube and you'll find plenty of videos of varying detail and amusement to explain why a 2 party system is inevitable with FPTP.
As for this election, don't bother with Green. If Green (and Libertarian) are serious they'll form a coalition with each other and all other disaffected voters to get Ranked Choice Voting.
In 2016, the Democrats' strategy was to nominate the worst possible candidate, and then try to browbeat everyone into voting for them anyway because "a vote for anyone else is a vote for Trump!" Fuck that. If Democrats really care that much about "stopping Trump," then they can damn well nominate someone who is reasonably palatable to people who aren't hardcore Democrats.
They did somewhat better this time around with Biden, at least, so maybe they learned something. Although the fact that their total nut
I wouldn't call Harris a nutjob. She's smart, but she's also incredibly scary. Her history is filled with the same types of authoritarian leanings as Trump, she's just not as loud and obnoxious with it. Most of the time at any rate.
As opposed as I am to fascism and authoritarianism, inept and weak are not qualities that we should ever look for in a president. He is head of the executive branch, after all. Every presidential administration will almost inevitably be faced with unique challenges that only they can deal with effectively.
What we've seen since before our lifetime is the checks and balance on executive branch being slowly eroded. Once you give someone power, it's really hard to take it back. Trump is as guilty as Obama is as
you make claim, you prove, but more than that.
Media is bullshitting 24/7.
Unless I see video of something - I don't believe it.
Its like with this Kyle Rittenhouse.
He is called white supremacist non stop.
I have seen 3 videos at different time.
Self defence all the way.
And yet people like you still call him racist and want his blood.
No. Just no. I have 2 direct ancestors who fought nazzi and lived to tell story, and third helped red army as medical personnel. One returned as permanent invalid. Poor fam
I'm curious (I don't really care) but she's loud and obnoxious seems to be a disqualifying characteristic, so loud and obnoxious compared to how ? Mother Theresa or Donald Trump.
Because if she's loud and obnoxious in an unqualifying way I'm not sure what to think of Trump.
On a linear scale her actions certainly seem to position her to the right of Trump.
She's advocating policies I couldn't support and her actions I can't support; that I'm sat halfway between her policies and her actions makes me deeply distrust what she says.
If you care about who's your president you start by finding your own candidate to support, you don't wait and hope for someone else to nominate someone you could agree with and then moan about them not satisfying your requirements. Complaining about this election is too late, now is the time for you to find your candidate for the next election.
They did somewhat better this time around with Biden, at least, so maybe they learned something.
Not really. It was clear early on that Biden was losing to various other moderate Democrats, so they essentially "cleared the lanes" to ensure that the primary became Biden vs Bernie, and Not Bernie handily won that contest.
And who knows, maybe Biden is the best candidate the Democrats have left, because they've basically destroyed their "farm teams" and have no up and coming Democrats. There's this generational gap between Biden's generation and the "new progressive" generation that's essentially infiltrated the Democratic party because they essentially gave up on recruiting younger members. (Yes, there are a lot of young people who "identify" as Democrats, but if you get them to list their views, they don't really align with the party itself. They just align slightly better with the Democrats than they do Republicans.)
But we don't really know if there was a better candidate, because the Democratic party ensured Biden won by telling everyone who was plausibly running against him (in other words, not Bernie or Warren) not to.
Biden might not be as bad a choice as Hillary was, but make no mistake, he was nominated through the same corrupt party process as she was. The Democratic Party is, ironically, trying to ensure that they never have another Obama or Bill Clinton - party outsiders who snuck in past the party filter.
It was clear early on that Biden was losing to various other moderate Democrats
The RCP average [realclearpolitics.com] shows that Biden was in the lead nearly the entire time. On October 7, 2019, at Warren's peak, she just barely edged into the lead for a single day. Other than that, Biden was always the favored moderate (i.e. non-Sanders) candidate.
I followed the primary like a hawk, this is incorrect. Biden's core support was incredibly solid. Meanwhile the other right wing Dems were basically all trading votes among the same pool of voters. e.g. none of them had a "base" that wouldn't abandon them no matter what. Bernie had that, but that base didn't show up to vote for him (it's debatable if that was due to the general structure of voting in America that lends itself to voter suppression or the staggeringly crappy campaign he ran which was headed u
Past the party filter? Didn't Obama get "crowned" the next presidential candidate because he had a wonderful, hopeful speech and people were falling all over themselves to elect the nation's 1st black president?
"They" don't nominate. People do. If you want a better nominee, vote in the primary.
If the Libertarians want to be taken seriously, they can run in the Republican primary. If they really had the support of 5% of the adult population, that's enough to take over the (R) ticket. That's what Bernie Sanders did. That's why he's taken seriously, and Jo Jorgeson isn't.
"They" disagree with you. (No more stupid ""s around that word, please.) Specifically, from https://observer.com/2017/08/c... [observer.com]:
"DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate."
Other DNC fat cats have said as much, a little searching would show you what they claim to believe. They apparently believe that they're the ones who are and should be responsible for picking the candidate. Even if the voters want to put in someone they don't like, they feel they can override the will of the voters with good conscience. This was the explicitly stated reason fo
The superdelegate rule that has since been removed? I agree it was bad (although superdelegates are just elected Democrats). But after Sanders in 2016 demonstrated the error in how they were set up, superdelegates now just break ties. They were set up after the ties in 1976 caused literal riots and violence. Bad solution, but not evil.
As for what lawyers say, they always make grandiose claims about rights.
But the reason "They" is in quotes is because using "They" as you do implies some weird shadow ca
#1, the 5% is a red herring. It comes from the fact that if you get 5% of the vote you qualify for some federal money in a Presidential election. It's pointless, because accepting that money comes with a *ton* of strings attached, and if you could get 5% of the vote you wouldn't take the money because you could raise much more (even from small dollar donations) without those strings. Lib & Green both use the 5% myth to try and give their voters a goal to reach, but it's a mirage.
The "Democratic Party" didn't nominate the worst possible candidate. Voters nominated the candidate.
Quit with this bullshit that there is some secret cabal of lizard people choosing who we vote for. You know who is selecting candidates you don't personally like? Primary voters. Did you vote in the primary? Did you support and encourage a candidate to run for office that you like?
Third parties are just vanity projects for make believe politicians who know they can't even convince the voters already incl
Small numbers of rich supporters opposing him make it very difficult for an obscure candidate to catch on, or for an unfavored candidate to succeed. Someone provided the bribe for Bernie to drop out.
You've heard of candidates forming "exploratory committees." That's when try to find big donors to back their campaign, more than when they start actually campaigning.
Lack of major backers doesn't prevent a successful run for office, but that lack makes it much less likely.
Or Ms Wasserman-Schultz if you prefer. She had spent the last 8 years gutting the party so that nobody could challenge her. That's how Bernie came out of nowhere. Nobody wanted her except the super rich but they'd been bankrolling the DNC (and Hilary with them) so she and her ilk were in positions of power to block things. Biden's actually suffering the damage Hilary did to the party to prevent Obama 2.0 from unseating her.
Also what part of Harris is a nut job? She's a pretty bog standard right wing Dem
Ranked Choice is pus. Not may voters can figure out a third choice, and expecting them to figure out how to rank their preferences accurately is a loser.
But it sure is attractive when you don't like the outcomes...
I don't think anyone is confused about theory preferences. But I know family that's had to vote ranked choice, they aren't unintelligent, and they really didn't understand that process to be sure they were voting as they intended. The process isn't as simple as up or down. Maybe we should learn new things, but preferably with some planning.
Democracy is how you peacefully remove a government
Canadians are culturally closer to Americans than any other people. We also have first past the post. First past the post allows you to vote the government out. If you look at countries like Israel or up until now New Zealand, there are parties that were always part of the coalition government. You could never vote them out because every coalition needed them. In most countries with FPTP there are two dominant parties but also a viable third party. Occasionally the voters will vote one of those main parties into oblivion. Canada's current opposition party and former governing party, the conservatives, is really the Reform party which formed in the 80s. The governing Liberal party was the third place party a few elections ago.
So FPTP doesn't lead to duopolies, it does allow new parties to form and most importantly it allows you to vote a party completely out of government. Gerrymandering, unlimited funding and outright corruption are the reason the USA has only two viable parties.
Canada has a parliamentary system so it's apples and oranges. You have a bunch of small FPtP elections for ministers and then they come together to form a government and appoint a PM. So you can have many smaller parties running for MP and have a coalition government form. Third parties are viable in this scenario because both mainstream parties need them to form a government, so they get a voice even if they aren't the majority.
With the US system, that simply isn't possible on the national level. We do
Which blunts the effects of FPTP a little. That said your country is gradually being moved to the right with your single payer healthcare in particular under attack.
Eventually you'll end up with a duopoly, it's just taking a little longer because your parliament slows the process. America's system accelerates it, but you'll catch up to us in a few more decades.
Also, the Democratic Party IS effectively a coalition, with caucuses ranging from moderate to highly liberal. Conceivably, in some alternate version of the US, those would be a vast collection of small, separate parties, either agreeing to form a coalition government, or never winning power at all.
we have a 2 party system because we have "Winner Take All, First Past The Post" voting.
And yet a lot of people want to make it *even more* winner take all, first past the post by doing away with the electoral college mechanism which was specifically designed to be a brake on that.
The fix for the FPTP isn't easy. The current systems, such as ranked choice vote, don't fix it. For example, ranked choice vote mostly just serves to eliminate the time and expense of runoff elections, which swinging the resultant winner closer to being a moderate centrist. The moderate centrist is certainly better than the party purist of course. However such elections may have 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats and 1 each of Republican, Green, and Libertarian; meaning you still end up with a moderate centr
If ranked choice national popular voting had given the President the office in 1912, Wilson probably would have lost. Roosevelt might have won, which would have been somewhat better than Wilson, or Taft might have won which would have been better still. The world would be a different place: no idiotic attempt to form the League of Nations, possibly no US income tax, among other things.
we have a 2 party system because we have "Winner Take All, First Past The Post" voting.
There must be more to it than that. There are plenty of countries out there with winner-take-all, first-past-the-post systems that do not have duopolies.
green (Score:5, Insightful)
Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
FPTP voting will always result in a duopoly because whichever side breaks ranks and goes 3rd party loses _everything_ to whichever side doesn't. Search YouTube and you'll find plenty of videos of varying detail and amusement to explain why a 2 party system is inevitable with FPTP.
As for this election, don't bother with Green. If Green (and Libertarian) are serious they'll form a coalition with each other and all other disaffected voters to get Ranked Choice Voting.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
In 2016, the Democrats' strategy was to nominate the worst possible candidate, and then try to browbeat everyone into voting for them anyway because "a vote for anyone else is a vote for Trump!" Fuck that. If Democrats really care that much about "stopping Trump," then they can damn well nominate someone who is reasonably palatable to people who aren't hardcore Democrats.
They did somewhat better this time around with Biden, at least, so maybe they learned something. Although the fact that their total nut
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
I wouldn't call Harris a nutjob. She's smart, but she's also incredibly scary. Her history is filled with the same types of authoritarian leanings as Trump, she's just not as loud and obnoxious with it. Most of the time at any rate.
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That bitch will become POTUS within 12 to 16 months. Maybe sooner depending on how fast Biden is impeached by his own party.
Why would they impeach him? I've never seen a Presidential nominee who looked less like he wanted the job or had four good years in him.
Re: Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
> I've never seen a Presidential nominee who looked less like he wanted the job
That might be the best qualification you could ever hope for.
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Heinlein pointed out that seeking power should disqualify you from being president.
I'd rather have an inept, weak President than a strong, fascist, authoritarian one.
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As opposed as I am to fascism and authoritarianism, inept and weak are not qualities that we should ever look for in a president. He is head of the executive branch, after all. Every presidential administration will almost inevitably be faced with unique challenges that only they can deal with effectively.
What we've seen since before our lifetime is the checks and balance on executive branch being slowly eroded. Once you give someone power, it's really hard to take it back. Trump is as guilty as Obama is as
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Re: Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:2)
Re: Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:2)
However he was rational, knew he was running for president, and not calling a lid on his campaign by 9 am.
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Why does that scare you so much?
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How about those mass forced hysterectomies in those camps? We're *this* close to outright genocide.
Do you even read the news?
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Fixed that for you.
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I'm curious (I don't really care) but she's loud and obnoxious seems to be a disqualifying characteristic, so loud and obnoxious compared to how ? Mother Theresa or Donald Trump.
Because if she's loud and obnoxious in an unqualifying way I'm not sure what to think of Trump.
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On a linear scale her actions certainly seem to position her to the right of Trump.
She's advocating policies I couldn't support and her actions I can't support; that I'm sat halfway between her policies and her actions makes me deeply distrust what she says.
Re: Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:2)
Who was it that said bernie sexually harassed her?
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If you care about who's your president you start by finding your own candidate to support, you don't wait and hope for someone else to nominate someone you could agree with and then moan about them not satisfying your requirements. Complaining about this election is too late, now is the time for you to find your candidate for the next election.
Re:Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
They did somewhat better this time around with Biden, at least, so maybe they learned something.
Not really. It was clear early on that Biden was losing to various other moderate Democrats, so they essentially "cleared the lanes" to ensure that the primary became Biden vs Bernie, and Not Bernie handily won that contest.
And who knows, maybe Biden is the best candidate the Democrats have left, because they've basically destroyed their "farm teams" and have no up and coming Democrats. There's this generational gap between Biden's generation and the "new progressive" generation that's essentially infiltrated the Democratic party because they essentially gave up on recruiting younger members. (Yes, there are a lot of young people who "identify" as Democrats, but if you get them to list their views, they don't really align with the party itself. They just align slightly better with the Democrats than they do Republicans.)
But we don't really know if there was a better candidate, because the Democratic party ensured Biden won by telling everyone who was plausibly running against him (in other words, not Bernie or Warren) not to.
Biden might not be as bad a choice as Hillary was, but make no mistake, he was nominated through the same corrupt party process as she was. The Democratic Party is, ironically, trying to ensure that they never have another Obama or Bill Clinton - party outsiders who snuck in past the party filter.
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Fuck the Democrats, fuck the Republicans: together, they are the party of pure lizard.
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It was clear early on that Biden was losing to various other moderate Democrats
The RCP average [realclearpolitics.com] shows that Biden was in the lead nearly the entire time. On October 7, 2019, at Warren's peak, she just barely edged into the lead for a single day. Other than that, Biden was always the favored moderate (i.e. non-Sanders) candidate.
Ok this is just wrong (Score:2)
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Past the party filter? Didn't Obama get "crowned" the next presidential candidate because he had a wonderful, hopeful speech and people were falling all over themselves to elect the nation's 1st black president?
Re:Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:4, Informative)
"They" don't nominate. People do. If you want a better nominee, vote in the primary.
If the Libertarians want to be taken seriously, they can run in the Republican primary. If they really had the support of 5% of the adult population, that's enough to take over the (R) ticket. That's what Bernie Sanders did. That's why he's taken seriously, and Jo Jorgeson isn't.
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"They" don't nominate.
"They" disagree with you. (No more stupid ""s around that word, please.) Specifically, from https://observer.com/2017/08/c... [observer.com]:
"DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate."
Other DNC fat cats have said as much, a little searching would show you what they claim to believe. They apparently believe that they're the ones who are and should be responsible for picking the candidate. Even if the voters want to put in someone they don't like, they feel they can override the will of the voters with good conscience. This was the explicitly stated reason fo
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The superdelegate rule that has since been removed? I agree it was bad (although superdelegates are just elected Democrats). But after Sanders in 2016 demonstrated the error in how they were set up, superdelegates now just break ties. They were set up after the ties in 1976 caused literal riots and violence. Bad solution, but not evil.
As for what lawyers say, they always make grandiose claims about rights.
But the reason "They" is in quotes is because using "They" as you do implies some weird shadow ca
So there's 2 things here (Score:2)
#2, most places do n
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The "Democratic Party" didn't nominate the worst possible candidate. Voters nominated the candidate.
Quit with this bullshit that there is some secret cabal of lizard people choosing who we vote for. You know who is selecting candidates you don't personally like? Primary voters. Did you vote in the primary? Did you support and encourage a candidate to run for office that you like?
Third parties are just vanity projects for make believe politicians who know they can't even convince the voters already incl
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Small numbers of rich supporters opposing him make it very difficult for an obscure candidate to catch on, or for an unfavored candidate to succeed. Someone provided the bribe for Bernie to drop out.
You've heard of candidates forming "exploratory committees." That's when try to find big donors to back their campaign, more than when they start actually campaigning.
Lack of major backers doesn't prevent a successful run for office, but that lack makes it much less likely.
That wasn't a strategy, that was Hilary & Debb (Score:2)
Also what part of Harris is a nut job? She's a pretty bog standard right wing Dem
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Ranked Choice is pus. Not may voters can figure out a third choice, and expecting them to figure out how to rank their preferences accurately is a loser.
But it sure is attractive when you don't like the outcomes...
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expecting them to figure out how to rank their preferences accurately
You're a fucking moron. That doesn't mean everyone else is confused about their own preferences.
Re: Without Ranked Choice Voting it's pointless (Score:2)
I don't think anyone is confused about theory preferences. But I know family that's had to vote ranked choice, they aren't unintelligent, and they really didn't understand that process to be sure they were voting as they intended. The process isn't as simple as up or down. Maybe we should learn new things, but preferably with some planning.
FPTP duoploy not necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
Canadians are culturally closer to Americans than any other people. We also have first past the post. First past the post allows you to vote the government out. If you look at countries like Israel or up until now New Zealand, there are parties that were always part of the coalition government. You could never vote them out because every coalition needed them. In most countries with FPTP there are two dominant parties but also a viable third party. Occasionally the voters will vote one of those main parties into oblivion. Canada's current opposition party and former governing party, the conservatives, is really the Reform party which formed in the 80s. The governing Liberal party was the third place party a few elections ago.
So FPTP doesn't lead to duopolies, it does allow new parties to form and most importantly it allows you to vote a party completely out of government. Gerrymandering, unlimited funding and outright corruption are the reason the USA has only two viable parties.
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Canada has a parliamentary system so it's apples and oranges. You have a bunch of small FPtP elections for ministers and then they come together to form a government and appoint a PM. So you can have many smaller parties running for MP and have a coalition government form. Third parties are viable in this scenario because both mainstream parties need them to form a government, so they get a voice even if they aren't the majority.
With the US system, that simply isn't possible on the national level. We do
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That would explain Pelosi's COVID bailout proposal.
You have a parlimentary system (Score:2)
Eventually you'll end up with a duopoly, it's just taking a little longer because your parliament slows the process. America's system accelerates it, but you'll catch up to us in a few more decades.
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Fairvote.org [fairvote.org]
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we have a 2 party system because we have "Winner Take All, First Past The Post" voting.
And yet a lot of people want to make it *even more* winner take all, first past the post by doing away with the electoral college mechanism which was specifically designed to be a brake on that.
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The fix for the FPTP isn't easy. The current systems, such as ranked choice vote, don't fix it. For example, ranked choice vote mostly just serves to eliminate the time and expense of runoff elections, which swinging the resultant winner closer to being a moderate centrist. The moderate centrist is certainly better than the party purist of course. However such elections may have 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats and 1 each of Republican, Green, and Libertarian; meaning you still end up with a moderate centr
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There must be more to it than that. There are plenty of countries out there with winner-take-all, first-past-the-post systems that do not have duopolies.
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Does someone have more then 2 choices to vote for in these countries or is a case of each seat has only 2 parties that trade the seat between them?
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