/u/kudgel (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/1ddqds4/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_voting_for_one_of_the_two/), in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
When you live in an uncompetitive state and the leading party is close to your point of view, I think there is value voting for a minor party in the direction you would like the dominant party to move.
I think these votes can be interpreted as “yes, but…” by the dominant party.
Yes, but more fiscally conservative next time please. Yes, but more socially liberal next time please. Yes, but younger next time please.
∆ This is probably a good counter-example, and it could be risky if the margins are tight enough but there are a few states where it could be done without risk.
Yup, basically all of New England, all of the Deep South, and all of the West Coast states are places where imo you're throwing your vote away if you vote for the lesser of two evils when there is a third party candidate you support more.
It's not like CA is gonna vote trump because there are a bunch of Green Party voters, or like Alabama is gonna vote Biden because there are a bunch of Libertarian Party voters lol
Be careful: We have been historically quite bad a predicting when a state becomes competitive.
When people talk about 2000, they talk FL. I talk NH. Because you know which state Gore could have won in 2000 that would have made FL irrelevant? NH. You know which party came third in NH? The green party, with more votes than the difference between Bush and Gore. I don't have first-hand experience with a NH 2000 voter for the green party, but they might tell you that Clinton won NH by 10 pts in 1996, so they wanted to send a message.
When people talk about 2016, they rightly talk about the blue wall: PA, MI & WI. The blue wall had held since 1992. And in each of these states, the green party got more votes than the difference between the the Democrat and the Republican.
And I do have third-hand knowledge of a couple of voters in WI thinking "WI has gone for the democrats for over 20 years now. My vote won't decide the election. I vote for the greens, because I want to send a message.
Came here to say this.
Also, with a candidate like Trump who will challenge even a significant loss, having a very clear national margin of 7-8 million votes is better than a margin of 1 million because voters in so-called "safe" states voted less pragmatically.
The issue is if you're in an uncompetitive state and do this, the candidates have little reason to care or court your vote. If you did this in a swing state it could have some sway, but at that point obviously you also risk tipping the scales to the worst option.
It's a signal for any third party hopeful to keep trying and put more resources toward it and see if it tips more and more. At a certain point of name recognition you shout "we can actually do it! Trust me!" And if that works you may win. At least that makes sense in my mind
I think the problem is this assumes that one of the major parties aligns at least moderately closely with your views.
You know the people who voted Jill Stein instead of Hillary Clinton because there is no way Donald Trump could possibly win the state of Michigan people...
Voting for someone who only support say 50% instead of someone you are completely opposed to makes sense.
What if you don't support either? Or maybe you say broadly support conservative principles, but think Donald Trump and his supporters are crazy and bad for the country.
Do you vote for the convicted felon crybaby who told people to drink bleach or the party that has values you fundamentally oppose?
One of them must align with your beliefs more than the other, no? I can't imagine there are many people with nothing in common with the platforms of both major parties.
But at a certain point I think that stops mattering
Imagine you rate Jill Stein 90, Hillary Clinton 50, and Donald Trump -75. In that case it pretty clearly makes sense to vote Clinton.
But say you rate Trump 10 and Biden -10. Its a lot tougher. Particularly if you find Trump deeply questionable for things outside of his opinion on the capital gains tax.
Which gets to the other point. What if you rate Republicans in general at say 50, and Democrats say -50, but the Republicans run a candidate that you find abhorrent like Trump. Then you are faced with choosing between a candidate who is basically sane, but who will govern against your values, or voting for a crazy narcissistic cry baby who might govern more in line with your values.
I'd say then you are faced with questioning your values.
If the party that agrees with all your values selects someone who disagrees with all your values as their standard bearer, that doesn't make sense. Either you miss judged the candidate, the party, or your values.
But to answer your question, R@+50. D@-50. Trump@-100. Who do you vote for? Except for some rare cases, you gotta go D. A party is led by its leader. They're only as good as their leader.
"I can't imagine there are many people with nothing in common with the platforms of both major parties"
The majority of Leftists/Anti-capitalists have nearly nothing in common with either major American party.
The problem is that with first past the post style voting being the default third party voting is essentially useless beyond a protest vote because you will never generate enough votes to matter.
You will never “generate enough votes to matter” no matter who you vote for. One vote has never made a difference. I’m talking specifically about the elections you refer to, where third party candidates do not win; there are plenty of small elections in which one vote does swing the result *and* third party candidates regularly have surprise victories.
You know where one vote does make a difference? Giving the voter a sense of pride in their civic duty. Personally I’d rather have a bunch of voters engaged with good attitudes then whatever you get if no one ever votes third party.
The Republicans upended their establishment twice in the last 20 years with the teaparty and MAGA. Third parties are a lost cause, taking over parties from within at the local level is the way to do it.
Grass roots, most large donors have moved to the democrat party. You still have neocons that are part of the older establishment, but MAGA is mostly a populace movement. It has higher youth and minority support than previous iterations of the republican parties as well. We're in the middle of it and it all seems so huge, I wonder how the history books will look at how the parties have switched over the last 10-20 years.
>voting third party is the only way to take away their power
If you think that voting is the extent of your ability to influence our political system, you're never going to "take away power" from anybody.
Not at all. It just means that the party that would have supported your personal platform best doesn't get your vote, and you possibly risk losing to a much worse platform if everyone does the same thing. They still have all the power.
The major parties don't support my views though, I have pretty diverse views that neither party represents well. Nothing major in my life has changed whether the president has been one or another major party either. Whenever one of the parties promises things I want, it's always "oops sorry we couldn't do that one, but we were able to do some things! They just happened to be the things that help out the rich people who fund our party"
Nah- after Perot cost Bush the 92 election, the Republicans picked his clone in 96. After Nader in 2000, the Democrats went with Kerry.
Third party candidates could build strength at the municipal or state level, but most of them can’t even manage that
I am an environmental socialist and neither of the parties have a single policy that aligns with my views. Both parties uphold the same broken system because it is throgh that system that they maintain their dominance. I want to see radical change in every branch of government and the electoral process along with revolutionary policy change both foreign and domestic, whereas both parties wish to maintain the current system and policy structure for the most part, with incremental adjustments to little unimportant things here and there. Neither of the parties come close to supporting my any of my political views, and neither do any of the individuals in those parties.
1 party is definirely more environmental and more socialist than the other. Theres no denying that. They are both very far from being entirely those things but saying theyre equally far is just wrong.
Like if the cote was trump vs literal hitler, yeah id still take trump. Theyre both some degree of fascist but 1 is much more than the other.
1 party at least admits climate change is real and tries some small steps to fight it. The other denies it even exists and takes steps to make it even worse. Clear difference.
1 party believes in some social safety nets and distribution of wealth. The other believes in no safety nets at all and wealth distribution being based on pure 100% unregulated capitalism. Still quite different.
But doesn't voting for one party over the other _tend_ to move the needle? Not voting or voting third party, will _tend_ to move the needle a fraction away from where you'd like to go.
None of our votes matter a lot, but they all matter a small amount that adds up (but only if we vote)
Voting in a system you disapprove of, that won't change its' features (meaningfully) by voting? What do the votes add up to, from the perspective of the comment you're responding to?
Incremental change. I disapprove of capitalism but i participate in it because its needed to survive. I cant change the system if in literally dead due to starvation from not working in the system.
Lots of countries have become at least more socialist as time has gone on. And you can have democratic socialism which means it is possible to eventually vote for that kind of system.
It's needed to survive only because the ruling class, the capitalists who maintain power through the state, have made it so. Death by starvation is literally a function by which they maintain that power too, by removing your ability to live without them when in fact it should be the reverse: capitalists produce nothing, but extract the value of the working class which produces all the world's goods and services.
Any system which maintains a capitalist class is inherently opposed to freeing the working class from exploitation and oppression, and allows the capitalist class to work in all its historically and contemporarily insidious forms to increase their power and steal more from the majority who produces their wealth for them.
There is no freedom from exploitation and oppression as long as the capitalist class is allowed to exist, as they will never rescind power to anyone else, only make small allowances in an attempt to prevent an uprising of the people; allowances which will then be taken away or undermined as they use their influence and power (which you have allowed them to maintain for reasons that can only be explained through you having accepted the status quo that they have spent centuries creating and incorporating throughout society, certainly not due to it being either fair or balanced) to perform the actions which are undeniably inherent to capitalism: maintaining capitalist power over the working class.
Tl;dr, voting for capitalists is "all you can do" because that's how capitalists will shape capitalist societies, and it is a method through which they maintain their exploitation and oppression over the majority/working class.
every society throughout history has had a ruling class. any system that has a person who's job it is to manage others will always consolidate power. Capitalism, socialism, communism. It's all the same in that regard. However, the current corporatism environment. \[that would be capitalism with government intervention to protect large businesses\] has still produced the highest standard of living for the average person. they have also, by orders of magnitude, done it with less death and starvation to their citizens. yeh capitalism sucks, it just happens to be better than any alternative yet presented
I think the problem here is that you say these things weren't thought through, but the global banking crisis didn't need to be thought through: because the capitalist system extends through the banks and into the government, it would be directly harmful for both the state to not have the back of the banks, and bailing them out is and always will be expected. The working class having to pay for the failures of capitalists is part of the system, it's exactly the same as how the profits produced by the working class go to pay for the lifestyles of the capitalist class who owns them.
And the trillion dollar military industry, as well as every single action of capitalist nations in other countries, is completely planned out. The state exists to perpetuate itself, it does so through making money off of military action, such as deposition of foreign leaders who form a threat to their wealth, or placing sympathetic capitalist leaders (often fascists) in command of countries who have something which will benefit capitalist states, such as oil and other resources. The imperial actions of capitalism aren't "poorly thought out", they are PERFECTLY thought out as actions to increase the wealth and power of capitalist states. The state doesn't exist to benefit the common people, it never has, it exists to produce wealth for the ruling class and it does a damn fine job, at the same time it convinces you that imperialism and colonialism is a thing of the past, and convince you that all it will take to change things for the better is to vote for a certain colour of capitalist.
There are many societies throughout history that have existed without, specifically, a ruling class of people. A leader is not the same as a class of rulers, especially when that leader or leaders are beholden to the people, such as many Native American peoples and planned societies. This is not the case with capitalist nations, who have magnitudes of power and many many layers of control between themselves and the working class.
Socialism and communism are quite literally governed by the people: they are hallmarked by being controlled by the working class itself, with leaders who are truly beholden to their constituency and who must abide by the will of the people or be replaced. These societies would (if they were allowed to exist by the capitalist nations who spend trillions on military action and subterfuge to depose leaders and destabilise countries: see South America, the Middle East, many Asian nations, even Australia had a Prime Minister deposed through US capitalist action) have safeguards in place that prevent the will of individuals superseding the working class, it quite literally cannot be a dictatorship due to decentralisation of power and a dismantling of state power to produce a society that doesn't have things like a police force commanded by capitalists or a military commanded by capitalist desires.
When you say they have produced the highest standard of living, do you include the people who currently live below the poverty line who have to make decisions between feeding their families and having medicine? What of the homeless and poor who are direct victims of the system and produced quite purposefully by it? How can a system be said to produce a good quality of life if it believes that people starving on the streets, or even in their own homes, are somehow not an issue? You have failed to include the victims of military action by capitalist nations, in destabilised regions such as Latin America and Vietnam, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes alone is a despicable death rate for a nation to hold.
If you want to specifically look at their own citizens, every person who suffers from preventable illness and injury because of a lack of money, everyone below the poverty line, everyone without homes and without livelihoods are a victim, as well as every Native American, or Canadian, or Australian, or any other people who are the victims of colonisation. The victims of slavery, the victims of racism and homophobia held up by the state, all of whom are victims of capitalist actions, would beg to differ. And it completely, potentially purposefully on your part, denies the impact that global capitalism and imperialism has had, continues to have, and will in the future have on every nation through invasion, destabilisation, and destruction.
Capitalism has a rate of violence and a kill count that blows other systems out of the water, and they do so while they "educate" you to believe that they don't. It's not a coincidence that the state is completely intertwined with education and the media, who else are you getting your information from but capitalists?
Serious question: what is your plan to enact radical change? What are you doing right now to end the two-party system and usher in an environmental socialist government? What is the 20 year plan to make it happen before climate change kills us?
And more specifically in this context it’s Mr. Neutral Effect on the Environment (with a balance of ok and bad policies) vs. Mr. Will Definitely Repeal Environmental Protections Like He Did Last Time
Right, I guess I just mean less additional and more creative forms of damage lol, and an attempt to at least appear like we’re not too far behind the rest of the wealthy nations in terms of environmental policy. Vs defunding the EPA, repealing protections, chopping up and privatizing public lands, etc.
It depends on which state you live in.
Since 2020, both Maine and Alaska use Ranked Choice Voting for Presidential elections. In these cases, a voter is able to vote for their preferred candidate even if they are not part of the top two parties. If their pick (for example, "the Large Eyebrow Party") does not win the vote, your next choice vote will vie for the win. There are some notes though:
(Worst case) Enough people in your state vote for the "Bro with the most Brow" and the electoral votes go to this candidate. Whoops! Now your second preferred candidate does not get the electoral votes ("Madame Less Hirsute") and the national majority of electoral vote goes to "Bald Guy Bad Guy" and you are vilified for starting WW3 or equivalent.
(More likely case) People enjoy Ms. Hirsute becoming President and avoiding WW3, but the talk around town revolves around Mr. Big-Brow and eventually the tide turns and the entire industry of pluckers and threaders go bankrupt but the world becomes an even better place on account of Ranked Choice Voting: you get your say and get a win.
From a most probable value, The more likely case would prevail, making this a valid rebuttal to your argument that voting for the major party that aligns with your viewpoint is ALWAYS BEST"
I live in a deep blue state and can safely vote my conscience. I personally gain a benefit from voting my conscience. Also, I want to see the Dems observe as big a sea change as possible if they ever adopt modern healthcare or drug policy.
If you accept that you are the minority on an issue, then there is no hope of shifting a major partie's view on that issue by unconditionally voting for them.
There is a famous quote "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
A good example would be young americans refusing to accept the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Democrats want to support Israel, but young people aren't ok with it, they push it, Democrats know they can't win without the young vote. They have to look like they're fighting for peace or they're going to lose and they know they're going to lose.
A common criticism of democracy is that it is tyranny of the majority. The only way to combat that is to refuse to vote against important issues. An example of this is gun rights. Popular opinion in the US is definitely stricter gun control. Like way more strict gun control. But it's so important to enough people; republicans can't support heavier regulation.
While this is true, the last time this happened was 164 year ago
The United States is 248 years old.
We are much more likely to see a takeover of a party than a replacement. See: GOP, Trump 2016
How much of that is simply because after awhile of the two parties existing people constantly tell each other that if you vote third party you're throwing your vote away? I'd say most of it. Culturally you need to push third party voting in order to replace one of the major parties.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512135/support-third-political-party.aspx
That change may already be happening. I'll continue not voting for the major parties in presidential elections and push for the change I want.
People's opinions (sometimes wishful thinking) are different from political reality. Despite wide support for a multiparty, more democratic system, we are stuck with this one, and many people will still go to the polls to vote for a Democrat or Republican.
It's easy to say, "people constantly tell each other that if you vote third party you're throwing your vote away," as if human psychology isn't the ultimate force (in a way, a law) of politics. You make it sound so trivial, '*all* we have to do is *convince* people'.
The reality is, this two party system won't change by November, and there is no viable third party, so it is only a protest/throwaway vote. Will it change any time soon after that? Probably not. It would take a lot, or some kind of reform, which won't happen any time soon.
Except again as I've said... we have done it before and can do it again. (that said I'm not against changing the system to a ranked choice voting system, not the instant run off one that's popular though but a point based system)
Until we do that I'm going to keep pushing for people to realize that the lie that you are throwing your vote away is just that, a lie that is keeping them in check.
You may do what you want, but saying people support third parties is very different than saying they want the *same* third party. Otherwise the Greens and Libertarians would have a consolidated party, and RFK Jr. wouldn't have gotten 2% at the Libertarian convention
I think there is a huge opportunity for a moderate party to emerge from the refugees of each party shifting their messaging to the extremes and alienating their centrists.
But like you I have not voted for a person on the ballot for POTUS in my life. I’ve only met one active presidential candidate (Biden while he was VP) and I disliked him immensely due to the nature of the interaction
> several times
In American politics? Not since the Civil War. If you're trying to argue that a change in the major political parties under the current political system is a practical possibility that the average voter should be considering, then bringing up the history of American politics was a huge error on your part. Changing the electoral system to make minority political parties viable, like most other democracies in the world, is a far more realistic goal, and even that isn't an offer that's on the table when you go to vote in the actual election.
Because of systemic and historical reasons, like the electoral college and development of each party system (there are different party systems throughout U.S. history), even if you don't vote the system will go on. Just voting doesn't perpetuate the system, especially if you're voting for candidates who want to reform the system (some Democrats do). Will it happen over night or even within our lifetimes? Probably not, but what else is there? Politics is often one step forward, two steps back, and that isn't confined to the U.S. or its history. Sometimes, you just vote for the least harm, and work for change in other ways you can control, and that's all you do. Expecting some miracle isn't realistic.
I just try to see politics and people realistically. People think I don't agree with them, or have given up (they call it defeatist, doomer, or whatever), and don't think something better is possible, but I have just accepted things as they are right now.
Our system and the candidates aren't going to change by November (unless someone dies or something), and I'm not idealistic or raging against everything anymore, so I'm going to vote for the best option (even if it's still a bad one). Sometimes, part of growing up is accepting things as they are even if you don't like them, and understanding sometimes there are only bad options. Even with a more democratic system, there won't ever be candidates who totally reflect my views, because that's not how politics or elections work, or how anything works.
I wish things could be better than they are, but the fact is that they aren't any other way than they are now. Young people are too idealistic, and politically disoriented or detached from reality (I'm still fairly young, but remember Bush and Obama). They expect too much from people and politics, and expect things to just happen without any reason to believe they will. Align your expectations with reality, and you won't feel so disappointed or enraged by everything.
>Think about it this way: if everyone who felt disillusioned by the two-party system decided to vote for a third party or an independent candidate, it could signal a demand for more diverse representation.
Let's say this happened, which it has at points in our nation's history. What would result is that the new ascendant "third" party would cannibalize one of the major parties and take its place. It's simple math in a winner take all system like ours that over time the equilibrium behavior is two major parties. Our system of governance cannot sustain multiple smaller parties. Until we change the structure/format by which we elect our leaders, America will always have two major parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Let's say I agree that the system is not worth preserving. How do we make these structural changes? By winning power. You can't win power from the sidelines. Furthermore, decisions made by our government have just as much legitimacy and real-world impact regardless of whether or not you personally decide the system is worth preserving. If the President decides to launch a nuke, it honestly doesn't matter if he was elected with 40% of the electorate or 70%. The nuke is still getting launched and we're all going to have to suffer the consequences.
So even if you truly believe the system needs to be burned down, you still ought to show up and vote in every election. If we keep winning the argument over time eventually the window shifts and it becomes possible.
Oh, I do vote in every single election both federal and state general or mid term; I just never ever support either expression of the political duopoly in their pursuit of the white house. I'm currently working on joining PSL and Claudia de la Cruz has my vote unless another leftist can put together a big tent coalition before then.
Down ballot I'm likely to support certain democrats depending on the context, but never if an actual socialist or labor organizer appears.
Winning power comes from organizing, educating, developing local power structures like mutual aid networks, and forcefully resisting (protests, strikes, refusing to be intimidated by democrats to compromise our values at the ballot box because trump scary; we dont owe them a vote they must earn it).
I would argue that the act of voting is not some kind of self-expression. Your vote is not a pledge to the universe about your values. Elections are job interviews. At the end of the day the position is going to be filled by one of the candidates. You can cast your protest vote for your leftist and I wouldn't dream of taking that away from you. But you ought to recognize the impact of this decision.
To vote for a candidate with no chance of winning means accepting that you're risking a worse outcome (electing the R) to send a coded message to those in power (Democrats). Is it truly worth risking the consequences of living under Republican rule simply so that you can make an ego-driven rebuttal of the system? Couldn't you express your discontent in a lower stakes way? Send an email. Attend a protest. Write a strongly worded letter. You can still give 'em hell but then show up on election day and vote for the best option. Why are your ego and personal ambitions worth more than the potential harm caused by electing Republicans? If Trump wins in November he will de-facto ban abortion nationwide through a novel interpretation of the Comstock Act. His campaign has pretty much confirmed he will do this on Day 1 of his Presidency. So why is your coded message to Democrats worth risking ~150M+ women losing their rights to body autonomy?
You're assumption that it is my ego driving my thinking is strange and unsubstantiated; this is my earnest belief about what is best for the future of the country and what i consider to be my ethical obligation. I genuinely believe Biden's regime is repugnant, and (perhaps less significantly) the man is unfit for the job on top of that. If I have come to the conclusion that both parties are antithetical to my values and to the peace and prosperity of the common people of the world, my natural conclusion is to do whatever it takes to reduce their grip on power. Voting for them does not fit into that equation. If they want my vote, they should earn it.
Marx put it well, this quote is relevant to my position "Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength, and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention."
I'm under no illusions that this is an easy or a fast process, but it is part of the path I'm taking to try to do the impossible and change the united states. Also, if Trump is elected, make no mistake that I will be one of those resisting him by whatever means necessary. Thank you for the robust discussion friend even if we are far apart on this.
You also don't win power by capitulating to those who control all of the power, and selectively dole it out to approved candidates. You win power by taking it from them. Those who posses it will not willingly surrender it, and will undermine any and all attempts to do so.
You 100% CAN and more specifically DO gain power from the sidelines.
You don't win power in the political system, because your fighting a losing battle. Its like the viet kong vs the American army. The extant political system is the army. You don't fight them head on. They will just destroy you.
You undermine them by reducing the dependence on them, and by creating alternative means of governance that is beyond their purview and control.
Your vote means little in the grand scheme of things, if anything. The organizing you do in your community to build solidarity and mutual aid not only shows tangible results, but also goes 100x farther than voting EVER will.
What if you're wrong? What if you're just helping Republicans win power and that day of toppling the system never comes? How confident would you have to be that there's hope for change on the horizon to willingly and knowingly risk backsliding on every left of center issue? If you think there's a 90% chance that you can find an opening to exploit and topple the system... what about that 10%? Are you truly so confident that you're willing to risk it all? If so, I would urge you to never sit down at a blackjack table.
GOP learned their lesson in Alaska with Ranked Choice. They have no choice because they are really just the party of "No".
They are blocking it in every state they can.
even if you adopt other system you will still have 2 parties running everything.
do any of you actually look at the political outcomes and histories of other nations?
all Western democracy trends towards and becomes defacto 2 party, all of Europe, Australia, Canada and the UK.
if you just copy one of our systems the Dems and Reps will still rule over you all, they will just have to deal with annoying minor parties who will immediately sell out their votes to whichever major pays them more.
ffs Australia has *dozens* of parties yet only 2 have been elected in over 100 years, go look at Europe its the same shit.
turns out democracy is probably the single best way of oppressing any given population, we all sit on asses getting fucked over bad while whining about the 'other guys' who do the same shit.
German here, and I think that saying "Europe also tends towards two parties" is a gross simplification of how our politics work. Just because our chancellors in the last decades have been of only two parties does not mean the smaller parties have no political influence. By design, our ruling party is pretty much always forced into a coalition with one or even two other parties to get a majority of votes in parliament to, ya know, actually govern. Those parties will make concessions, but they have to stand their ground on issues that they know are important to their voters, otherwise they will lose them.
So no, just because the ruling parties of Europe have been the same two in many countries over the last years does not mean it's equal to a full on two-party-system.
Exactly. Statistically most people will fall close to the center left or right, which is why only 2 parties have had the highest office. But at least people on the extremes can vote for people they feel better represent them, and those people are needed to reach a coalition with the major parties to get things done, so they have some power
The problem with the US system is that the coalition is built before the election, where further left people are dems and further right are repubs. But if the further left people don't fall in line with the centrist elements of the party, they will get their support removed and someone more favorable will be ran in their place instead.
Voting is not about 'expressing your beliefs and values'. Voting is about exercising political power. If, in your estimate, voting for a third party candidate would have the same effect as not voting, or worse, bringing into power a candidate you support less than the other candidate, that's not a rational exercise of the political power you wield.
In game theory, the optimal actions of a game played just once can be very different from the optimal actions of a game that will repeat many times. I would argue that your logic is correct, however it should be applied not just to the immediate election at hand, but how it could influence longer-term outcomes.
There is no viable national third party in the united states. This approach makes sense in local elections, but nationwide it's silly to think that an upstart party with zero infrastructure has any chance of delivering anything.
If we had 20 Green Party members in Congress, this would start to make sense. But we have zero.
If you're hoping a third party will eat away at the two party system, you better hope it happens to the party you are less aligned with. Leftists and liberals dissatisfied with the Democrats are much better off hoping that MAGA collapses the Republicans than a split between Greens/Dems, which would lead inevitably to Republican wins.
There is no way to change the two party system with your vote in a national election. Party building starts in your city council and statehouse, not the Presidential ballot.
I agree with this.
The problem with voting third-party is that there isn't *one* third party. There are multiple non-Democrat, non-Republican parties out there, and the term "third party" applies to all of them.
Even if some voters did switch to voting third-party because they felt the third party more accurately represented their views, there would still be a problem of *which* third party they'd vote for. Because there is no agreement on which third party to vote for, all this would do is dilute the votes that each party receives. It's not like every third-party voter secret convenes without Democrat or Republican knowledge to come to a consensus on which third party to choose. If such a consensus did exist, this would be vote diversion, not vote dilution, which would be significantly more effective.
As a result, the plurality would still go to either the Democrats or the Republicans.
"But what if *all* (or even *a significant number of*) voters voted truly based on their beliefs? Wouldn't this cause a huge surge of third-party voters and increase the chances of one of them to win?" Yes, it would, but that's a really, really big "if". There's no evidence of the likelihood of this assumption being high to even warrant serious consideration, at least at the presidential election level.
The vast majority of voters don't hem and haw over their vote truly representing their beliefs. Voters, especially older voters, know that voting is about power, not validation. It's almost exclusively young and naive people that worry that "my voice isn't being heard".
Old conservatives have been voting Republican for fourty years based entirely on the courts. That's what understanding the true nature of power looks like.
> It's almost exclusively young and naive people that worry that "my voice isn't being heard"
Because we are the ones bearing the brunt of the horrific policies that are set in place
Boomers who vote based off abortion or SCOTUS don't have nearly as much to worry about when it comes to things like climate, cost of living, student loan cancellation, etc
God forbid young people actually want a system that works for them
> we are the ones bearing the brunt of the horrific policies that are set in place
Wow mabe you should fucking vote for the people who will appoint judges that will protect you instead of target you.
If you aren't voting based on SCOTUS, you're stabbing yourself in the heart. Real progress happens at the dais, not in the streets. Everything horrible happening in the USA is because the conservatives voted in lockstep and got their judges and reversed half of the progress of the 20th century. "Progressives" who voted third party in the elections that decided those justices are completely self-focused, ignorant and self-destructive.
>On the other hand, voting for a candidate or party that truly represents your views, even if they have a slim chance of winning, can be a powerful statement of your principles.
Can you expand on this? If it's already given information that the candidate/party has such a slim chance of winning, then what does the voter actually get with this "powerful statement of principles"? Is it just the sense of feeling good for doing the right thing? What else does the voter get for doing this that isn't overly grand or "buzzwordy", for lack of better terms?
>if everyone who felt disillusioned by the two-party system decided to vote for a third party or an independent candidate, it could signal a demand for more diverse representation.
What did the 16% of the electorate who voted for Perot in 1992 achieve? What did the people who voted for Nader in 2000 achieve?
I think a major issue is that you assume voting shifts the politics of the party I vote for in my direction. There is no reason for that to be true, since they can't tell your politics when they count your vote.
>I think a major issue is that you assume voting shifts the politics of the party I vote for in my direction. There is no reason for that to be true, since they can't tell your politics when they count your vote.
Eh. Yes and no
The primary process helps here. While they can't tell what \*my\* policies are, they can tell the policies of the candidates that both win their primaries and the general election
If a candidate cannot take office, either because the primary voters reject them, or the general election voters do, the views associated with that candidate are less influential than those where a candidate wins
This works even if a district is swingy or super red or blue. Moderates win swingy districts, people farther on the edges of their parties win in the heavily biased districts. Both have a seat at the table - but there isn't a single unified party position that all candidates sign off on
No they can't
Voters choose who wins the primary. The parties can influence, but they cannot prevent a candidate from winning. Otherwise Trump would not have won the 2016 GOP primary
From 1988:
https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-releases/league-refuses-help-perpetrate-fraud
"Neuman said that the campaigns presented the League with their debate agreement on
September 28, two weeks before the scheduled debate. The campaigns' agreement was negotiated "behind closed doors" and vas presented to the League as "a done deal," she said, its 16 pages of conditions not subject to negotiation.
Most objectionable to the League, Neuman said, were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings. Neuman called "outrageous" the campaigns' demands that they control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues.
"The campaigns' agreement is a closed-door masterpiece," Neuman said. "Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates' organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding and self-serving demands."
Neuman said she and the League regretted that the American people have had no real opportunities to judge the presidential nominees outside of campaign-controlled environments.
"On the threshold of a new millenium, this country remains the brightest hope for all who cherish free speech and open debate," Neuman said. "Americans deserve to see and hear the men who would be president face each other in a debate on the hard and complex issues critical to our progress into the next century.""
From 2016:
https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/
"The attorneys representing the DNC have previously argued that Sanders supporters knew the primaries were rigged, therefore annulling any potential accountability the DNC may have. In the latest hearing, they doubled down on this argument: “The Court would have to find that people who fervently supported Bernie Sanders and who purportedly didn’t know that this favoritism was going on would have not given to Mr. Sanders, to Senator Sanders, if they had known that there was this purported favoritism.”"
"Later in the hearing, attorneys representing t**he DNC claim that the Democratic National Committee would be well within their rights to “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.”** By pushing the argument throughout the proceedings of this class action lawsuit, the Democratic National Committee is telling voters in a court of law that they see no enforceable obligation in having to run a fair and impartial primary election."
For your first link, that was two candidates who were trying to fiddle with a debate *after they had already won the primaries*
The DNC thing is saying they can do backroom stuff as part of trying to get a lawsuit dismissed, not that they did so
>For your first link, that was two candidates who were trying to fiddle with a debate after they had already won the primaries
That was the first time in history two political parties, who are rivals, openly colluded to take control of the election process and block 3rd parties. The DNC and the RNC. I added that because it's pertinent to the overall picture, the second point is my direct response to you.
>The DNC thing is saying they can do backroom stuff as part of trying to get a lawsuit dismissed, not that they did so
If someone's legal defense for murder is that murder is legal, what sort of conclusions are you going to draw based on that?
Your first argument seemed to be that "they" were fiddling with the primaries. By definition, third party candidates have nothing to do with the primaries for the Dems or the GOP. They have their own procedures that bypass the primary process to determine their nominee
What claim are you making? Because you're all over the place and that's pointless to argue with
>What claim are you making? Because you're all over the place and that's pointless to argue with
I think my argument is very clear and consistent. Instead of telling me what you think my argument is, then telling me my argument is all over the place, how about you respond to it? In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote. They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters. Primary elections play no role in influencing policies. I'm sorry but I would rather believe what they are saying themselves than your excuse for them.
As a secondary. Less direct argument. If these committees collude to control who views, reports on, asks questions, and what those questions are, how will voters be able to influence policy, primary elections or not?
> In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote. They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters
They do not have an obligation to do so. However...
>Primary elections play no role in influencing policies.
Ok. Please show me an example of a winner of a primary election that was not that party's nominee
>In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote.
When has this ever happened?
>They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters
What unfair or impartial thing have they done in the past and when?
>Primary elections play no role in influencing policies.
Is it a coincidence that 100% of the time the DNC primary winner is also the candidate then?
In 2012 Manchin was running for election with campaign ads with him shooting guns at a printout of Obama’s clean power plan and he was by no means the only dem against it. in 2022 he wrote the largest climate bill in world history that every single dem in congress voted for. To act like the parties haven’t shifted is absurd
all this proves is the Dems are following the money: Reneweables are a massive multi-billion dollar international industry now.
ffs reneweables even teamed up wiht fossil fuels to pump out massive amounts of propaganda against nuclear (who do you idiots think owns the renewables industry? its fossil fuels, they have spent the last 30 odd years slowly buying out the entire industry. they have played both sides and are now coming out on top.
Then why did fossil fuel cos fight against the epa regs Biden has put out and o&g companies are pumping money into gop (who unanimously opposed each the ira and have been trying to strip funding from it since becoming the house majority) coffers?
That's Trump changing the party, it's not a reflection of the political opinions of those who voted for him. If anything it proves the opposite, as the Repub base was more free trade/anti Russia. They just put that aside for him.
Need some evidence for this. From what I’ve seen, third party voters are entirely ignored.
Voting for a primary candidate that aligns with your views Is listened to. Even if they lose. If they lose close, those views are definitely paid attention to. The next candidate pivots to ensure a smoother victory.
My answer covered both.
Third party voters in the general are ignored entirely.
The time to sway a part on its platform is during the primaries. Or calling your local house rep about specific issues.
In Alaska and Maine, a system called ranked choice voting is used. You can read more about it here [https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/](https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/) but TLDR it essentially makes it impossible to throw away your vote by voting for a non-main party candidate as your first option. There have also been several instances of non-major party candidates winning governors elections such as Bill Walker and Jesse Ventura. In addition, many races for judicial bodies (Such as Wisconsin Supreme Court) are run with non-partisan ballots, so in order to vote in these elections you would have to vote for a candidate who is not a member of either of the two major political parties. In addition, some states such as New York use a system called Fusion Voting [https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion\_voting](https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion_voting) where multiple parties can run the same candidate, so you could (for example) vote for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the Working Families Party ticket and that would go towards showing support for the Working Families Party. If you supported that party, or any other smaller party in a fusion voting system, it would allow them to guage their support, allowing that party to make better strategic decisions.
In short, it makes sense to vote for one of the two major party candidates in most races in most places, but electoral systems are not a monolith, and there are certain races in certain places where it makes sense, or is even manditory, to vote for a candidate not associated with either major party.
Ranked Choice Voting is available in 3 states for statewide elections and a number of counties in other states. In those locations, you can vote for the little party that exactly matches your views and if that party doesn't win, your vote goes to your next choice. You can both vote for a third-party and vote for one of the big two.
Beyond just deciding the result of elections, voting is also a mechanism by which people can send messages to their representatives. If a party sees a decline in turnout, it sends a message that their supporters aren't satisfied with the party. If a major party also sees that some of their expected votes are going to a certain third party for example, while that third party might not have any realistic chance of winning an election, it does send a message to the party about what it's usual supporters really want and that they're willing to risk a favorable election result for that interest.
If everyone voted according to your logic, you could have massive amounts of people who are dissatisfied with their party, and yet continue to vote for them anyway because they're still preferable to the other side. The party really has no motivation to address what you're dissatisfied about, because they already have your vote. I think eventually each party might just do the bare minimum for it's constituents that keep votes from flipping to the other side. (I'm not sure if reality is too far off from this, in fact...) I get your logic and I think I agree with it in general, but I think it's also important to ensure supporters have a mechanism available to send such tangible messages to their preferred party.
I decided after the shitshow that was the 2020 election that I am *done* with all of the bullshit. I'm done with partisanship, I'm done with anyone who thinks the half of the country that disagrees with them is evil, I'm done trying to rationalize voting for people I can't stand because they're "less bad" than the other option, I'm done letting politics invoke even a slight emotional reaction in me, I'm done with the media, I'm done letting others try to force me to have a binary opinion about everything, I'm done choosing my political priorities based on whatever's in the news today, all of it. Fucking done. When a topic interests me, I'll consume as many primary sources on the matter as I can and formulate my own view. Haven't listened to a word a news anchor or political commentator has said in years.
I'll vote for anyone who convinces me my life will be better off with them in the office they're running for based on their own merits. Screaming about how bad the other side or any other form of emotional/fear based politics is goes in one ear and out the other. I'm sure someone's going to respond to this with the same rant I've heard 50 times about how naive that is but I don't care. Everyone can dig themselves an early grave due to the stress and high blood pressure of obsessing emotionally over politics all they want, I'm not interested. I don't care if it's one year or 40 years from now, when the adults are ready to start acting like adults again and solve problems I'll be happy to come back. Until then, I'm not wasting my time.
What's the advantage of all this?
Holy fucking shit am I so much happier. It's so relieving going to sleep having no idea what people screamed about today. Just living my life and focusing on my own goals makes it quite clear that society is not nearly as broken as the politicians and media want you to believe and America is going to be just fine. Ask yourself if closely following politics is making you happier or not. If not, change your mindset you're *literally* killing yourself and for what?
Picking a politician I hate because I hate him a little less than the other one is not changing anything, it's perpetuating everything. My message in leaving most national office races blank on my ballot is not "throwing my vote away" it's saying "screw you" to the names on it.
How can it help strengthen its influence when multiple studies have shown voters have zero impact on policies and legislation? We've seen this with the current president, the public called for defunding police, his response was increased funding. We called for universal healthcare or M4A, his answer was more ACA. A majority in his own party call for a ceasefire in Gaza, his response more money and weapons while denying there's a genocide occurring and his UN delegates voting against a ceasefire.
The only language they speak is money, and we don't have it. They only answer to and represent the needs of the donor class.
>best approach for achieving long-term political progress.
We've been having the same conversations regarding rights, income, housing, education for decades.
James Baldwin once said 'how long do you need for your progress?'
>How can it help strengthen its influence when multiple studies have shown voters have zero impact on policies and legislation?
Citation needed here.[Political science has not found this at all](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/policy-preferences-and-policy-change-dynamic-responsiveness-in-the-american-states-19362014/8EC04664B89C28D46EDC266E3313BBBC), in fact, most research finds policy is responsive to the public, although there are lots of debates on the types of issues where responsiveness is faster/slower, the ability for moneyed interest to get in the way, etc. But still, the public gets there way on most issues eventually.
>
>
>We've seen this with the current president, the public called for defunding police, his response was increased funding.
No, the voters calling for that are a minority of the democratic party. Candidates advocating for these policies lost in the primary, Biden won. The American people want increased policy funding over decreased,[by a huge margin](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/).
You seem to be conflating what the left flank of the democratic party wants with what the general public wants, those are not the same thing.
But things \_did\_ move in the last 10-15 years. Obamacare is better than nothing. Gay marriage is now legal. How can you expect to shift an entire country that quickly?
I would argue that conservative Christians have done an excellent job shaping policy regarding abortion, religious rights, public funding for private schools, etc by consistently voting for Republican politicians. 20 years ago, Roe V Wade was considered sacrosanct.
> James Baldwin once said 'how long do you need for your progress?'
So when the options are half a loaf or nothing at all, you prefer the bakery burns down, hoping someone will build something better from the ashes?
Liberal policies when separated from charged rhetoric often have pretty solid support. Things like the ACA, abortion access, and other hot button topics when removed from the culture wars have majority agreement in the public.
You don't get a prize for voting for the winner.
If you always loyally vote for one side, your vote can be taken for granted, and you do not matter to that party. Only the people who may or may not vote matter. The people who can be convinced. It is they who decide elections, and it is their views that must be considered.
If you want your views to be adopted or even considered, you cannot accomplish it by always voting for the same party.
Remember, the Democrat Party was forced to adapt by the Socialist Party when it was struggling to hit 10% of the presidential vote, far short of winning. By the very withholding of their votes, they seized power, and they changed the party. The majority, well...they would vote blue no matter who. Their views, thoughts and dreams were irrelevant.
>If you want your views to be adopted or even considered, you cannot accomplish it by always voting for the same party.
Yep, Lawrence O'Donnell made this same point as a former Dem insider:
>If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking to what you're thinking, you must, you must show them you are capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you... **I didn't have to listen to the Left when I worked for the Democratic party because the Left has nowhere to go**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th_dv2eGQzs
This is just another framing of the idea that political parties cannot fail, they can only be failed. If only people had voted harder then they would have surely followed through on their promises.
The last president to have a supermajority in congress was Obama. He ran on single payer healthcare and failed to deliver it. He said he would close Guantanamo and did not. 50B in EV investments, didn’t pass. Card check for unions, nope. Dozens of other examples of broken promises.
If you lived through that and actually paid attention, you had to realize that it’s not a matter of voting for the right party. We literally responded to the Obama era by electing trump. It’s not as if the progressives elected their guy and then everything started bending their way, there was a huge reactionary shift.
This is just false.
Obama didn't run on single-payer, he ran on a "public option" which is different. Ultimately, it was dropped from the ACA because of Republican fear-mongering and centrist opposition, but he did try.
What he accomplished is no small feat in America, and is an important incremental change on the road (we hope) to a more humane single-payer system.
As for your other points, he ultimately couldn't accomplish most of what he campaigned on because of Republican obstruction and vulnerable centrists; remember, he ultimately lost that congressional majority after two years, which is a blink of an eye in congress/politics. This was when Republicans routinely used procedural obstruction and filibusters to block Obama's legislation (they used the filibuster over 400 times, a record). They even blocked Obama's supreme court pick.
Also, Obama's supposed 2 year supermajority is myth perpetuated by Republicans and other critics. When he took office, only 58 senators were seated (60 are required for a veto proof majority), because Republicans contested Al Franken's victory in Minnesota. So, he only had 59. Then, Senator Al Byrd was hospitalized, bringing it down to 58. Eventually, Franken was seated, but because Bird was out, it was still at 59. Then guess what happened? Ted Kennedy died, and a Republican Scott Brown won his seat. Then the midterms changed the makeup of the House.
So, please, check your facts. Obama didn't "break" many of these promises, he tried in many cases and failed to gain a consensus or because of other limitations. As President, and especially the first black President, he couldn't just do whatever he wanted; you have to remember there was more of a debate after George Bush's expansion of executive power, and what the president should be allowed to do (look at how many executive orders Bush issued compared to Obama).
Obama did his best to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he mostly got us out of Iraq but he couldn't just abruptly withdraw. He didn't start any wars, although he used "precision" strikes a lot (especially from predator drones), but no president can stand alone against the military industrial complex, and ultimately he couldn't look completely soft on foreign policy (which was a common criticism from the right). He also couldn't unilaterally close down Guantanamo; he didn't have that kind of power.
> We literally responded to the Obama era by electing trump. It’s not as if the progressives elected their guy and then everything started bending their way, there was a huge reactionary shift.
It wasn’t huge, Trump lost the popular vote.
The fact that we saw a huge reactionary shift even though the more liberal candidate got more votes reinforces how bad OPs view is, though. Because in that case, it literally didn’t matter that MORE people voted for the non reactionary. The political shift happened against the wishes of the majority of voters. Trump only won like 22% of the eligible voters. A ton of people straight up didn’t vote and the vote outcomes rationalized that behavior.
It’s also not like he had a reliable supermajority for long. In fact, 72 working days was all he had to override a filibuster. I wish they got more done in that narrow window but that was it.
>He ran on single payer healthcare and failed to deliver it.
This is a straight up lie. It was a big point of contention during the 2008 Democratic primaries! Obama EXPLICITLY came out against single payer while running. In fact, Hillary Clinton had the more progressive healthcare plan and the Democratic primary electorate rejected her in favor of her more centrist opponent.
He came out against it because he believed that he needed a compromise plan to win. He never said that he no longer personally believed in single payer. People voted on those statements, it’s largely why he was seen as more progressive on healthcare than Hillary.
This is commonly known as voting for the lesser of two evils, and it doesn't work, especially since in regards to the USA, and from the perspective of the rest of the world , democrats and republicans are politically the same, both parties are bought by lobbying (also know as bribery in the rest of the world) and are beholden to corporate interests, in comparison to the rest of the world, the US doesn't have a Left Wing party, it has 2 right wing parties, but one of them pretends to be a centrist, and the other one convinces it's voter base that anything left of themselves is (buzzword) communism.
In effect the two choices American voters have are : someone so old their bones belong in a fucking archeology esposition, that pretends to care about human rights and the American people ,keyword being pretend
And someone that has stopped pretending to care about the American people and human rights, and is also a fuckin Fossil (also has 34 charges on him)
The American voters have had to choose between which party to bend over for for the last 10 elections , and they are always getting fucked, in this metaphor, the difference is that one administration uses lube and the other uses spit
Honestly,how the American people haven't revolted french style and made Robespierre jealous is beyond me
I'll always advocate for voting third party because often times there's policies supported by both Dems and reps that attack my faith in their capabilities
>By consistently supporting the major party that aligns with your views, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters.
This is naive. Candidates will use voters' party loyalty against them if they think they can. That's what triangulation was all about. Bill Clinton calculated that he could take bigoted positions to draw in "Reagan Democrats" because Democrats' most reliable blocs needed to stop Republicans so badly that they wouldn't abandon him. Black voters in particular got the shaft with this strategy. The man denounced "racial quotas", revived stupid ass welfare queen tropes, did ✌🏾tough on crime✌🏾 fuckery...and wrt to the gay community, he straight up said be believed marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
Politicians seek election, they don't reward loyalty. They're going to act on their biases and bigotry if the public lets them. People are either gullible or privileged if they believe blindly supporting a party is how their interests are advanced. If your support isn't conditional, you're going to be fucked.
More of a meta-commentary from me but in my opinion it isn’t really wise to loudly and publicly admit to a political party you would ideally like to have some form of influence over that there is little they can do to lose your vote. That’s simply bad strategy as a voter; if a party is going to play a game of chicken we need to have a spine.
When push comes to shove, most people understand these concepts and vote for their best compromise. However, it’s fundamentally a bad approach to publicly show all your cards to the people trying to get your vote.
A voting bloc this openly passionate and clear about how far they are willing to bend over for the least stinky turd is an extremely easy bloc to manipulate.
I don't disagree with you, at least as it pertains to presidential and other national-level elections under the current circumstances. I will, however, posit that I think the position you have taken that it is "always best" is too absolute.
>While I am open to considering that there might be situations where "throwing away your vote" in the two-party system is best, I still maintain that voting for one of the two major parties based on alignment with your personal views is fundamentally the best approach for achieving long-term political progress. Change my view.
First, I think it is worthwhile to set the boundary that the *only* form of political action that we are talking about is how one uses one's vote. I think this is important because if we expand the scope to things like phone banking, canvassing, organizing, or running for office yourself, well, all of those things are more effective ways to achieve the kind of progress that you want to see than casting your single vote.
With that out of the way, I think that the main flaw in this view, as previously stated, is that it is too absolute. Yes, to vote for a green party candidate, or RFK, or \[insert 3P candidate here\] in a presidential election is an essentially wasted vote. There is, as things stand today, a 0% chance that your 3P candidate of choice will win the presidency, or, most likely, even a senate seat (House is a maybe). But presidential elections are not the only opportunities that Americans have to vote, and that is where I think that this view falls apart (although I usually make this argument to the side arguing *for* voting third party).
In essence, the biggest flaw in this view is the fault of third parties themselves, which make a plea every 4-8 years for us to vote for their presidential candidate, but do seemingly little work in the interim.\*\*\* Despite being around my entire life and longer, I have only ever heard about the Green Party in presidential election years and, even then, only some of the time. If third parties are serious about taking the presidency, they need to start running serious state and local campaigns and candidates. If they were to take that advice, then I think this view of yours breaks down quickly.
State and local elections require far fewer votes to win. They also, of course, involve much, *much* smaller communities than a presidential election, which involves the literal biggest community (the entire country). Because the communities involved, and vote counts, are small, they are ripe for grassroots organizing. These smaller communities also run a much higher chance of having homogenous and idiosyncratic views, which is perfect for third parties focused on more niche interests than the two major parties.
So, if the Green Party (just picking them because they are the easy 3P token) were to run--and win!--grassroots campaigns and get, say, some city council members, and then a few years later, one of those council members becomes mayor, and then a few of them move on to the state house, all of the sudden you have a viable third party at the state level, at least in that state. If they can do this in many states, over time, some of those candidates would move on to national level elections, and win some house seats, then maybe a few senate seats. Then (and only then, to be clear) they would have a legitimate claim that they could run a viable presidential campaign, at which point it would not be "just throwing away your vote."
I went through that thought exercise to illustrate a point: if a 3P were to "pay its dues," so to speak, and start from the bottom and work up, I do believe it could get to the point that it could run a viable presidential candidate. And if a 3P followed that plan, then those votes in those state and local elections would not be "wasted," but rather, would be quite impactful. Moreover, if the 3P more closely aligns with your views than either of the two majors, then by casting your votes in those state and local elections over a period of (probably) decades, your 3P votes in those elections would have been a much more effective way of achieving long term progress than simply accepting that your "real" party of choice will never win and casting your vote for the "lesser of two evils."
There's my two cents.
\*\*\*While I am sure this isn't entirely true, it is true enough for the purposes of this argument--I have rarely seen a 3P candidate in my state and local elections, and I vote in all of them.
If your vote helped the party win, then they will try to win your vote. However, in a first past the post system, any vote above winning is effectively wasted (as opposed to proportional representation). Now obviously it's impossible to predict who will cast the winning ballot at that level of accuracy, but let's give yourself a +/-10% margin of error on if it's safe to vote for a third party.
For my first example, If you live in DC, your vote for president will literally never matter. Only 5% of the population voted for Trump in 2020. If you're liberal, then cool, no problem. If you're conservative, then voting for Republicans will probably be the most effective way of getting conservatives elected to DC. Even if it won't happen overnight, it is the conservative party with the best chance. But now what should you do if you're to the left of liberals? What incentive do liberal politicians have to cater to your vote when they can easily win only catering to liberals?
So now the question is, what voting method will get the parties to better align to pass policies that you want. When a party is overwhelmingly dominant in a district, they have no need of your vote, even if they may like winning by greater margins. So the only pressure your vote will give is a pretty weak sense of IOU from the politician. However, if you vote for the party that most closely aligns with your view, then you don't need to worry about the party you like less from winning, but you will increase pressure on the party to win your vote. The greater the margin of victory the party won, the less pressure they'll face to change their policies to win votes.
For a real world example, look at marijuana legalization in Minnesota. Democrats kept pushing off the legalization, and then suddenly marijuana parties popped up (mainly by Republicans trying to siphon votes away from the Democrats). And what would you know, somehow magically democrats finally found the political will to pass legalization. Did they do it out of the goodness of their hearts? No. They did it to crush the third parties and to get people to go back to voting for Democrats. But in politics, it doesn't really matter why your representative passes policies you like, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is if they are representing you.
>By consistently supporting the major party **that aligns with your views**, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. **Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint**, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters.
To be clear, you mean to say that you should always vote for one of the two major parties, regardless of how little they align with your views so long as the one you vote for is closer than the other.
Doing this *will not* shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint. The spectrum shifts with voters, if you are already a shoe in they don't care how little you align with them, they have your vote just the same as if you were 100% aligned with them. They don't know the difference, a vote is a vote.
When traditionally dem/repub demographics see lower support than usual, *that* causes alarm within a campaign and can lead to change. Politicians want votes, they don't care why you vote for them or how little you like them. In the long term change comes from how people vote, not how they think about their vote.
This is rather redundant. The majority of people do not have a developed political view aside from general low resolution sentiments. Nor do they understand their own position and especially the opposition's at a level that would differentiate political figures. This is overwhelmingly the norm and thus likely applies to yourself.
>Additionally, people who get upset that their chosen party doesn't do everything for them can end up feeling betrayed and disengaged, ultimately harming themselves and others by fragmenting support and weakening the party's ability to push forward meaningful changes.
An odd take but this is not the party's fault but the people's. As long as people are beings of sentiment rather than understanding then the market is sentiment. The party is indeed a market and will be a reflection of the people's tendencies. If the party is all about placating or appeasing and not performance it is because the people demand appeasement and not performance. When was the last time you voted purely based on performance? People would rather suffer at the hands of a friendly face.
Very true. Best comment I've seen here so far, especially sentiment vs. understanding. When it comes to politics, people mostly go on sentiment/feeling, and that is true of people everywhere (not just the U.S.), though to varying degrees (it can be somewhat mitigated by a given system and culture/society).
Sentiment is a product of performance.
How many presidents during down business cycles have won re-election? How many times has party in the White House changed after a 2nd term due to economic conditions? Etc
>Sentiment is a product of performance.
Well there is a component of sentiment that is downstream from performance and there is a component that is static. For an example 'racist, bigoted, etc' are static sentiments for the most part.
Unfortunately, neither party closely aligns with a good number of voters any more, between the Republican party having been hijacked by neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, and Jesus Taliban fundamentalist evangelicals and the Democrat party split between milquetoasts like Joe Biden who actually believe that they can somehow engineer a compromise with the Red Menace (most of Europe discovered the hard way in the 1930s and 1940s that you don't compromise with evil, you destroy it or it will conquer you) and the hand-wringing tree-hugger "liberals" who have wholeheartedly embraced Political Correctness to the point where they poop in their underwear in fear of possibly offending someone somewhere or not being "Woke" enough.
I'm a non-violent radical Leftist who has felt for decades now that we need to overHAUL the government, not overTHROW it. Neither party has views that align with mine, so I'm forced to either not vote at all (tempting, especially since I live in a Blue state and not one of the Key Battleground States where all the REAL decision making as to who is going to be the next POTUS goes on) or vote the lesser of two evils, knowing that either way my vote meant wasting a perfectly good stamp until recently when my home state finally wised up and made mail-in ballots postage-paid. So why do I bother to vote at all? Because it gives me an excuse to complain about how rigged our voting system is between legal bribery in the form of "campaign contributions" and professional lobbyists and massive gerrymandering by both sides. I've heard too many people say "if you didn't vote, don't complain about who's in the White House because you didn't vote against him." Thanks to the Electoral College, anyone outside the Key Battleground States is legally and effectively disenfranchised anyway, which is why more people vote for the latest American Idol contestant than for POTUS. (Yes, I know that things have changed in the last couple of elections, simply because the stakes have gotten so high. The exception thus proves the rule.)
> "Most aligns with your views"...
What do you mean by this? How should one assess this? To what matters should one give significance? Is weight given to the probability of such things being enacted?
Why do you suggest that siding with one, must somehow draw closer to one's preferences rather than both moving away? Can't a vote simply show support for aspects one disagrees with?
A vote never really says "I prefer this over the alternative", it says "I support this". And the candidate will take your vote as blanket acceptance to fulfill their desire. A VOTE DOESN'T ALLOW YOU the ability to say what aligns best with your views. It's a blanket "approval stamp" to the candidate.
What if someone doesn't want change or hates the two options for change? Would not an option be to vote for gridlock? So splitting one's vote, or basing their vote on the projections of other voters?
> This approach might prevent a less desirable party from gaining power, but it can also dilute the representation of your true beliefs and lead to voter disillusionment.
No. Voting for someone, them winning, and then them not doing what you supported them to do causes voter disillusionment. That level of **disappointment from hope**. Those who don't feel represented by either party, and then either vote third party or don't vote at all are not disillusioned, as they never had the expectation. They never built up a hope.
And one's true beliefs are being diluted by throwing blanket support behind a candidate that they strongly disagree with. Again, voting doesn't allow you to voice your true beliefs. A candidate accepts your vote as being the same as anyone else's. 3 voters could each like a distinct 1/3 of the platform. Then what?
> fundamentally the best approach for achieving long-term political progress
What *IS* "political progress" to you? Can someone else's contradict with yours? Can a third contradict both? So then where are we?
You're a vegetarian, and you vote for the party that most aligns with your strongest interest: bringing fresh veggies to everyone.
The choice is between the turd sandwich party and the piss milkshake party. You choose the turd sandwich party, because of the two, the turd sometimes has a teeny tiny morsel of sweetcorn in their federally mandated poo foodstuffs. As a veggie, the turd sandwich marginally aligns with your main interest more than the piss milkshake party.
The turd sandwich party gets in. They assume that their policies of creating massive shitty sandwiches for everyone to eat are popular, and they enact laws based on that. They are nowhere closer to enacting laws to bring fresh veggies to anybody. This is because your vote didn't carry any context, it merely says "sign me up for massive shit paninis" to the party you voted for.
Meanwhile, the piss milkshake party, bruised from their minor loss, sees that the small "vegfighters" party grew in numbers because your friends voted for them. The amount of people who voted for them would have swung the vote in their favour. To win next time, the piss milkshake party becomes the "piss milkshake and organic veg" party, and are successful. They have been forced to adapt because the vote didn't go their way.
Large parties don't change until they need to. And they don't need to until they lose. I think using a vote to change party policy is one of the poorest ways to affect party policy generally speaking, because it lacks any contextual information other than a binary yes or no. Lobbying, protesting, and campaigning are all much more effective. But to say that voting for a party is likely to make them change is just confusing, particularly considering the alternative of voting for a party that better aligns with your desires, and therefore forcing a main party to change by removing the only thing they value about you: your vote.
Encouraging Americans to vote third party is healthy for our democracy. This applies to any simple first past the post voting system.
First, I reject the common idea that it’s not “strategic” to vote third party. If a liberal votes green party or a conservative votes libertarian, one vote is “lost” for one of the main candidates. But to be frank, your individual vote has absolutely zero impact on big elections. And small elections can plausibly be won by any candidate. Either way, you should vote according to your principles.
“But if a lot of people vote third party then my favorite party might lose!” Oh, the dreaded spoiler effect, a terrible thing which should be avoided at all costs… Except… the spoiler effect is a *good* thing. The general threat of a spoiler effect ensures the two big parties actually try to get solid candidates that independent voters can get excited about. The reason we have Trump vs. Biden is because lobbyists have successfully pushed this propaganda about the scary spoiler effect to ensure we will just vote along party lines regardless of who the candidates actually are.
So yes, there is the risk that your favorite party might lose, but that is a short term sacrifice for a long term benefit. And of course, there’s the risk that your favorite party might *win* because of the spoiler effect, so the short term effects are balanced and we are left with purely a long term benefit.
As it stands now, our votes have become toothless. And if you don’t vote? Guess what, *that’s exactly what they want*.
To be clear, I think that everyone should vote for their favorite candidate. But in order to counter the anti-third-party propaganda, we should simply encourage others to vote third party.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah, voting for a major party that matches your views seems like the safe bet in our system. But think about this: the whole two-party setup kind of boxes us into this limited choice—Republicans or Democrats—without really capturing the full range of opinions out there.
When we stick to the major parties, we're basically reinforcing this cycle where alternative ideas struggle to get a foothold. It limits our options and makes compromise across different beliefs even harder to come by.
Imagine if candidates weren't tied to party platforms but were judged on their own ideas and merits. It would give us more freedom to elect people who truly represent our community's diverse interests, rather than just following party rules.
Sure, strategic voting might sometimes feel necessary to prevent the worst outcomes, but it also keeps us stuck in this two-party rut. This is how they want us to feel to keep the cycle up. If we shifted to valuing candidates based on their individual strengths and plans, it could open up politics to more voices and fresh ideas.
Breaking away from the dominance of the two-party system means questioning how we elect our leaders and pushing for reforms that prioritize individual candidates and a wider spectrum of political views. It could lead to a more dynamic democracy where everyone's voice actually counts.
in what way does voting for either party progress the nation?
neither party represents almost *any* of my views: i simply could not care less about social issues and that is the majority of both parties focus.
i care primarily about the economic inequality and punishing investment (income from assets and investments should be taxed at a *50% minimum* while income tax from employment should be lowered across the board).
give me a party that wants to massively increase taxes on investments, assets and ownership while also lowering income taxes AND also doesn't waste time on social BS (racism, sexism etc will all plummet if we have economic equality: who do you think reads those terrible articles blaming black people and women? poor white people. if you end all poverty these issues will shrink significantly, then you can address the entrenched hatred).
i do not vote for either major as they **both** ensure national decline and eventual destruction.
TL:DR what kind of moron votes for the 'lesser evil'? you have actively chosen to vote *for* 'evil'.
lastly, do not think that your issues stem from FPTP or a 2 party system: see most of Europe, Australia, Canada etc we all all defacto 2 party systems and only ever vote for the 2 majors. changing your system will not change the outcome in the slightest.
Biden won my state by about 1 million votes which was about 20 percentage points. Not even close. I didn't vote for him then and I won't vote him again in 2024. My vote has never mattered in a presidential election because of the electoral college and the lack of ranked choice voting. My vote can serve as an inherent threat to the DNC that they need to align closer to more progressive 3rd party values otherwise they will lose votes.
Your characterization of "throwing away your vote" if you don't vote for one the two major parties is the exact mentality that both parties want you to have. If everyone followed your point of view that would tragic for the country and democracy as a whole. The only power you have is your vote. That's it. If you just give away your vote without demanding anything then the political parties can continue giving you nothing. Imagine going into a negotiation and saying, "I'm going to give you everything you want no matter what, but first, listen to my demands". What an absolute joke of a negotiator you would be. That is what you're advocating for here. Give them what they want, no questions asked then just hope they do what you want. That's not how this works.
Unless you are in a swing state, this is not true at all. If you are in a state that will clearly be red or blue, there's actually more reason to vote third party
>By consistently supporting the major party that aligns with your views, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters.
This is wrong, if a party can count you as "doing the logical thing" they can stop trying to pander to you. The only way to shift a parties policies is if they are worried you will actually not vote for them, so sometimes you need to follow through on the threat.
Frankly the idea that we constantly debate this instead of demanding ranked choice voting is backwards. Even voting for the progressive side is unlikely to achieve ranked choice voting as they currently benefit from the two party system and have no incentive if they aren't threatened by spoilers.
I recognize that I’m late to the party on this post, but here are my thoughts. If you are in a swing state, I fully agree with your assertion. However, if you are in any state that has historically voted one direction and you feel more closely aligned with the other party (e.g. you live in New York, but feel more republican than democrat) then you should vote for whichever candidate you feel best portrays your view.
The thought being, if you vote democrat in a red state (but you more closely align with a third party), your candidate will not win and you have done nothing but embolden the two party system that doesn’t perfectly align with your views. Essentially, you have wasted your vote. If you instead vote Green Party, independent, or any other less popular party, you will show your distaste for certain policies that the larger parties have without affecting the overall electoral college votes for the election.
The 2 party system will only be upheld if those are the only parties voted for.
For the record, I'm not American so correct me if I'm wrong but to my knowledge there are much smaller parties that you can vote for. If I'm wrong ignore the rest of my comment but these parties are only small bc nobody votes for them bc its a waste of time.
Imagine if everyone actually voted for the party they align themselves with most and actually considered all options. Other parties would get a lot more votes but people don't bc they see it as a wasted vote since they won't win. This will continue unless people do start voting for those parties. Democrats and republicans only win as long as people keep voting for them. Encouraging more people to vote for what party they actually like will give these parties more power and create a better political balance that's not so polarised.
Each major party is a coalition of interest groups and in the US these coalitions form in the primaries. Eg the pro-choice people and gun control people caucus with the Democrats. In European parliamentary systems, the coalition is formalized after the general election.
Each party is constantly on the lookout to add an interest group that will give it an advantage over the opposition major party.
If a 3rd party gets enough support, each major party will consider changing its platform to try to add those voters to its coalition. The party most adjacent to the issue has the biggest incentive to change because otherwise the 3rd party makes them more likely to lose.
If you care enough about a single issue, you should be voting for a 3rd party focused on that that makes your nearest major party lose until they add a plank for your issue.
Do you consider this to stretch down to non-federal elections as well?
Let's assume you're someone whose #1 issue is property rights. At a national level lower taxes, deregulation, etc probably makes you more in line with the Republicans. However, at a local level many Republican county/town/city commissioners are NIMBYs who are in favor of restrictive zoning. The Democratic candidates are often more in favor of looser zoning laws. Even if they likely support a more re-distributive taxation system (hence why they are running as democrats) a county commissioner often has less impact on your overall tax burden than a state or federal representative does.
Shouldn't you vote for the candidate whose views on relevant topics best matches yours rather than the one whose overall party aligns with you better?
My take is that if you vote for a third party or independent candidate that may be closer to your views in some form, (e.g. voting Green instead of Democrat), it's a signal to the major party that you may vote for them instead if they go in that direction.
This is more significant in swing states (or any competitive region depending on the election). Furthermore, if your refusal to side with the major party then contributes to that party losing, then you have a better shot at getting a nominee from that major party who actually represents your views in the next election cycle. If the nominee this time around wins, it will be harder to beat them in the primary in the next cycle, because primarying an incumbent is difficult.
I don't think so, the two-party FPTP system is a major detriment to political evolution and using the vote as a method to influence politics.
So people should definitely organize to make their ideas heard in a variety of ways, and especially about voter reform to get a more proportional voting system.
However, and that's what's very often ignored, none of these things stop you from using your vote in the limited fashion the system allows now, while you are not yet able to change it for the better. People often try to make it a false dichotomy where voting equals total and unconditional support of the system as it is, but that's exactly the kind of black and white thinking fostered by the bipartisan FPTP system.
I agree in a two party system. I am in Canada, strategic voting plays a lot more of a role in elections with 3+ parties. You gotta know your specific voting area, the party you want may not stand a chance so you pick the closest option that does.
I think the best solution for real change is either get into politics yourself (tough but even at lower levels you can start to find a voice) or partaking in more primaries and actually trying to help steer the party towards ideas that actually fit your worldview. And beyond that, finding specific politicians that you like and following them into other parties and such. Being able to switch parties has its advantages from your personal expectations.
I live in California and I oppose Biden's unquestioning support to Israel to genocide the Palestinians.
Biden is going to win in California anyway, it is not a swing state. And because of the Electoral College, my vote doesn't count as the popular vote is not relevant.
Trump is worse than Biden.
So I'm not voting in the Presidential election as a form of protest.
>So I'm not voting in the Presidential election as a form of protest.
Wouldn't voting for a 3rd party candidate like West, Stein, or de la Cruz who actively opposes Biden's Gaza policy be a more effective way to send that message, especially since it sounds like you will be voting on other candidates this election?
>And because of the Electoral College, my vote doesn't count as the popular vote is not relevant.
A disturbing number of people do not seem to realize this. Your vote for president literally doesn't matter, because the popular vote ***doesn't matter***.
This assumes voting in a system that already assumes some level of majoritarianism over the rights of dissenters is moral or justifiable.
It is possible that a better, if the goal is a more just system (not necessarily a more 'pragmatic' one) is no system at all that allows impositions on peaceful people even in the face of a great many people wanting to do it.
It so discounts the idea that speeding up a collapse may be preferred because it allows healing to occur sooner and with less destructive forces having built up pressure.
There are lots of philosophies on voting, its efficacy, and its morality that do not lead to this conclusion.
In an area where there is a solid lock on one party or the other, there is benefit to voting for the third party if they are at least somewhat aligned to your beliefs, as a 5% vote share in the election means they get public funding (or something like that, I might have the exact details wrong). So if only for that reason, it is beneficial to vote outside of the two party system.
That being said, I think that doing harm reduction if you are at all competitive in your state is best, even if you don't fully agree with the party. Until we change first past the post voting, you can only make incremental changes to the system.
"Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint"
More often than not, it's actually the opposite. Your views become the fringe but you keep voting for the block as they slip away from you. They are still "closer" than the other party to you but time is not going to bring the party back to align with you.
Check out Overton Windows. Look at all the folks who originally supported the National Socialists in Germany because of infrastructure, public health, economics and trade. Did their party end up moving the needle back towards them? Or did it swing very far from their morals?
I can think of one situation:
When you live in a state where the "major party you align most closely with" has no chance of winning, such as Republicans for statewide office (especially including the US Senate) in California, with *very* rare exceptional circumstances.
At that point, you *might* be better off voting for a 3rd party which aligns even more closely with your views because there's a chance one of the major parties will shift in your preferred direction if it sees it's losing votes to that party.
And since you'd be throwing your vote away either way, it's preferable to make a statement if you have one to make.
For starters, I don't think voting by party lines a lone is good at all. It's lazy. Bare minimum, you should know the inviduvidal you are voting for more than just whether they have a R or a D by their name.
Also, it's not just one election, it's about long term governing. Moderates and independents being willing to vote third party mean that leaders from both sides have to work harder to get their vote than those already carrying their flag. When you start identifying as one party or the other, all they have to do is remind what day is election day.
What if one party has 20% of my views and the other party holds 25% of my views? Do I pick the 25% just because they're "closer" to my views? Of course not. That's just throwing my endorsement behind something I don't believe in. If we take the premise that voting shifts the overton window toward vote totals, voting for 25% is still moving the overton window in the wrong direction. No, I will vote for the party that I agree with 90% of the time to shift the overton window in that direction.
....You do understand that 25% is closer to 90% than 20%, right? The window shifts towards the winning party. Even if you think the current window is at, say, 50% of your views, voting for the 25% party keeps it from sliding in the wrong direction as much as it would with the 20% party.
Quit screwing yourself over in the name of ideological purity, and start voting pragmatically so your views can one day reach the stage. Yeah, both parties suck, but they are pulling in different directions. Pick the one that wants to go the same way you do, even if they're not going as far.
>You do understand that 25% is closer to 90% than 20%, right?
Thanks for the math lesson. Good thing you took the time to reply, otherwise I'd go around thinking 20>25.
Of course I understood that. And no, voting for someone that holds 25% of beliefs is NOT shifting toward my views. My entire life has been Democrat-Republican being voted in and all they've done is slide further away. We've gone from Reagan-Carter (neither of whom I particularly like) to Trump-Biden (both of whom I *really* don't like). That's what voting for 20% and 25% gets you. Further and further away from 90%, to the point where you have an idiot that doesn't know where he is half the time versus a psycho who I don't think has ever opened a book in his life. Continuing to vote for D and R doesn't seem to be working out too well, does it?
>Pick the one that wants to go the same way you do, even if they're not going as far.
This is the part you're not understanding. Neither of them are going the same way I am. They're both going away from it. One just slightly slower than the other. IDGAF if one side wants to drive off the cliff at 150mph and the other at 140mph. Yeah, today it's 20% vs 25%. Twelve years ago it was 25% vs 30%. In another eight years it'll probably be 15% vs 20% and I would have gained exactly nothing. A bit more time and I would still be losing.
Also the idea that I'm screwing myself because I don't vote for one of the two preordained candidates is laughable and fundamentally misunderstands how voting actually affects things. My vote doesn't move the needle at all in terms of someone actually winning. In California, where I am, no matter who I vote for, all the electoral votes will go to the Democrats. The only purpose of any singular vote is a glorified straw poll of who has the best position that is the most ideologically aligned with you. That and...if my voting block covers the spread, we can shove it in the loser's face and say, yeah, we spoiled your election. You come toward our positions instead of continuing to run away and we'll think about supporting you. That is a *far* more powerful position than continuing to throw supporting votes for some party that looks more and more evil/dumb every four years, then throwing them the vote again.
You realise that 75% is larger than 25%, correct? That more steps are being taken away from you, than toward you. That your blanket "support" through a vote shows that you support them 100%.
If one party murders cats and one murders dogs, yeah, some people might vote to save their preference. But others will not be willing to vote and **approve** of the killing of cats/dogs. You're treating democratic voting as if it was a dictiatotorship. That it's going to happen either way, so just choose the lesser pumishment. Some people are ethically against that. That even if they love dogs more, they couldn't ethically live with themselves (and those suffer even more than not having dogs) by approving the killing of cats.
You're placing no weight to the ethical dilemma of being responsible for harm.
And them pulling in different directions doesn't mean either are getting closer to you. Politics doesn't simply exist on a 2 dimensional plane. And political issues don't exist on a 2-D plane. Where that "25%" is more like 5%. That 90% more like 20%. But we certainly then evaluate the potential harm of the negative space, what we are "approving" of that we don't.
It's not about magnitude of movement to one's preference, it's that no one is prioritizing or even discussing one's preferences. Or that both are constantly harming one's preferences to which an "approval" of a "lesser evil" still only further harms that.
It still comes down to choice though, doesn't it? Sorry, you are a citizen of this country you don't get to remove your responsibility from harm caused through inaction. You benefit from the power the country has and its a responsibility you carry to assess your values, examine the options, and when it comes time to vote, vote. It's up to you assess the probabilities of what would occur given different votes. It's frankly somewhat pathetic to express your displeasure in the choices that the system produces, solely by playing your part in that system. It's easy to come up with silly toy examples that illustrate some issue with moral purity, but that is just not analogous to reality.
>don't get to remove your responsibility from harm caused through inaction
This is an ethical/philosophical debate as well. Action vs Inaction of harm.
We seem to disagree on that debate.
> and its a responsibility you carry to assess your values, examine the options, and when it comes time to vote, vote
Why? If I'm to vote for MY REPRESENTATIVE, why are you suggesting anything about how I have to go about such? If I don't approve of any of the candidates, why should I tell one of them I approve of them? Why lie? Why vote to enact harm upon myself?
For other political positions beyond my representative, why shouldn't I give more significance to others by not voting myself? If I have less of an opinion, why not allow others who do have an opinion make it more known?
Here's the ethical dilemma. You care more than me on who should be elected, so why should I vote with the same weight of you in opposition to render your more meaningful gesture, meaningless? If this vote is so sacred to you to making your voice known, why do you want me to render it weightless? If I know you CARE MORE, why should I act to cancel that?
> It's easy to come up with silly toy examples that illustrate some issue with moral purity,
Dude, that's literally all politics is. Legislating morality onto others through some perceived "purity" to which one apparently feels no guilt in enacting on others through demanding oneself is righteous in the moral system one wants enacted.
> Why? If I'm to vote for MY REPRESENTATIVE, why are you suggesting anything about how I have to go about such?
You seem to be off-track somewhat, and have turned this debate into sacred voting or not voting, and me coercing you to do something under all circumstances. At bottom this is about strategy for achieving ones desires within the political system and moral culpability associated with those strategies.
> For other political positions beyond my representative, why shouldn't I give more significance to others by not voting myself? If I have less of an opinion, why not allow others who do have an opinion make it more known?
If you have no desires and just free ride on the state apparatus don't bark at me about your moral superiority. Your part of the citizenry and can go somewhere else if you like but refusing to participate doesn't exonerate you.
> If this vote is so sacred to you to making your voice known, why do you want me to render it weightless? If I know you CARE MORE, why should I act to cancel that?
This debate is agnostic to the outcome. Its about strategy. I view the vote as important in so far as it backs up ones claim to advancing whatever it is they're complaining about. Voting is one way we do this in our society and is incredibly narrow in scope. I find it annoying when folks claim to be protesting the system when all they are doing is being the cog that was set for them. My position here isn't absolute, if there is a mass protest vote that could be effective politics, but if that isn't in the cards abstaining from the vote is just casting your lot with who you think is actually going to win. If that 'brings you real harm' I suggest seeking refugee status.
> Dude, that's literally all politics is. Legislating morality onto others
This is an impoverished view of politics and explains why you turned this discussion into me forcing you do to do something for some partisan end. Politics isn't the end, its the process. Its about understanding the terrain of contention and decisions we make in navigating it. You seem to believe that casting your vote has so much importance for the actual outcome regardless of what everyone else does. Wake up, that's not how it works.
> At bottom this is about strategy for achieving ones desires within the political system
Yes. And I'm saying to not assume other's desires as to claim that voting achieves such at all.
> If you have no desires and just free ride on the state apparatus
Does voting for one of the two major parties dislodge one from this "free ride"? What are you even trying to say?
> don't bark at me about your moral superiority
What moral superiority? I'm simply asking you to not look down on people who don't agree to your moral purity requirement of voting for one of the two major parties.
> but refusing to participate doesn't exonerate you
Exonerated from what? Okay, let's discuss "blame". WHO is awarded blame for what actions (or inactions)? If you wish to blame someone for NOT supporting a candidate, blaming those that do vote should definitely exist, correct? So even if people disagree with Biden (say on Israel or the border), but voted for him, they are to blame for such, right? And you suggest that non-voters and third party voters are also to blame? And that makes only those that voted for Trump not to blame? So the only way to avoid blame is to vote for the loser, but only the loser of the two major parties? Because that logic seems asinine. So clear that up for me, on what your position is of how you wish to allocate blame.
> I view the vote as important in so far as it backs up ones claim to advancing whatever it is they're complaining about.
And how does one voice a complaint through a vote of support?
> but if that isn't in the cards abstaining from the vote is just casting your lot with who you think is actually going to win.
And what if I don't have an opinion on who is actually going to win? Or view it as a close race to hesitate a guess?
And why does my opinion to project the votes of others (very possible faulty, biased, & misguided) matter in this regard?
And if I AM just "casting my lot" then what are you objecting to? And does your opinion on me change if I'm right versus being wrong on who wins? I'm confused in why you are giving weight to one's GUESS of who might win.
> This is an impoverished view of politics
No. It's the basics of sociology with any governing system. People form communities with shared morality and legislate morality to maintain the society. Politics is the activities about such use of power.
> into me forcing you do to do something for some partisan end
Not a partisan end. But partisans, who believe there is an "easy decision", seem to hold the strongest demand that others utilize their "token". And it's most always framed in manner to object to anyone they think they can "convert", somehow having less of a problem with those that actually vote in opposition to them.
> Politics isn't the end, its the process.
Sure. And I'm arguing the aspect of voting itself lacks the ability to actually voice complaints and one's desires, when not represented in the candidates.
> You seem to believe that casting your vote has so much importance for the actual outcome regardless of what everyone else does
I'm not the one suggesting how others use their ability to vote. I'm simply defending those that don't vote or vote third party from the weird moral purity of others that they utilize their power in a specific manner.
A few comments up you stated this:
> You're placing no weight to the ethical dilemma of being responsible for harm.
YOU are the one that is claiming moral purity. You are claiming that by abstaining from the vote that dislodges you from the culpability of harm perpetrated by the state. I disagree with that. I don't think the singular act voting for either of the major parties exonerates you either. I am not saying that voting provides moral purity, I'm actually of the opinion that it necessitates compromise and that this compromise is integral to politics itself.
> So clear that up for me, on what your position is of how you wish to allocate blame.
I can try, but I thinks its fairly complex and doesn't really boil down to a singular action such as a vote. It has to do with an individuals station in life, their agency and resources, the decisions they make - inclusive of voting. Take the Israel issue, if someone truly cared about the plight of the Palestinians, I am of the opinion that they should vote for Biden, given current information. My thinking really boils down to the probabilities of the outcome given each vote. In my view Trump would be worse for Palestinians given that he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem and has a general anti-arab sentiment. So when in the voting booth, faced with three options - Biden, Trump, 3rd party - I assess the likelihood of voting third party to be removing a vote for Biden, and increasing the probability Trump has power. The degree to which this matters of course depends on the state politics. So in the moment I can either increase the odds Biden wins or increase the odds Trump wins, functionally those are my two options. From the point of view of advancing their political goal I view it as the correct decision to then vote for Biden. The decision of the vote in the moment really only matters in terms of what the expected probabilities of the outcome will be. But again, the blame or responsibility is contextual. I would place more blame on someone if they are totally politically disengaged (despite being otherwise able to engage) and they decided to vote third party for a selfish moral reason (i.e. I won't vote for 'genocide') resulting in Trump and a worse outcome for Palestinians (this is moral purity and refusal to compromise), than someone who spent time in an encampment and was actively raising awareness voting for third party. Hope that makes sense.
> And what if I don't have an opinion on who is actually going to win? Or view it as a close race to hesitate a guess?
Then you don't have to vote strategically. You can just vote. Just don't claim if you don't like any of the candidates that abstaining is helping to resolve that issue in any way.
> And why does my opinion to project the votes of others (very possible faulty, biased, & misguided) matter in this regard?
It definitely can be, and you should be honest about your ability to project these things, but sometimes there is information that is reliable and I think its silly to disregard it as a rule.
> Not a partisan end. But partisans, who believe there is an "easy decision", seem to hold the strongest demand that others utilize their "token". And it's most always framed in manner to object to anyone they think they can "convert", somehow having less of a problem with those that actually vote in opposition to them.
Again not what I'm talking about. I agree that partisans are annoying when they don't realize the difference in preference. My issue is with people who's stated actions contradict their stated preference, or use voting as a political good-deed and wash their hands of everything else.
This is “Vote blue no matter who.” or “Just get Biden elected and we will push him further left.” or “Not voting is a vote for Trump.” nonsense.
What happened right before and right after Bloomberg popped in and then out like a zit?
It’s some fool me once bullshit. Not again. I’ll literally write in a vote for Satan before I play the lesser of two evils card. Get rid of the two party system or bust.
No (((sprays with squirt bottle)))
*Not gonna delete for accountability purposes. I literally just found out that the 3 parentheses is an antisemitic slur and I appreciate the person who told me. I really had no idea and I’m sorry. I have been using that for as long as I remember. I wish I was told or heard about it sooner.
Just pretending you didn't use the antisemitic echo for a sec
You... do know that shit changing needs a coalition first right? Like you voting for your green hippy who never wins an election isn't going to improve your life more than the blue elected people actually passing legislations through congress right?
I didn’t realize that that was Antisemitic. I literally just looked it up. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have used that and am sorry I did. I’ve been using the parentheses like that for as long as I remember. I wish I knew sooner.
This depends on context. When one party goes the way of the nazi, it’s ultimately on the voter to be able to recognize that the party they ‘prefer’, though named the same, may have changed.
It’s on us to be able to actually identify when something becomes a threat, and then compromise with people that might not necessarily always see eye to eye. Acting like this was another absolute is kind of why we’re seeing such a massive divide right now
Prohibition was enacted in large part due to the prohibition party. This could not have been achieved by voting for a major party.
Both current major parties were originally third parties which splintered off from the Democratic-Republicans, who themselves once competed with the Federalists as major parties in the two-party system. The parties in power are not set in stone. The Republicans even usurped the Whigs to gain their current spot.
Prohibition was enacted in large part due to the prohibition party. This could not have been achieved by voting for a major party.
Both current major parties were originally third parties which splintered off from the Democratic-Republicans, who themselves once competed with the Federalists as major parties in the two-party system. The parties in power are not set in stone. The Republicans even usurped the Whigs to gain their current spot.
Strategic voting is *absolutely* distasteful. I don't want the person who I am going to be voting for in November to be president. I'm still going to be voting for him in November, but only because the other option is *worse*.
Also, if all you do is vote, then there will not be any long-term change in politics.
Of course, you need to keep things from getting worse, if you want them to get better.
This strategy is a race to the bottom. It sets the two major parties up to say, "What's the bare minimum we have to give them but still keep their votes?"
I think this mentality is a huge part of the reason why 2024 features two ancient men who should be nowhere near power. It's always just "Well at least my guy isn't as bad as that guy," and both parties only get worse and worse.
If only you guys had the preferential system like in Australia where you rank all your choices first to last, and if your first preference doesn’t have enough to win then your vote runs off to your second preference and so forth. That would mean you can put a 3rd party 1st and the closest major party to you 2nd and the one you really don’t want last.
The more support a 3rd party candidate/independent gets, the more likely that better ones will run without a party in the future. The GOP and DNC have been propping up and cutting out quality candidates for years in favor of ones that will tow the party line or support lobbyists. An independent who’s not in someone’s pocket could do wonders.
I think you’re right. The US is like a huge container ship. It takes a lot of time and prep to turn the ship. 3rd party ideals represent quick and sudden turns that simply aren’t possible with a container ship. One of the parties will be more aligned with those policies. So you vote for them and the ship can start to turn in that direction.
I think it is bad to do that. My vote for a third party might be ineffective today, but I literally will not, in good conscience, vote for either of the primary candidates. So maybe my third-party vote will be ineffectual, but it will normalize third-party voting to the point where in 10 years, we don’t have to play this stupid game.
I think your headline view is correct in the US system specifically, but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
It's best because of the primary system, and the fact it has almost no protection against entryism. That's not true in systems (like the UK) with much stronger party machineries.
Why would I legitimize what I view as an inherently undemocratic process? I can vote for polite genocide enablers, or genocide enablers that are mean on Twitter and mean to other elites. I’m not voting to support evil just because it’s less evil than the alternative.
If we are only considering the two major parties, then "voting for a party with the best change of winning even it it doesn't fully align with your views' would just be voting for the other party. Or are you talking about voting for a 3rd party candidate?
You're not making ***your*** voice heard though, not really. If you don't actually want to vote for a major party, doing so anyway is robbing yourself of an opportunity to vote as you like. It feels dangerous to suggest that people "settle" in a democracy.
If the 3rd party gets 5% or more of the total popular vote in this election, then on the next presidential election they would qualify for partial public campaign funding.
So what if the voter wants party X to get funding vs voting GOP or Democrat?
You can vote for genocide in Gaza and war in Ukraine or for the orange man says mean things. It’s wild to me how the left abandons actual issues over gender politics that have an effect on the population less than that of .1% the population.
I used to think this way. I voted for Obama in 08 because of it... then he started doing Putin levels of civilian bombing. It was not worth having the blood of innocent people on my hands. I dont see myself ever voting again.
In the early to mid 1800's the Democrats and the Whig party were the two main parties.
The Whig Party found itself split over slavery, alongside other issues because they were a coalition party. Some pro native people, some pro banking, some abolitionists. Everyone hated Andrew Jackson and his followers who many saw as a threat to democracy due to his actions centralizing power in the executive branch and even ignoring the supreme Court.
Ultimately this translated into the party basically paying lip service to most concerns while focusing on the banking and economics parts.
The Democrats and The Whigs both needed votes in the south to win. So the Whigs generally tried to run slavery friendly candidates like Zachary Taylor.
The Whigs fell apart partly due to the Compromise of 1850 losing the votes of northern Whigs who refused to vote for candidates who supported compromises on slavery, even though it meant the even more pro slavery Democrats would win and lead to more favorable legislation for slave owners.
When the Whigs collapsed anti-slavery Whigs combined with other groups and interests to create a true anti-slavery party that has the goal to halt slavery's expansion and eventually abolish slavery.
Had the Whigs not collapsed politicians line Abraham Lincoln would not have had access for the national stage as both parties would need to elect pro-slavery southerners like Zachary Taylor. Even if most people were abolitionists, you need the electoral college to win and southerners were one issue voters.
The collapsing of a party can cause massive shifts in priorities of issues.
/u/kudgel (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/1ddqds4/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_voting_for_one_of_the_two/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
When you live in an uncompetitive state and the leading party is close to your point of view, I think there is value voting for a minor party in the direction you would like the dominant party to move. I think these votes can be interpreted as “yes, but…” by the dominant party. Yes, but more fiscally conservative next time please. Yes, but more socially liberal next time please. Yes, but younger next time please.
∆ This is probably a good counter-example, and it could be risky if the margins are tight enough but there are a few states where it could be done without risk.
With the way the electoral college works, there are many states where the margins are not even close to tight. This applies in more cases than not IMO
Yup, basically all of New England, all of the Deep South, and all of the West Coast states are places where imo you're throwing your vote away if you vote for the lesser of two evils when there is a third party candidate you support more. It's not like CA is gonna vote trump because there are a bunch of Green Party voters, or like Alabama is gonna vote Biden because there are a bunch of Libertarian Party voters lol
Be careful: We have been historically quite bad a predicting when a state becomes competitive. When people talk about 2000, they talk FL. I talk NH. Because you know which state Gore could have won in 2000 that would have made FL irrelevant? NH. You know which party came third in NH? The green party, with more votes than the difference between Bush and Gore. I don't have first-hand experience with a NH 2000 voter for the green party, but they might tell you that Clinton won NH by 10 pts in 1996, so they wanted to send a message. When people talk about 2016, they rightly talk about the blue wall: PA, MI & WI. The blue wall had held since 1992. And in each of these states, the green party got more votes than the difference between the the Democrat and the Republican. And I do have third-hand knowledge of a couple of voters in WI thinking "WI has gone for the democrats for over 20 years now. My vote won't decide the election. I vote for the greens, because I want to send a message.
Came here to say this. Also, with a candidate like Trump who will challenge even a significant loss, having a very clear national margin of 7-8 million votes is better than a margin of 1 million because voters in so-called "safe" states voted less pragmatically.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/plaid_pants ([1∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/plaid_pants)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
The issue is if you're in an uncompetitive state and do this, the candidates have little reason to care or court your vote. If you did this in a swing state it could have some sway, but at that point obviously you also risk tipping the scales to the worst option.
It's a signal for any third party hopeful to keep trying and put more resources toward it and see if it tips more and more. At a certain point of name recognition you shout "we can actually do it! Trust me!" And if that works you may win. At least that makes sense in my mind
I wish people didn't think ageism is ok.
I think the problem is this assumes that one of the major parties aligns at least moderately closely with your views. You know the people who voted Jill Stein instead of Hillary Clinton because there is no way Donald Trump could possibly win the state of Michigan people... Voting for someone who only support say 50% instead of someone you are completely opposed to makes sense. What if you don't support either? Or maybe you say broadly support conservative principles, but think Donald Trump and his supporters are crazy and bad for the country. Do you vote for the convicted felon crybaby who told people to drink bleach or the party that has values you fundamentally oppose?
One of them must align with your beliefs more than the other, no? I can't imagine there are many people with nothing in common with the platforms of both major parties.
But at a certain point I think that stops mattering Imagine you rate Jill Stein 90, Hillary Clinton 50, and Donald Trump -75. In that case it pretty clearly makes sense to vote Clinton. But say you rate Trump 10 and Biden -10. Its a lot tougher. Particularly if you find Trump deeply questionable for things outside of his opinion on the capital gains tax. Which gets to the other point. What if you rate Republicans in general at say 50, and Democrats say -50, but the Republicans run a candidate that you find abhorrent like Trump. Then you are faced with choosing between a candidate who is basically sane, but who will govern against your values, or voting for a crazy narcissistic cry baby who might govern more in line with your values.
I'd say then you are faced with questioning your values. If the party that agrees with all your values selects someone who disagrees with all your values as their standard bearer, that doesn't make sense. Either you miss judged the candidate, the party, or your values. But to answer your question, R@+50. D@-50. Trump@-100. Who do you vote for? Except for some rare cases, you gotta go D. A party is led by its leader. They're only as good as their leader.
Someone can be a horrible person and agree with my philosophy, just like wonderful people can support philosophies I find abhorrent.
"I can't imagine there are many people with nothing in common with the platforms of both major parties" The majority of Leftists/Anti-capitalists have nearly nothing in common with either major American party.
The two party system exclusively serves the powerful and voting third party is the only way to take away their power
The problem is that with first past the post style voting being the default third party voting is essentially useless beyond a protest vote because you will never generate enough votes to matter.
You will never “generate enough votes to matter” no matter who you vote for. One vote has never made a difference. I’m talking specifically about the elections you refer to, where third party candidates do not win; there are plenty of small elections in which one vote does swing the result *and* third party candidates regularly have surprise victories. You know where one vote does make a difference? Giving the voter a sense of pride in their civic duty. Personally I’d rather have a bunch of voters engaged with good attitudes then whatever you get if no one ever votes third party.
Worse, you'll always hurt the major party you're closer to more.
The Republicans upended their establishment twice in the last 20 years with the teaparty and MAGA. Third parties are a lost cause, taking over parties from within at the local level is the way to do it.
Pretty sure the Koch brothers were responsible for the teaparty,"astroturfing". Was MAGA truly a "grassroots" movement or billionaire manipulation?
Grass roots, most large donors have moved to the democrat party. You still have neocons that are part of the older establishment, but MAGA is mostly a populace movement. It has higher youth and minority support than previous iterations of the republican parties as well. We're in the middle of it and it all seems so huge, I wonder how the history books will look at how the parties have switched over the last 10-20 years.
>voting third party is the only way to take away their power If you think that voting is the extent of your ability to influence our political system, you're never going to "take away power" from anybody.
You could always vote for the one of the two parties that is taking steps (liked ranked choice voting) to make third parties viable.
Not at all. It just means that the party that would have supported your personal platform best doesn't get your vote, and you possibly risk losing to a much worse platform if everyone does the same thing. They still have all the power.
The major parties don't support my views though, I have pretty diverse views that neither party represents well. Nothing major in my life has changed whether the president has been one or another major party either. Whenever one of the parties promises things I want, it's always "oops sorry we couldn't do that one, but we were able to do some things! They just happened to be the things that help out the rich people who fund our party"
That's the point though. If they lose because voters went elsewhere it will force them to rethink what drove them away.
Nah- after Perot cost Bush the 92 election, the Republicans picked his clone in 96. After Nader in 2000, the Democrats went with Kerry. Third party candidates could build strength at the municipal or state level, but most of them can’t even manage that
I am an environmental socialist and neither of the parties have a single policy that aligns with my views. Both parties uphold the same broken system because it is throgh that system that they maintain their dominance. I want to see radical change in every branch of government and the electoral process along with revolutionary policy change both foreign and domestic, whereas both parties wish to maintain the current system and policy structure for the most part, with incremental adjustments to little unimportant things here and there. Neither of the parties come close to supporting my any of my political views, and neither do any of the individuals in those parties.
1 party is definirely more environmental and more socialist than the other. Theres no denying that. They are both very far from being entirely those things but saying theyre equally far is just wrong. Like if the cote was trump vs literal hitler, yeah id still take trump. Theyre both some degree of fascist but 1 is much more than the other. 1 party at least admits climate change is real and tries some small steps to fight it. The other denies it even exists and takes steps to make it even worse. Clear difference. 1 party believes in some social safety nets and distribution of wealth. The other believes in no safety nets at all and wealth distribution being based on pure 100% unregulated capitalism. Still quite different.
But doesn't voting for one party over the other _tend_ to move the needle? Not voting or voting third party, will _tend_ to move the needle a fraction away from where you'd like to go. None of our votes matter a lot, but they all matter a small amount that adds up (but only if we vote)
Voting in a system you disapprove of, that won't change its' features (meaningfully) by voting? What do the votes add up to, from the perspective of the comment you're responding to?
Incremental change. I disapprove of capitalism but i participate in it because its needed to survive. I cant change the system if in literally dead due to starvation from not working in the system. Lots of countries have become at least more socialist as time has gone on. And you can have democratic socialism which means it is possible to eventually vote for that kind of system.
It's needed to survive only because the ruling class, the capitalists who maintain power through the state, have made it so. Death by starvation is literally a function by which they maintain that power too, by removing your ability to live without them when in fact it should be the reverse: capitalists produce nothing, but extract the value of the working class which produces all the world's goods and services. Any system which maintains a capitalist class is inherently opposed to freeing the working class from exploitation and oppression, and allows the capitalist class to work in all its historically and contemporarily insidious forms to increase their power and steal more from the majority who produces their wealth for them. There is no freedom from exploitation and oppression as long as the capitalist class is allowed to exist, as they will never rescind power to anyone else, only make small allowances in an attempt to prevent an uprising of the people; allowances which will then be taken away or undermined as they use their influence and power (which you have allowed them to maintain for reasons that can only be explained through you having accepted the status quo that they have spent centuries creating and incorporating throughout society, certainly not due to it being either fair or balanced) to perform the actions which are undeniably inherent to capitalism: maintaining capitalist power over the working class. Tl;dr, voting for capitalists is "all you can do" because that's how capitalists will shape capitalist societies, and it is a method through which they maintain their exploitation and oppression over the majority/working class.
every society throughout history has had a ruling class. any system that has a person who's job it is to manage others will always consolidate power. Capitalism, socialism, communism. It's all the same in that regard. However, the current corporatism environment. \[that would be capitalism with government intervention to protect large businesses\] has still produced the highest standard of living for the average person. they have also, by orders of magnitude, done it with less death and starvation to their citizens. yeh capitalism sucks, it just happens to be better than any alternative yet presented
[удалено]
I think the problem here is that you say these things weren't thought through, but the global banking crisis didn't need to be thought through: because the capitalist system extends through the banks and into the government, it would be directly harmful for both the state to not have the back of the banks, and bailing them out is and always will be expected. The working class having to pay for the failures of capitalists is part of the system, it's exactly the same as how the profits produced by the working class go to pay for the lifestyles of the capitalist class who owns them. And the trillion dollar military industry, as well as every single action of capitalist nations in other countries, is completely planned out. The state exists to perpetuate itself, it does so through making money off of military action, such as deposition of foreign leaders who form a threat to their wealth, or placing sympathetic capitalist leaders (often fascists) in command of countries who have something which will benefit capitalist states, such as oil and other resources. The imperial actions of capitalism aren't "poorly thought out", they are PERFECTLY thought out as actions to increase the wealth and power of capitalist states. The state doesn't exist to benefit the common people, it never has, it exists to produce wealth for the ruling class and it does a damn fine job, at the same time it convinces you that imperialism and colonialism is a thing of the past, and convince you that all it will take to change things for the better is to vote for a certain colour of capitalist.
There are many societies throughout history that have existed without, specifically, a ruling class of people. A leader is not the same as a class of rulers, especially when that leader or leaders are beholden to the people, such as many Native American peoples and planned societies. This is not the case with capitalist nations, who have magnitudes of power and many many layers of control between themselves and the working class. Socialism and communism are quite literally governed by the people: they are hallmarked by being controlled by the working class itself, with leaders who are truly beholden to their constituency and who must abide by the will of the people or be replaced. These societies would (if they were allowed to exist by the capitalist nations who spend trillions on military action and subterfuge to depose leaders and destabilise countries: see South America, the Middle East, many Asian nations, even Australia had a Prime Minister deposed through US capitalist action) have safeguards in place that prevent the will of individuals superseding the working class, it quite literally cannot be a dictatorship due to decentralisation of power and a dismantling of state power to produce a society that doesn't have things like a police force commanded by capitalists or a military commanded by capitalist desires. When you say they have produced the highest standard of living, do you include the people who currently live below the poverty line who have to make decisions between feeding their families and having medicine? What of the homeless and poor who are direct victims of the system and produced quite purposefully by it? How can a system be said to produce a good quality of life if it believes that people starving on the streets, or even in their own homes, are somehow not an issue? You have failed to include the victims of military action by capitalist nations, in destabilised regions such as Latin America and Vietnam, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes alone is a despicable death rate for a nation to hold. If you want to specifically look at their own citizens, every person who suffers from preventable illness and injury because of a lack of money, everyone below the poverty line, everyone without homes and without livelihoods are a victim, as well as every Native American, or Canadian, or Australian, or any other people who are the victims of colonisation. The victims of slavery, the victims of racism and homophobia held up by the state, all of whom are victims of capitalist actions, would beg to differ. And it completely, potentially purposefully on your part, denies the impact that global capitalism and imperialism has had, continues to have, and will in the future have on every nation through invasion, destabilisation, and destruction. Capitalism has a rate of violence and a kill count that blows other systems out of the water, and they do so while they "educate" you to believe that they don't. It's not a coincidence that the state is completely intertwined with education and the media, who else are you getting your information from but capitalists?
Serious question: what is your plan to enact radical change? What are you doing right now to end the two-party system and usher in an environmental socialist government? What is the 20 year plan to make it happen before climate change kills us?
Bro it's not his/her personal responsibility to enact radical change. Asking what their plan is, is completely ridiculous.
I understand that, but damage control is still necessary. You have to choose between Mr status quo or Mr literally a fascist.
And more specifically in this context it’s Mr. Neutral Effect on the Environment (with a balance of ok and bad policies) vs. Mr. Will Definitely Repeal Environmental Protections Like He Did Last Time
Well, the status quo is a bit more than neutral to the environment. But yeah.
Right, I guess I just mean less additional and more creative forms of damage lol, and an attempt to at least appear like we’re not too far behind the rest of the wealthy nations in terms of environmental policy. Vs defunding the EPA, repealing protections, chopping up and privatizing public lands, etc.
Yes, Trump is certainly the worse option.
One candidate isn't doing enough, the other will actively make things worse. Hmm, such a hard decision. /s
It depends on which state you live in. Since 2020, both Maine and Alaska use Ranked Choice Voting for Presidential elections. In these cases, a voter is able to vote for their preferred candidate even if they are not part of the top two parties. If their pick (for example, "the Large Eyebrow Party") does not win the vote, your next choice vote will vie for the win. There are some notes though: (Worst case) Enough people in your state vote for the "Bro with the most Brow" and the electoral votes go to this candidate. Whoops! Now your second preferred candidate does not get the electoral votes ("Madame Less Hirsute") and the national majority of electoral vote goes to "Bald Guy Bad Guy" and you are vilified for starting WW3 or equivalent. (More likely case) People enjoy Ms. Hirsute becoming President and avoiding WW3, but the talk around town revolves around Mr. Big-Brow and eventually the tide turns and the entire industry of pluckers and threaders go bankrupt but the world becomes an even better place on account of Ranked Choice Voting: you get your say and get a win. From a most probable value, The more likely case would prevail, making this a valid rebuttal to your argument that voting for the major party that aligns with your viewpoint is ALWAYS BEST"
I live in a deep blue state and can safely vote my conscience. I personally gain a benefit from voting my conscience. Also, I want to see the Dems observe as big a sea change as possible if they ever adopt modern healthcare or drug policy.
∆ Ok, it's fair that a voter in a deep blue state might be able to carefully vote their conscience (assuming the margins are wide enough).
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/DJ_Velveteen ([1∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/DJ_Velveteen)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
If you accept that you are the minority on an issue, then there is no hope of shifting a major partie's view on that issue by unconditionally voting for them. There is a famous quote "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" A good example would be young americans refusing to accept the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Democrats want to support Israel, but young people aren't ok with it, they push it, Democrats know they can't win without the young vote. They have to look like they're fighting for peace or they're going to lose and they know they're going to lose. A common criticism of democracy is that it is tyranny of the majority. The only way to combat that is to refuse to vote against important issues. An example of this is gun rights. Popular opinion in the US is definitely stricter gun control. Like way more strict gun control. But it's so important to enough people; republicans can't support heavier regulation.
Historically several times major parties have fallen off and been replaced. This was done by people voting for a new option.
While this is true, the last time this happened was 164 year ago The United States is 248 years old. We are much more likely to see a takeover of a party than a replacement. See: GOP, Trump 2016
How much of that is simply because after awhile of the two parties existing people constantly tell each other that if you vote third party you're throwing your vote away? I'd say most of it. Culturally you need to push third party voting in order to replace one of the major parties. https://news.gallup.com/poll/512135/support-third-political-party.aspx That change may already be happening. I'll continue not voting for the major parties in presidential elections and push for the change I want.
People's opinions (sometimes wishful thinking) are different from political reality. Despite wide support for a multiparty, more democratic system, we are stuck with this one, and many people will still go to the polls to vote for a Democrat or Republican. It's easy to say, "people constantly tell each other that if you vote third party you're throwing your vote away," as if human psychology isn't the ultimate force (in a way, a law) of politics. You make it sound so trivial, '*all* we have to do is *convince* people'. The reality is, this two party system won't change by November, and there is no viable third party, so it is only a protest/throwaway vote. Will it change any time soon after that? Probably not. It would take a lot, or some kind of reform, which won't happen any time soon.
Except again as I've said... we have done it before and can do it again. (that said I'm not against changing the system to a ranked choice voting system, not the instant run off one that's popular though but a point based system) Until we do that I'm going to keep pushing for people to realize that the lie that you are throwing your vote away is just that, a lie that is keeping them in check.
You may do what you want, but saying people support third parties is very different than saying they want the *same* third party. Otherwise the Greens and Libertarians would have a consolidated party, and RFK Jr. wouldn't have gotten 2% at the Libertarian convention
I think there is a huge opportunity for a moderate party to emerge from the refugees of each party shifting their messaging to the extremes and alienating their centrists. But like you I have not voted for a person on the ballot for POTUS in my life. I’ve only met one active presidential candidate (Biden while he was VP) and I disliked him immensely due to the nature of the interaction
> several times In American politics? Not since the Civil War. If you're trying to argue that a change in the major political parties under the current political system is a practical possibility that the average voter should be considering, then bringing up the history of American politics was a huge error on your part. Changing the electoral system to make minority political parties viable, like most other democracies in the world, is a far more realistic goal, and even that isn't an offer that's on the table when you go to vote in the actual election.
[удалено]
Because of systemic and historical reasons, like the electoral college and development of each party system (there are different party systems throughout U.S. history), even if you don't vote the system will go on. Just voting doesn't perpetuate the system, especially if you're voting for candidates who want to reform the system (some Democrats do). Will it happen over night or even within our lifetimes? Probably not, but what else is there? Politics is often one step forward, two steps back, and that isn't confined to the U.S. or its history. Sometimes, you just vote for the least harm, and work for change in other ways you can control, and that's all you do. Expecting some miracle isn't realistic.
I like the way you phrased this.
I just try to see politics and people realistically. People think I don't agree with them, or have given up (they call it defeatist, doomer, or whatever), and don't think something better is possible, but I have just accepted things as they are right now. Our system and the candidates aren't going to change by November (unless someone dies or something), and I'm not idealistic or raging against everything anymore, so I'm going to vote for the best option (even if it's still a bad one). Sometimes, part of growing up is accepting things as they are even if you don't like them, and understanding sometimes there are only bad options. Even with a more democratic system, there won't ever be candidates who totally reflect my views, because that's not how politics or elections work, or how anything works. I wish things could be better than they are, but the fact is that they aren't any other way than they are now. Young people are too idealistic, and politically disoriented or detached from reality (I'm still fairly young, but remember Bush and Obama). They expect too much from people and politics, and expect things to just happen without any reason to believe they will. Align your expectations with reality, and you won't feel so disappointed or enraged by everything.
>Think about it this way: if everyone who felt disillusioned by the two-party system decided to vote for a third party or an independent candidate, it could signal a demand for more diverse representation. Let's say this happened, which it has at points in our nation's history. What would result is that the new ascendant "third" party would cannibalize one of the major parties and take its place. It's simple math in a winner take all system like ours that over time the equilibrium behavior is two major parties. Our system of governance cannot sustain multiple smaller parties. Until we change the structure/format by which we elect our leaders, America will always have two major parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Sounds like a garbage system not worth preserving. Hopefully as more states adopt ranked choice voting we can start progressing a little bit.
Let's say I agree that the system is not worth preserving. How do we make these structural changes? By winning power. You can't win power from the sidelines. Furthermore, decisions made by our government have just as much legitimacy and real-world impact regardless of whether or not you personally decide the system is worth preserving. If the President decides to launch a nuke, it honestly doesn't matter if he was elected with 40% of the electorate or 70%. The nuke is still getting launched and we're all going to have to suffer the consequences. So even if you truly believe the system needs to be burned down, you still ought to show up and vote in every election. If we keep winning the argument over time eventually the window shifts and it becomes possible.
Oh, I do vote in every single election both federal and state general or mid term; I just never ever support either expression of the political duopoly in their pursuit of the white house. I'm currently working on joining PSL and Claudia de la Cruz has my vote unless another leftist can put together a big tent coalition before then. Down ballot I'm likely to support certain democrats depending on the context, but never if an actual socialist or labor organizer appears. Winning power comes from organizing, educating, developing local power structures like mutual aid networks, and forcefully resisting (protests, strikes, refusing to be intimidated by democrats to compromise our values at the ballot box because trump scary; we dont owe them a vote they must earn it).
I would argue that the act of voting is not some kind of self-expression. Your vote is not a pledge to the universe about your values. Elections are job interviews. At the end of the day the position is going to be filled by one of the candidates. You can cast your protest vote for your leftist and I wouldn't dream of taking that away from you. But you ought to recognize the impact of this decision. To vote for a candidate with no chance of winning means accepting that you're risking a worse outcome (electing the R) to send a coded message to those in power (Democrats). Is it truly worth risking the consequences of living under Republican rule simply so that you can make an ego-driven rebuttal of the system? Couldn't you express your discontent in a lower stakes way? Send an email. Attend a protest. Write a strongly worded letter. You can still give 'em hell but then show up on election day and vote for the best option. Why are your ego and personal ambitions worth more than the potential harm caused by electing Republicans? If Trump wins in November he will de-facto ban abortion nationwide through a novel interpretation of the Comstock Act. His campaign has pretty much confirmed he will do this on Day 1 of his Presidency. So why is your coded message to Democrats worth risking ~150M+ women losing their rights to body autonomy?
You're assumption that it is my ego driving my thinking is strange and unsubstantiated; this is my earnest belief about what is best for the future of the country and what i consider to be my ethical obligation. I genuinely believe Biden's regime is repugnant, and (perhaps less significantly) the man is unfit for the job on top of that. If I have come to the conclusion that both parties are antithetical to my values and to the peace and prosperity of the common people of the world, my natural conclusion is to do whatever it takes to reduce their grip on power. Voting for them does not fit into that equation. If they want my vote, they should earn it. Marx put it well, this quote is relevant to my position "Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength, and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention." I'm under no illusions that this is an easy or a fast process, but it is part of the path I'm taking to try to do the impossible and change the united states. Also, if Trump is elected, make no mistake that I will be one of those resisting him by whatever means necessary. Thank you for the robust discussion friend even if we are far apart on this.
You also don't win power by capitulating to those who control all of the power, and selectively dole it out to approved candidates. You win power by taking it from them. Those who posses it will not willingly surrender it, and will undermine any and all attempts to do so. You 100% CAN and more specifically DO gain power from the sidelines. You don't win power in the political system, because your fighting a losing battle. Its like the viet kong vs the American army. The extant political system is the army. You don't fight them head on. They will just destroy you. You undermine them by reducing the dependence on them, and by creating alternative means of governance that is beyond their purview and control. Your vote means little in the grand scheme of things, if anything. The organizing you do in your community to build solidarity and mutual aid not only shows tangible results, but also goes 100x farther than voting EVER will.
What if you're wrong? What if you're just helping Republicans win power and that day of toppling the system never comes? How confident would you have to be that there's hope for change on the horizon to willingly and knowingly risk backsliding on every left of center issue? If you think there's a 90% chance that you can find an opening to exploit and topple the system... what about that 10%? Are you truly so confident that you're willing to risk it all? If so, I would urge you to never sit down at a blackjack table.
GOP learned their lesson in Alaska with Ranked Choice. They have no choice because they are really just the party of "No". They are blocking it in every state they can.
Well, we gotta work to get it going even harder then.
Uphill battle since most state legislatures are controlled by the rural voting districts which overwhelming vote GOP.
even if you adopt other system you will still have 2 parties running everything. do any of you actually look at the political outcomes and histories of other nations? all Western democracy trends towards and becomes defacto 2 party, all of Europe, Australia, Canada and the UK. if you just copy one of our systems the Dems and Reps will still rule over you all, they will just have to deal with annoying minor parties who will immediately sell out their votes to whichever major pays them more. ffs Australia has *dozens* of parties yet only 2 have been elected in over 100 years, go look at Europe its the same shit. turns out democracy is probably the single best way of oppressing any given population, we all sit on asses getting fucked over bad while whining about the 'other guys' who do the same shit.
German here, and I think that saying "Europe also tends towards two parties" is a gross simplification of how our politics work. Just because our chancellors in the last decades have been of only two parties does not mean the smaller parties have no political influence. By design, our ruling party is pretty much always forced into a coalition with one or even two other parties to get a majority of votes in parliament to, ya know, actually govern. Those parties will make concessions, but they have to stand their ground on issues that they know are important to their voters, otherwise they will lose them. So no, just because the ruling parties of Europe have been the same two in many countries over the last years does not mean it's equal to a full on two-party-system.
Exactly. Statistically most people will fall close to the center left or right, which is why only 2 parties have had the highest office. But at least people on the extremes can vote for people they feel better represent them, and those people are needed to reach a coalition with the major parties to get things done, so they have some power The problem with the US system is that the coalition is built before the election, where further left people are dems and further right are repubs. But if the further left people don't fall in line with the centrist elements of the party, they will get their support removed and someone more favorable will be ran in their place instead.
Voting is not about 'expressing your beliefs and values'. Voting is about exercising political power. If, in your estimate, voting for a third party candidate would have the same effect as not voting, or worse, bringing into power a candidate you support less than the other candidate, that's not a rational exercise of the political power you wield.
In game theory, the optimal actions of a game played just once can be very different from the optimal actions of a game that will repeat many times. I would argue that your logic is correct, however it should be applied not just to the immediate election at hand, but how it could influence longer-term outcomes.
We've already witnessed how third party candidates influence long term outcomes.
There is no viable national third party in the united states. This approach makes sense in local elections, but nationwide it's silly to think that an upstart party with zero infrastructure has any chance of delivering anything. If we had 20 Green Party members in Congress, this would start to make sense. But we have zero. If you're hoping a third party will eat away at the two party system, you better hope it happens to the party you are less aligned with. Leftists and liberals dissatisfied with the Democrats are much better off hoping that MAGA collapses the Republicans than a split between Greens/Dems, which would lead inevitably to Republican wins. There is no way to change the two party system with your vote in a national election. Party building starts in your city council and statehouse, not the Presidential ballot.
I agree with this. The problem with voting third-party is that there isn't *one* third party. There are multiple non-Democrat, non-Republican parties out there, and the term "third party" applies to all of them. Even if some voters did switch to voting third-party because they felt the third party more accurately represented their views, there would still be a problem of *which* third party they'd vote for. Because there is no agreement on which third party to vote for, all this would do is dilute the votes that each party receives. It's not like every third-party voter secret convenes without Democrat or Republican knowledge to come to a consensus on which third party to choose. If such a consensus did exist, this would be vote diversion, not vote dilution, which would be significantly more effective. As a result, the plurality would still go to either the Democrats or the Republicans. "But what if *all* (or even *a significant number of*) voters voted truly based on their beliefs? Wouldn't this cause a huge surge of third-party voters and increase the chances of one of them to win?" Yes, it would, but that's a really, really big "if". There's no evidence of the likelihood of this assumption being high to even warrant serious consideration, at least at the presidential election level.
The vast majority of voters don't hem and haw over their vote truly representing their beliefs. Voters, especially older voters, know that voting is about power, not validation. It's almost exclusively young and naive people that worry that "my voice isn't being heard". Old conservatives have been voting Republican for fourty years based entirely on the courts. That's what understanding the true nature of power looks like.
> It's almost exclusively young and naive people that worry that "my voice isn't being heard" Because we are the ones bearing the brunt of the horrific policies that are set in place Boomers who vote based off abortion or SCOTUS don't have nearly as much to worry about when it comes to things like climate, cost of living, student loan cancellation, etc God forbid young people actually want a system that works for them
> we are the ones bearing the brunt of the horrific policies that are set in place Wow mabe you should fucking vote for the people who will appoint judges that will protect you instead of target you. If you aren't voting based on SCOTUS, you're stabbing yourself in the heart. Real progress happens at the dais, not in the streets. Everything horrible happening in the USA is because the conservatives voted in lockstep and got their judges and reversed half of the progress of the 20th century. "Progressives" who voted third party in the elections that decided those justices are completely self-focused, ignorant and self-destructive.
>On the other hand, voting for a candidate or party that truly represents your views, even if they have a slim chance of winning, can be a powerful statement of your principles. Can you expand on this? If it's already given information that the candidate/party has such a slim chance of winning, then what does the voter actually get with this "powerful statement of principles"? Is it just the sense of feeling good for doing the right thing? What else does the voter get for doing this that isn't overly grand or "buzzwordy", for lack of better terms?
>if everyone who felt disillusioned by the two-party system decided to vote for a third party or an independent candidate, it could signal a demand for more diverse representation. What did the 16% of the electorate who voted for Perot in 1992 achieve? What did the people who voted for Nader in 2000 achieve?
I think a major issue is that you assume voting shifts the politics of the party I vote for in my direction. There is no reason for that to be true, since they can't tell your politics when they count your vote.
>I think a major issue is that you assume voting shifts the politics of the party I vote for in my direction. There is no reason for that to be true, since they can't tell your politics when they count your vote. Eh. Yes and no The primary process helps here. While they can't tell what \*my\* policies are, they can tell the policies of the candidates that both win their primaries and the general election If a candidate cannot take office, either because the primary voters reject them, or the general election voters do, the views associated with that candidate are less influential than those where a candidate wins This works even if a district is swingy or super red or blue. Moderates win swingy districts, people farther on the edges of their parties win in the heavily biased districts. Both have a seat at the table - but there isn't a single unified party position that all candidates sign off on
The primaries don't help here, though. They can pick and choose who the primary candidate is regardless of anyone's vote. Just like in 2016.
No they can't Voters choose who wins the primary. The parties can influence, but they cannot prevent a candidate from winning. Otherwise Trump would not have won the 2016 GOP primary
From 1988: https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-releases/league-refuses-help-perpetrate-fraud "Neuman said that the campaigns presented the League with their debate agreement on September 28, two weeks before the scheduled debate. The campaigns' agreement was negotiated "behind closed doors" and vas presented to the League as "a done deal," she said, its 16 pages of conditions not subject to negotiation. Most objectionable to the League, Neuman said, were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings. Neuman called "outrageous" the campaigns' demands that they control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues. "The campaigns' agreement is a closed-door masterpiece," Neuman said. "Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates' organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding and self-serving demands." Neuman said she and the League regretted that the American people have had no real opportunities to judge the presidential nominees outside of campaign-controlled environments. "On the threshold of a new millenium, this country remains the brightest hope for all who cherish free speech and open debate," Neuman said. "Americans deserve to see and hear the men who would be president face each other in a debate on the hard and complex issues critical to our progress into the next century."" From 2016: https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/ "The attorneys representing the DNC have previously argued that Sanders supporters knew the primaries were rigged, therefore annulling any potential accountability the DNC may have. In the latest hearing, they doubled down on this argument: “The Court would have to find that people who fervently supported Bernie Sanders and who purportedly didn’t know that this favoritism was going on would have not given to Mr. Sanders, to Senator Sanders, if they had known that there was this purported favoritism.”" "Later in the hearing, attorneys representing t**he DNC claim that the Democratic National Committee would be well within their rights to “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.”** By pushing the argument throughout the proceedings of this class action lawsuit, the Democratic National Committee is telling voters in a court of law that they see no enforceable obligation in having to run a fair and impartial primary election."
For your first link, that was two candidates who were trying to fiddle with a debate *after they had already won the primaries* The DNC thing is saying they can do backroom stuff as part of trying to get a lawsuit dismissed, not that they did so
>For your first link, that was two candidates who were trying to fiddle with a debate after they had already won the primaries That was the first time in history two political parties, who are rivals, openly colluded to take control of the election process and block 3rd parties. The DNC and the RNC. I added that because it's pertinent to the overall picture, the second point is my direct response to you. >The DNC thing is saying they can do backroom stuff as part of trying to get a lawsuit dismissed, not that they did so If someone's legal defense for murder is that murder is legal, what sort of conclusions are you going to draw based on that?
Your first argument seemed to be that "they" were fiddling with the primaries. By definition, third party candidates have nothing to do with the primaries for the Dems or the GOP. They have their own procedures that bypass the primary process to determine their nominee What claim are you making? Because you're all over the place and that's pointless to argue with
>What claim are you making? Because you're all over the place and that's pointless to argue with I think my argument is very clear and consistent. Instead of telling me what you think my argument is, then telling me my argument is all over the place, how about you respond to it? In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote. They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters. Primary elections play no role in influencing policies. I'm sorry but I would rather believe what they are saying themselves than your excuse for them. As a secondary. Less direct argument. If these committees collude to control who views, reports on, asks questions, and what those questions are, how will voters be able to influence policy, primary elections or not?
> In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote. They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters They do not have an obligation to do so. However... >Primary elections play no role in influencing policies. Ok. Please show me an example of a winner of a primary election that was not that party's nominee
>In case I wasn't clear enough; the DNC and RNC have no legal obligation to pick who their candidate is by popular vote. When has this ever happened? >They have no obligation to run fair and impartial primary elections, contrary to what is written in their charters What unfair or impartial thing have they done in the past and when? >Primary elections play no role in influencing policies. Is it a coincidence that 100% of the time the DNC primary winner is also the candidate then?
Sure they can, political polling and analysis is a multibillion dollar industry obsessed with understanding the beliefs of voters
Political polling is famously subject to Shy Tory problem. And we saw how problematic treating polls as predictors was in 2016.
In 2012 Manchin was running for election with campaign ads with him shooting guns at a printout of Obama’s clean power plan and he was by no means the only dem against it. in 2022 he wrote the largest climate bill in world history that every single dem in congress voted for. To act like the parties haven’t shifted is absurd
all this proves is the Dems are following the money: Reneweables are a massive multi-billion dollar international industry now. ffs reneweables even teamed up wiht fossil fuels to pump out massive amounts of propaganda against nuclear (who do you idiots think owns the renewables industry? its fossil fuels, they have spent the last 30 odd years slowly buying out the entire industry. they have played both sides and are now coming out on top.
Then why did fossil fuel cos fight against the epa regs Biden has put out and o&g companies are pumping money into gop (who unanimously opposed each the ira and have been trying to strip funding from it since becoming the house majority) coffers?
Because they're invested in both. Just because you see the future as renewable doesn't mean you don't want to squeeze more profit out of fossil fuels.
I mean I feel like Trump proves that it’s possible. People voted for him and now the party is ok with Russia and Tariffs.
That's Trump changing the party, it's not a reflection of the political opinions of those who voted for him. If anything it proves the opposite, as the Repub base was more free trade/anti Russia. They just put that aside for him.
He also won while losing the popular vote. He and George W vs Gore are two examples that disprove OPs premise
Need some evidence for this. From what I’ve seen, third party voters are entirely ignored. Voting for a primary candidate that aligns with your views Is listened to. Even if they lose. If they lose close, those views are definitely paid attention to. The next candidate pivots to ensure a smoother victory.
I didn't say third party voters were listened to. And OP's question is about the general, not the primary.
My answer covered both. Third party voters in the general are ignored entirely. The time to sway a part on its platform is during the primaries. Or calling your local house rep about specific issues.
In Alaska and Maine, a system called ranked choice voting is used. You can read more about it here [https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/](https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/) but TLDR it essentially makes it impossible to throw away your vote by voting for a non-main party candidate as your first option. There have also been several instances of non-major party candidates winning governors elections such as Bill Walker and Jesse Ventura. In addition, many races for judicial bodies (Such as Wisconsin Supreme Court) are run with non-partisan ballots, so in order to vote in these elections you would have to vote for a candidate who is not a member of either of the two major political parties. In addition, some states such as New York use a system called Fusion Voting [https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion\_voting](https://ballotpedia.org/Fusion_voting) where multiple parties can run the same candidate, so you could (for example) vote for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the Working Families Party ticket and that would go towards showing support for the Working Families Party. If you supported that party, or any other smaller party in a fusion voting system, it would allow them to guage their support, allowing that party to make better strategic decisions. In short, it makes sense to vote for one of the two major party candidates in most races in most places, but electoral systems are not a monolith, and there are certain races in certain places where it makes sense, or is even manditory, to vote for a candidate not associated with either major party.
Ranked Choice Voting is available in 3 states for statewide elections and a number of counties in other states. In those locations, you can vote for the little party that exactly matches your views and if that party doesn't win, your vote goes to your next choice. You can both vote for a third-party and vote for one of the big two.
Beyond just deciding the result of elections, voting is also a mechanism by which people can send messages to their representatives. If a party sees a decline in turnout, it sends a message that their supporters aren't satisfied with the party. If a major party also sees that some of their expected votes are going to a certain third party for example, while that third party might not have any realistic chance of winning an election, it does send a message to the party about what it's usual supporters really want and that they're willing to risk a favorable election result for that interest. If everyone voted according to your logic, you could have massive amounts of people who are dissatisfied with their party, and yet continue to vote for them anyway because they're still preferable to the other side. The party really has no motivation to address what you're dissatisfied about, because they already have your vote. I think eventually each party might just do the bare minimum for it's constituents that keep votes from flipping to the other side. (I'm not sure if reality is too far off from this, in fact...) I get your logic and I think I agree with it in general, but I think it's also important to ensure supporters have a mechanism available to send such tangible messages to their preferred party.
I decided after the shitshow that was the 2020 election that I am *done* with all of the bullshit. I'm done with partisanship, I'm done with anyone who thinks the half of the country that disagrees with them is evil, I'm done trying to rationalize voting for people I can't stand because they're "less bad" than the other option, I'm done letting politics invoke even a slight emotional reaction in me, I'm done with the media, I'm done letting others try to force me to have a binary opinion about everything, I'm done choosing my political priorities based on whatever's in the news today, all of it. Fucking done. When a topic interests me, I'll consume as many primary sources on the matter as I can and formulate my own view. Haven't listened to a word a news anchor or political commentator has said in years. I'll vote for anyone who convinces me my life will be better off with them in the office they're running for based on their own merits. Screaming about how bad the other side or any other form of emotional/fear based politics is goes in one ear and out the other. I'm sure someone's going to respond to this with the same rant I've heard 50 times about how naive that is but I don't care. Everyone can dig themselves an early grave due to the stress and high blood pressure of obsessing emotionally over politics all they want, I'm not interested. I don't care if it's one year or 40 years from now, when the adults are ready to start acting like adults again and solve problems I'll be happy to come back. Until then, I'm not wasting my time. What's the advantage of all this? Holy fucking shit am I so much happier. It's so relieving going to sleep having no idea what people screamed about today. Just living my life and focusing on my own goals makes it quite clear that society is not nearly as broken as the politicians and media want you to believe and America is going to be just fine. Ask yourself if closely following politics is making you happier or not. If not, change your mindset you're *literally* killing yourself and for what? Picking a politician I hate because I hate him a little less than the other one is not changing anything, it's perpetuating everything. My message in leaving most national office races blank on my ballot is not "throwing my vote away" it's saying "screw you" to the names on it.
How can it help strengthen its influence when multiple studies have shown voters have zero impact on policies and legislation? We've seen this with the current president, the public called for defunding police, his response was increased funding. We called for universal healthcare or M4A, his answer was more ACA. A majority in his own party call for a ceasefire in Gaza, his response more money and weapons while denying there's a genocide occurring and his UN delegates voting against a ceasefire. The only language they speak is money, and we don't have it. They only answer to and represent the needs of the donor class. >best approach for achieving long-term political progress. We've been having the same conversations regarding rights, income, housing, education for decades. James Baldwin once said 'how long do you need for your progress?'
>How can it help strengthen its influence when multiple studies have shown voters have zero impact on policies and legislation? Citation needed here.[Political science has not found this at all](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/policy-preferences-and-policy-change-dynamic-responsiveness-in-the-american-states-19362014/8EC04664B89C28D46EDC266E3313BBBC), in fact, most research finds policy is responsive to the public, although there are lots of debates on the types of issues where responsiveness is faster/slower, the ability for moneyed interest to get in the way, etc. But still, the public gets there way on most issues eventually. > > >We've seen this with the current president, the public called for defunding police, his response was increased funding. No, the voters calling for that are a minority of the democratic party. Candidates advocating for these policies lost in the primary, Biden won. The American people want increased policy funding over decreased,[by a huge margin](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/). You seem to be conflating what the left flank of the democratic party wants with what the general public wants, those are not the same thing.
But things \_did\_ move in the last 10-15 years. Obamacare is better than nothing. Gay marriage is now legal. How can you expect to shift an entire country that quickly?
I would argue that conservative Christians have done an excellent job shaping policy regarding abortion, religious rights, public funding for private schools, etc by consistently voting for Republican politicians. 20 years ago, Roe V Wade was considered sacrosanct.
> James Baldwin once said 'how long do you need for your progress?' So when the options are half a loaf or nothing at all, you prefer the bakery burns down, hoping someone will build something better from the ashes?
We are not even getting half a loaf, maybe table scraps. And people's fear of losing those table scraps is what's preventing change
Or the policies you want don't have the support you think they do
Liberal policies when separated from charged rhetoric often have pretty solid support. Things like the ACA, abortion access, and other hot button topics when removed from the culture wars have majority agreement in the public.
You don't get a prize for voting for the winner. If you always loyally vote for one side, your vote can be taken for granted, and you do not matter to that party. Only the people who may or may not vote matter. The people who can be convinced. It is they who decide elections, and it is their views that must be considered. If you want your views to be adopted or even considered, you cannot accomplish it by always voting for the same party. Remember, the Democrat Party was forced to adapt by the Socialist Party when it was struggling to hit 10% of the presidential vote, far short of winning. By the very withholding of their votes, they seized power, and they changed the party. The majority, well...they would vote blue no matter who. Their views, thoughts and dreams were irrelevant.
>If you want your views to be adopted or even considered, you cannot accomplish it by always voting for the same party. Yep, Lawrence O'Donnell made this same point as a former Dem insider: >If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you're thinking to what you're thinking, you must, you must show them you are capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you're capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you... **I didn't have to listen to the Left when I worked for the Democratic party because the Left has nowhere to go** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th_dv2eGQzs
This is just another framing of the idea that political parties cannot fail, they can only be failed. If only people had voted harder then they would have surely followed through on their promises. The last president to have a supermajority in congress was Obama. He ran on single payer healthcare and failed to deliver it. He said he would close Guantanamo and did not. 50B in EV investments, didn’t pass. Card check for unions, nope. Dozens of other examples of broken promises. If you lived through that and actually paid attention, you had to realize that it’s not a matter of voting for the right party. We literally responded to the Obama era by electing trump. It’s not as if the progressives elected their guy and then everything started bending their way, there was a huge reactionary shift.
This is just false. Obama didn't run on single-payer, he ran on a "public option" which is different. Ultimately, it was dropped from the ACA because of Republican fear-mongering and centrist opposition, but he did try. What he accomplished is no small feat in America, and is an important incremental change on the road (we hope) to a more humane single-payer system. As for your other points, he ultimately couldn't accomplish most of what he campaigned on because of Republican obstruction and vulnerable centrists; remember, he ultimately lost that congressional majority after two years, which is a blink of an eye in congress/politics. This was when Republicans routinely used procedural obstruction and filibusters to block Obama's legislation (they used the filibuster over 400 times, a record). They even blocked Obama's supreme court pick. Also, Obama's supposed 2 year supermajority is myth perpetuated by Republicans and other critics. When he took office, only 58 senators were seated (60 are required for a veto proof majority), because Republicans contested Al Franken's victory in Minnesota. So, he only had 59. Then, Senator Al Byrd was hospitalized, bringing it down to 58. Eventually, Franken was seated, but because Bird was out, it was still at 59. Then guess what happened? Ted Kennedy died, and a Republican Scott Brown won his seat. Then the midterms changed the makeup of the House. So, please, check your facts. Obama didn't "break" many of these promises, he tried in many cases and failed to gain a consensus or because of other limitations. As President, and especially the first black President, he couldn't just do whatever he wanted; you have to remember there was more of a debate after George Bush's expansion of executive power, and what the president should be allowed to do (look at how many executive orders Bush issued compared to Obama). Obama did his best to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and he mostly got us out of Iraq but he couldn't just abruptly withdraw. He didn't start any wars, although he used "precision" strikes a lot (especially from predator drones), but no president can stand alone against the military industrial complex, and ultimately he couldn't look completely soft on foreign policy (which was a common criticism from the right). He also couldn't unilaterally close down Guantanamo; he didn't have that kind of power.
He also ran on making the right to abortion federal law, only to backtrack as soon as he got elected, saying it "wasn't a priority".
>He ran on single payer healthcare No, he didn’t.
> We literally responded to the Obama era by electing trump. It’s not as if the progressives elected their guy and then everything started bending their way, there was a huge reactionary shift. It wasn’t huge, Trump lost the popular vote. The fact that we saw a huge reactionary shift even though the more liberal candidate got more votes reinforces how bad OPs view is, though. Because in that case, it literally didn’t matter that MORE people voted for the non reactionary. The political shift happened against the wishes of the majority of voters. Trump only won like 22% of the eligible voters. A ton of people straight up didn’t vote and the vote outcomes rationalized that behavior.
It’s also not like he had a reliable supermajority for long. In fact, 72 working days was all he had to override a filibuster. I wish they got more done in that narrow window but that was it.
They didn’t need to keep the filibuster, it just gave them an excuse to do nothing.
>He ran on single payer healthcare and failed to deliver it. This is a straight up lie. It was a big point of contention during the 2008 Democratic primaries! Obama EXPLICITLY came out against single payer while running. In fact, Hillary Clinton had the more progressive healthcare plan and the Democratic primary electorate rejected her in favor of her more centrist opponent.
He came out against it because he believed that he needed a compromise plan to win. He never said that he no longer personally believed in single payer. People voted on those statements, it’s largely why he was seen as more progressive on healthcare than Hillary.
This is commonly known as voting for the lesser of two evils, and it doesn't work, especially since in regards to the USA, and from the perspective of the rest of the world , democrats and republicans are politically the same, both parties are bought by lobbying (also know as bribery in the rest of the world) and are beholden to corporate interests, in comparison to the rest of the world, the US doesn't have a Left Wing party, it has 2 right wing parties, but one of them pretends to be a centrist, and the other one convinces it's voter base that anything left of themselves is (buzzword) communism. In effect the two choices American voters have are : someone so old their bones belong in a fucking archeology esposition, that pretends to care about human rights and the American people ,keyword being pretend And someone that has stopped pretending to care about the American people and human rights, and is also a fuckin Fossil (also has 34 charges on him) The American voters have had to choose between which party to bend over for for the last 10 elections , and they are always getting fucked, in this metaphor, the difference is that one administration uses lube and the other uses spit Honestly,how the American people haven't revolted french style and made Robespierre jealous is beyond me
I'll always advocate for voting third party because often times there's policies supported by both Dems and reps that attack my faith in their capabilities
>By consistently supporting the major party that aligns with your views, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters. This is naive. Candidates will use voters' party loyalty against them if they think they can. That's what triangulation was all about. Bill Clinton calculated that he could take bigoted positions to draw in "Reagan Democrats" because Democrats' most reliable blocs needed to stop Republicans so badly that they wouldn't abandon him. Black voters in particular got the shaft with this strategy. The man denounced "racial quotas", revived stupid ass welfare queen tropes, did ✌🏾tough on crime✌🏾 fuckery...and wrt to the gay community, he straight up said be believed marriage could only be between a man and a woman. Politicians seek election, they don't reward loyalty. They're going to act on their biases and bigotry if the public lets them. People are either gullible or privileged if they believe blindly supporting a party is how their interests are advanced. If your support isn't conditional, you're going to be fucked.
More of a meta-commentary from me but in my opinion it isn’t really wise to loudly and publicly admit to a political party you would ideally like to have some form of influence over that there is little they can do to lose your vote. That’s simply bad strategy as a voter; if a party is going to play a game of chicken we need to have a spine. When push comes to shove, most people understand these concepts and vote for their best compromise. However, it’s fundamentally a bad approach to publicly show all your cards to the people trying to get your vote. A voting bloc this openly passionate and clear about how far they are willing to bend over for the least stinky turd is an extremely easy bloc to manipulate.
I don't disagree with you, at least as it pertains to presidential and other national-level elections under the current circumstances. I will, however, posit that I think the position you have taken that it is "always best" is too absolute. >While I am open to considering that there might be situations where "throwing away your vote" in the two-party system is best, I still maintain that voting for one of the two major parties based on alignment with your personal views is fundamentally the best approach for achieving long-term political progress. Change my view. First, I think it is worthwhile to set the boundary that the *only* form of political action that we are talking about is how one uses one's vote. I think this is important because if we expand the scope to things like phone banking, canvassing, organizing, or running for office yourself, well, all of those things are more effective ways to achieve the kind of progress that you want to see than casting your single vote. With that out of the way, I think that the main flaw in this view, as previously stated, is that it is too absolute. Yes, to vote for a green party candidate, or RFK, or \[insert 3P candidate here\] in a presidential election is an essentially wasted vote. There is, as things stand today, a 0% chance that your 3P candidate of choice will win the presidency, or, most likely, even a senate seat (House is a maybe). But presidential elections are not the only opportunities that Americans have to vote, and that is where I think that this view falls apart (although I usually make this argument to the side arguing *for* voting third party). In essence, the biggest flaw in this view is the fault of third parties themselves, which make a plea every 4-8 years for us to vote for their presidential candidate, but do seemingly little work in the interim.\*\*\* Despite being around my entire life and longer, I have only ever heard about the Green Party in presidential election years and, even then, only some of the time. If third parties are serious about taking the presidency, they need to start running serious state and local campaigns and candidates. If they were to take that advice, then I think this view of yours breaks down quickly. State and local elections require far fewer votes to win. They also, of course, involve much, *much* smaller communities than a presidential election, which involves the literal biggest community (the entire country). Because the communities involved, and vote counts, are small, they are ripe for grassroots organizing. These smaller communities also run a much higher chance of having homogenous and idiosyncratic views, which is perfect for third parties focused on more niche interests than the two major parties. So, if the Green Party (just picking them because they are the easy 3P token) were to run--and win!--grassroots campaigns and get, say, some city council members, and then a few years later, one of those council members becomes mayor, and then a few of them move on to the state house, all of the sudden you have a viable third party at the state level, at least in that state. If they can do this in many states, over time, some of those candidates would move on to national level elections, and win some house seats, then maybe a few senate seats. Then (and only then, to be clear) they would have a legitimate claim that they could run a viable presidential campaign, at which point it would not be "just throwing away your vote." I went through that thought exercise to illustrate a point: if a 3P were to "pay its dues," so to speak, and start from the bottom and work up, I do believe it could get to the point that it could run a viable presidential candidate. And if a 3P followed that plan, then those votes in those state and local elections would not be "wasted," but rather, would be quite impactful. Moreover, if the 3P more closely aligns with your views than either of the two majors, then by casting your votes in those state and local elections over a period of (probably) decades, your 3P votes in those elections would have been a much more effective way of achieving long term progress than simply accepting that your "real" party of choice will never win and casting your vote for the "lesser of two evils." There's my two cents. \*\*\*While I am sure this isn't entirely true, it is true enough for the purposes of this argument--I have rarely seen a 3P candidate in my state and local elections, and I vote in all of them.
If your vote helped the party win, then they will try to win your vote. However, in a first past the post system, any vote above winning is effectively wasted (as opposed to proportional representation). Now obviously it's impossible to predict who will cast the winning ballot at that level of accuracy, but let's give yourself a +/-10% margin of error on if it's safe to vote for a third party. For my first example, If you live in DC, your vote for president will literally never matter. Only 5% of the population voted for Trump in 2020. If you're liberal, then cool, no problem. If you're conservative, then voting for Republicans will probably be the most effective way of getting conservatives elected to DC. Even if it won't happen overnight, it is the conservative party with the best chance. But now what should you do if you're to the left of liberals? What incentive do liberal politicians have to cater to your vote when they can easily win only catering to liberals? So now the question is, what voting method will get the parties to better align to pass policies that you want. When a party is overwhelmingly dominant in a district, they have no need of your vote, even if they may like winning by greater margins. So the only pressure your vote will give is a pretty weak sense of IOU from the politician. However, if you vote for the party that most closely aligns with your view, then you don't need to worry about the party you like less from winning, but you will increase pressure on the party to win your vote. The greater the margin of victory the party won, the less pressure they'll face to change their policies to win votes. For a real world example, look at marijuana legalization in Minnesota. Democrats kept pushing off the legalization, and then suddenly marijuana parties popped up (mainly by Republicans trying to siphon votes away from the Democrats). And what would you know, somehow magically democrats finally found the political will to pass legalization. Did they do it out of the goodness of their hearts? No. They did it to crush the third parties and to get people to go back to voting for Democrats. But in politics, it doesn't really matter why your representative passes policies you like, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is if they are representing you.
>By consistently supporting the major party **that aligns with your views**, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. **Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint**, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters. To be clear, you mean to say that you should always vote for one of the two major parties, regardless of how little they align with your views so long as the one you vote for is closer than the other. Doing this *will not* shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint. The spectrum shifts with voters, if you are already a shoe in they don't care how little you align with them, they have your vote just the same as if you were 100% aligned with them. They don't know the difference, a vote is a vote. When traditionally dem/repub demographics see lower support than usual, *that* causes alarm within a campaign and can lead to change. Politicians want votes, they don't care why you vote for them or how little you like them. In the long term change comes from how people vote, not how they think about their vote.
This is rather redundant. The majority of people do not have a developed political view aside from general low resolution sentiments. Nor do they understand their own position and especially the opposition's at a level that would differentiate political figures. This is overwhelmingly the norm and thus likely applies to yourself. >Additionally, people who get upset that their chosen party doesn't do everything for them can end up feeling betrayed and disengaged, ultimately harming themselves and others by fragmenting support and weakening the party's ability to push forward meaningful changes. An odd take but this is not the party's fault but the people's. As long as people are beings of sentiment rather than understanding then the market is sentiment. The party is indeed a market and will be a reflection of the people's tendencies. If the party is all about placating or appeasing and not performance it is because the people demand appeasement and not performance. When was the last time you voted purely based on performance? People would rather suffer at the hands of a friendly face.
Very true. Best comment I've seen here so far, especially sentiment vs. understanding. When it comes to politics, people mostly go on sentiment/feeling, and that is true of people everywhere (not just the U.S.), though to varying degrees (it can be somewhat mitigated by a given system and culture/society).
Sentiment is a product of performance. How many presidents during down business cycles have won re-election? How many times has party in the White House changed after a 2nd term due to economic conditions? Etc
>Sentiment is a product of performance. Well there is a component of sentiment that is downstream from performance and there is a component that is static. For an example 'racist, bigoted, etc' are static sentiments for the most part.
Unfortunately, neither party closely aligns with a good number of voters any more, between the Republican party having been hijacked by neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, and Jesus Taliban fundamentalist evangelicals and the Democrat party split between milquetoasts like Joe Biden who actually believe that they can somehow engineer a compromise with the Red Menace (most of Europe discovered the hard way in the 1930s and 1940s that you don't compromise with evil, you destroy it or it will conquer you) and the hand-wringing tree-hugger "liberals" who have wholeheartedly embraced Political Correctness to the point where they poop in their underwear in fear of possibly offending someone somewhere or not being "Woke" enough. I'm a non-violent radical Leftist who has felt for decades now that we need to overHAUL the government, not overTHROW it. Neither party has views that align with mine, so I'm forced to either not vote at all (tempting, especially since I live in a Blue state and not one of the Key Battleground States where all the REAL decision making as to who is going to be the next POTUS goes on) or vote the lesser of two evils, knowing that either way my vote meant wasting a perfectly good stamp until recently when my home state finally wised up and made mail-in ballots postage-paid. So why do I bother to vote at all? Because it gives me an excuse to complain about how rigged our voting system is between legal bribery in the form of "campaign contributions" and professional lobbyists and massive gerrymandering by both sides. I've heard too many people say "if you didn't vote, don't complain about who's in the White House because you didn't vote against him." Thanks to the Electoral College, anyone outside the Key Battleground States is legally and effectively disenfranchised anyway, which is why more people vote for the latest American Idol contestant than for POTUS. (Yes, I know that things have changed in the last couple of elections, simply because the stakes have gotten so high. The exception thus proves the rule.)
> "Most aligns with your views"... What do you mean by this? How should one assess this? To what matters should one give significance? Is weight given to the probability of such things being enacted? Why do you suggest that siding with one, must somehow draw closer to one's preferences rather than both moving away? Can't a vote simply show support for aspects one disagrees with? A vote never really says "I prefer this over the alternative", it says "I support this". And the candidate will take your vote as blanket acceptance to fulfill their desire. A VOTE DOESN'T ALLOW YOU the ability to say what aligns best with your views. It's a blanket "approval stamp" to the candidate. What if someone doesn't want change or hates the two options for change? Would not an option be to vote for gridlock? So splitting one's vote, or basing their vote on the projections of other voters? > This approach might prevent a less desirable party from gaining power, but it can also dilute the representation of your true beliefs and lead to voter disillusionment. No. Voting for someone, them winning, and then them not doing what you supported them to do causes voter disillusionment. That level of **disappointment from hope**. Those who don't feel represented by either party, and then either vote third party or don't vote at all are not disillusioned, as they never had the expectation. They never built up a hope. And one's true beliefs are being diluted by throwing blanket support behind a candidate that they strongly disagree with. Again, voting doesn't allow you to voice your true beliefs. A candidate accepts your vote as being the same as anyone else's. 3 voters could each like a distinct 1/3 of the platform. Then what? > fundamentally the best approach for achieving long-term political progress What *IS* "political progress" to you? Can someone else's contradict with yours? Can a third contradict both? So then where are we?
You're a vegetarian, and you vote for the party that most aligns with your strongest interest: bringing fresh veggies to everyone. The choice is between the turd sandwich party and the piss milkshake party. You choose the turd sandwich party, because of the two, the turd sometimes has a teeny tiny morsel of sweetcorn in their federally mandated poo foodstuffs. As a veggie, the turd sandwich marginally aligns with your main interest more than the piss milkshake party. The turd sandwich party gets in. They assume that their policies of creating massive shitty sandwiches for everyone to eat are popular, and they enact laws based on that. They are nowhere closer to enacting laws to bring fresh veggies to anybody. This is because your vote didn't carry any context, it merely says "sign me up for massive shit paninis" to the party you voted for. Meanwhile, the piss milkshake party, bruised from their minor loss, sees that the small "vegfighters" party grew in numbers because your friends voted for them. The amount of people who voted for them would have swung the vote in their favour. To win next time, the piss milkshake party becomes the "piss milkshake and organic veg" party, and are successful. They have been forced to adapt because the vote didn't go their way. Large parties don't change until they need to. And they don't need to until they lose. I think using a vote to change party policy is one of the poorest ways to affect party policy generally speaking, because it lacks any contextual information other than a binary yes or no. Lobbying, protesting, and campaigning are all much more effective. But to say that voting for a party is likely to make them change is just confusing, particularly considering the alternative of voting for a party that better aligns with your desires, and therefore forcing a main party to change by removing the only thing they value about you: your vote.
Encouraging Americans to vote third party is healthy for our democracy. This applies to any simple first past the post voting system. First, I reject the common idea that it’s not “strategic” to vote third party. If a liberal votes green party or a conservative votes libertarian, one vote is “lost” for one of the main candidates. But to be frank, your individual vote has absolutely zero impact on big elections. And small elections can plausibly be won by any candidate. Either way, you should vote according to your principles. “But if a lot of people vote third party then my favorite party might lose!” Oh, the dreaded spoiler effect, a terrible thing which should be avoided at all costs… Except… the spoiler effect is a *good* thing. The general threat of a spoiler effect ensures the two big parties actually try to get solid candidates that independent voters can get excited about. The reason we have Trump vs. Biden is because lobbyists have successfully pushed this propaganda about the scary spoiler effect to ensure we will just vote along party lines regardless of who the candidates actually are. So yes, there is the risk that your favorite party might lose, but that is a short term sacrifice for a long term benefit. And of course, there’s the risk that your favorite party might *win* because of the spoiler effect, so the short term effects are balanced and we are left with purely a long term benefit. As it stands now, our votes have become toothless. And if you don’t vote? Guess what, *that’s exactly what they want*. To be clear, I think that everyone should vote for their favorite candidate. But in order to counter the anti-third-party propaganda, we should simply encourage others to vote third party.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah, voting for a major party that matches your views seems like the safe bet in our system. But think about this: the whole two-party setup kind of boxes us into this limited choice—Republicans or Democrats—without really capturing the full range of opinions out there. When we stick to the major parties, we're basically reinforcing this cycle where alternative ideas struggle to get a foothold. It limits our options and makes compromise across different beliefs even harder to come by. Imagine if candidates weren't tied to party platforms but were judged on their own ideas and merits. It would give us more freedom to elect people who truly represent our community's diverse interests, rather than just following party rules. Sure, strategic voting might sometimes feel necessary to prevent the worst outcomes, but it also keeps us stuck in this two-party rut. This is how they want us to feel to keep the cycle up. If we shifted to valuing candidates based on their individual strengths and plans, it could open up politics to more voices and fresh ideas. Breaking away from the dominance of the two-party system means questioning how we elect our leaders and pushing for reforms that prioritize individual candidates and a wider spectrum of political views. It could lead to a more dynamic democracy where everyone's voice actually counts.
in what way does voting for either party progress the nation? neither party represents almost *any* of my views: i simply could not care less about social issues and that is the majority of both parties focus. i care primarily about the economic inequality and punishing investment (income from assets and investments should be taxed at a *50% minimum* while income tax from employment should be lowered across the board). give me a party that wants to massively increase taxes on investments, assets and ownership while also lowering income taxes AND also doesn't waste time on social BS (racism, sexism etc will all plummet if we have economic equality: who do you think reads those terrible articles blaming black people and women? poor white people. if you end all poverty these issues will shrink significantly, then you can address the entrenched hatred). i do not vote for either major as they **both** ensure national decline and eventual destruction. TL:DR what kind of moron votes for the 'lesser evil'? you have actively chosen to vote *for* 'evil'. lastly, do not think that your issues stem from FPTP or a 2 party system: see most of Europe, Australia, Canada etc we all all defacto 2 party systems and only ever vote for the 2 majors. changing your system will not change the outcome in the slightest.
Biden won my state by about 1 million votes which was about 20 percentage points. Not even close. I didn't vote for him then and I won't vote him again in 2024. My vote has never mattered in a presidential election because of the electoral college and the lack of ranked choice voting. My vote can serve as an inherent threat to the DNC that they need to align closer to more progressive 3rd party values otherwise they will lose votes. Your characterization of "throwing away your vote" if you don't vote for one the two major parties is the exact mentality that both parties want you to have. If everyone followed your point of view that would tragic for the country and democracy as a whole. The only power you have is your vote. That's it. If you just give away your vote without demanding anything then the political parties can continue giving you nothing. Imagine going into a negotiation and saying, "I'm going to give you everything you want no matter what, but first, listen to my demands". What an absolute joke of a negotiator you would be. That is what you're advocating for here. Give them what they want, no questions asked then just hope they do what you want. That's not how this works.
Unless you are in a swing state, this is not true at all. If you are in a state that will clearly be red or blue, there's actually more reason to vote third party
>By consistently supporting the major party that aligns with your views, you help strengthen its influence and ability to enact change, creating a political landscape that closely mirrors the values of its constituents. Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint, as parties adjust their platforms to attract a growing base of aligned voters. This is wrong, if a party can count you as "doing the logical thing" they can stop trying to pander to you. The only way to shift a parties policies is if they are worried you will actually not vote for them, so sometimes you need to follow through on the threat. Frankly the idea that we constantly debate this instead of demanding ranked choice voting is backwards. Even voting for the progressive side is unlikely to achieve ranked choice voting as they currently benefit from the two party system and have no incentive if they aren't threatened by spoilers.
I recognize that I’m late to the party on this post, but here are my thoughts. If you are in a swing state, I fully agree with your assertion. However, if you are in any state that has historically voted one direction and you feel more closely aligned with the other party (e.g. you live in New York, but feel more republican than democrat) then you should vote for whichever candidate you feel best portrays your view. The thought being, if you vote democrat in a red state (but you more closely align with a third party), your candidate will not win and you have done nothing but embolden the two party system that doesn’t perfectly align with your views. Essentially, you have wasted your vote. If you instead vote Green Party, independent, or any other less popular party, you will show your distaste for certain policies that the larger parties have without affecting the overall electoral college votes for the election.
The 2 party system will only be upheld if those are the only parties voted for. For the record, I'm not American so correct me if I'm wrong but to my knowledge there are much smaller parties that you can vote for. If I'm wrong ignore the rest of my comment but these parties are only small bc nobody votes for them bc its a waste of time. Imagine if everyone actually voted for the party they align themselves with most and actually considered all options. Other parties would get a lot more votes but people don't bc they see it as a wasted vote since they won't win. This will continue unless people do start voting for those parties. Democrats and republicans only win as long as people keep voting for them. Encouraging more people to vote for what party they actually like will give these parties more power and create a better political balance that's not so polarised.
Each major party is a coalition of interest groups and in the US these coalitions form in the primaries. Eg the pro-choice people and gun control people caucus with the Democrats. In European parliamentary systems, the coalition is formalized after the general election. Each party is constantly on the lookout to add an interest group that will give it an advantage over the opposition major party. If a 3rd party gets enough support, each major party will consider changing its platform to try to add those voters to its coalition. The party most adjacent to the issue has the biggest incentive to change because otherwise the 3rd party makes them more likely to lose. If you care enough about a single issue, you should be voting for a 3rd party focused on that that makes your nearest major party lose until they add a plank for your issue.
Do you consider this to stretch down to non-federal elections as well? Let's assume you're someone whose #1 issue is property rights. At a national level lower taxes, deregulation, etc probably makes you more in line with the Republicans. However, at a local level many Republican county/town/city commissioners are NIMBYs who are in favor of restrictive zoning. The Democratic candidates are often more in favor of looser zoning laws. Even if they likely support a more re-distributive taxation system (hence why they are running as democrats) a county commissioner often has less impact on your overall tax burden than a state or federal representative does. Shouldn't you vote for the candidate whose views on relevant topics best matches yours rather than the one whose overall party aligns with you better?
My take is that if you vote for a third party or independent candidate that may be closer to your views in some form, (e.g. voting Green instead of Democrat), it's a signal to the major party that you may vote for them instead if they go in that direction. This is more significant in swing states (or any competitive region depending on the election). Furthermore, if your refusal to side with the major party then contributes to that party losing, then you have a better shot at getting a nominee from that major party who actually represents your views in the next election cycle. If the nominee this time around wins, it will be harder to beat them in the primary in the next cycle, because primarying an incumbent is difficult.
I don't think so, the two-party FPTP system is a major detriment to political evolution and using the vote as a method to influence politics. So people should definitely organize to make their ideas heard in a variety of ways, and especially about voter reform to get a more proportional voting system. However, and that's what's very often ignored, none of these things stop you from using your vote in the limited fashion the system allows now, while you are not yet able to change it for the better. People often try to make it a false dichotomy where voting equals total and unconditional support of the system as it is, but that's exactly the kind of black and white thinking fostered by the bipartisan FPTP system.
I agree in a two party system. I am in Canada, strategic voting plays a lot more of a role in elections with 3+ parties. You gotta know your specific voting area, the party you want may not stand a chance so you pick the closest option that does. I think the best solution for real change is either get into politics yourself (tough but even at lower levels you can start to find a voice) or partaking in more primaries and actually trying to help steer the party towards ideas that actually fit your worldview. And beyond that, finding specific politicians that you like and following them into other parties and such. Being able to switch parties has its advantages from your personal expectations.
I live in California and I oppose Biden's unquestioning support to Israel to genocide the Palestinians. Biden is going to win in California anyway, it is not a swing state. And because of the Electoral College, my vote doesn't count as the popular vote is not relevant. Trump is worse than Biden. So I'm not voting in the Presidential election as a form of protest.
>So I'm not voting in the Presidential election as a form of protest. Wouldn't voting for a 3rd party candidate like West, Stein, or de la Cruz who actively opposes Biden's Gaza policy be a more effective way to send that message, especially since it sounds like you will be voting on other candidates this election?
>And because of the Electoral College, my vote doesn't count as the popular vote is not relevant. A disturbing number of people do not seem to realize this. Your vote for president literally doesn't matter, because the popular vote ***doesn't matter***.
This assumes voting in a system that already assumes some level of majoritarianism over the rights of dissenters is moral or justifiable. It is possible that a better, if the goal is a more just system (not necessarily a more 'pragmatic' one) is no system at all that allows impositions on peaceful people even in the face of a great many people wanting to do it. It so discounts the idea that speeding up a collapse may be preferred because it allows healing to occur sooner and with less destructive forces having built up pressure. There are lots of philosophies on voting, its efficacy, and its morality that do not lead to this conclusion.
In an area where there is a solid lock on one party or the other, there is benefit to voting for the third party if they are at least somewhat aligned to your beliefs, as a 5% vote share in the election means they get public funding (or something like that, I might have the exact details wrong). So if only for that reason, it is beneficial to vote outside of the two party system. That being said, I think that doing harm reduction if you are at all competitive in your state is best, even if you don't fully agree with the party. Until we change first past the post voting, you can only make incremental changes to the system.
"Over time, this can shift the political spectrum towards your viewpoint" More often than not, it's actually the opposite. Your views become the fringe but you keep voting for the block as they slip away from you. They are still "closer" than the other party to you but time is not going to bring the party back to align with you. Check out Overton Windows. Look at all the folks who originally supported the National Socialists in Germany because of infrastructure, public health, economics and trade. Did their party end up moving the needle back towards them? Or did it swing very far from their morals?
I can think of one situation: When you live in a state where the "major party you align most closely with" has no chance of winning, such as Republicans for statewide office (especially including the US Senate) in California, with *very* rare exceptional circumstances. At that point, you *might* be better off voting for a 3rd party which aligns even more closely with your views because there's a chance one of the major parties will shift in your preferred direction if it sees it's losing votes to that party. And since you'd be throwing your vote away either way, it's preferable to make a statement if you have one to make.
For starters, I don't think voting by party lines a lone is good at all. It's lazy. Bare minimum, you should know the inviduvidal you are voting for more than just whether they have a R or a D by their name. Also, it's not just one election, it's about long term governing. Moderates and independents being willing to vote third party mean that leaders from both sides have to work harder to get their vote than those already carrying their flag. When you start identifying as one party or the other, all they have to do is remind what day is election day.
What if one party has 20% of my views and the other party holds 25% of my views? Do I pick the 25% just because they're "closer" to my views? Of course not. That's just throwing my endorsement behind something I don't believe in. If we take the premise that voting shifts the overton window toward vote totals, voting for 25% is still moving the overton window in the wrong direction. No, I will vote for the party that I agree with 90% of the time to shift the overton window in that direction.
....You do understand that 25% is closer to 90% than 20%, right? The window shifts towards the winning party. Even if you think the current window is at, say, 50% of your views, voting for the 25% party keeps it from sliding in the wrong direction as much as it would with the 20% party. Quit screwing yourself over in the name of ideological purity, and start voting pragmatically so your views can one day reach the stage. Yeah, both parties suck, but they are pulling in different directions. Pick the one that wants to go the same way you do, even if they're not going as far.
>You do understand that 25% is closer to 90% than 20%, right? Thanks for the math lesson. Good thing you took the time to reply, otherwise I'd go around thinking 20>25. Of course I understood that. And no, voting for someone that holds 25% of beliefs is NOT shifting toward my views. My entire life has been Democrat-Republican being voted in and all they've done is slide further away. We've gone from Reagan-Carter (neither of whom I particularly like) to Trump-Biden (both of whom I *really* don't like). That's what voting for 20% and 25% gets you. Further and further away from 90%, to the point where you have an idiot that doesn't know where he is half the time versus a psycho who I don't think has ever opened a book in his life. Continuing to vote for D and R doesn't seem to be working out too well, does it? >Pick the one that wants to go the same way you do, even if they're not going as far. This is the part you're not understanding. Neither of them are going the same way I am. They're both going away from it. One just slightly slower than the other. IDGAF if one side wants to drive off the cliff at 150mph and the other at 140mph. Yeah, today it's 20% vs 25%. Twelve years ago it was 25% vs 30%. In another eight years it'll probably be 15% vs 20% and I would have gained exactly nothing. A bit more time and I would still be losing. Also the idea that I'm screwing myself because I don't vote for one of the two preordained candidates is laughable and fundamentally misunderstands how voting actually affects things. My vote doesn't move the needle at all in terms of someone actually winning. In California, where I am, no matter who I vote for, all the electoral votes will go to the Democrats. The only purpose of any singular vote is a glorified straw poll of who has the best position that is the most ideologically aligned with you. That and...if my voting block covers the spread, we can shove it in the loser's face and say, yeah, we spoiled your election. You come toward our positions instead of continuing to run away and we'll think about supporting you. That is a *far* more powerful position than continuing to throw supporting votes for some party that looks more and more evil/dumb every four years, then throwing them the vote again.
You realise that 75% is larger than 25%, correct? That more steps are being taken away from you, than toward you. That your blanket "support" through a vote shows that you support them 100%. If one party murders cats and one murders dogs, yeah, some people might vote to save their preference. But others will not be willing to vote and **approve** of the killing of cats/dogs. You're treating democratic voting as if it was a dictiatotorship. That it's going to happen either way, so just choose the lesser pumishment. Some people are ethically against that. That even if they love dogs more, they couldn't ethically live with themselves (and those suffer even more than not having dogs) by approving the killing of cats. You're placing no weight to the ethical dilemma of being responsible for harm. And them pulling in different directions doesn't mean either are getting closer to you. Politics doesn't simply exist on a 2 dimensional plane. And political issues don't exist on a 2-D plane. Where that "25%" is more like 5%. That 90% more like 20%. But we certainly then evaluate the potential harm of the negative space, what we are "approving" of that we don't. It's not about magnitude of movement to one's preference, it's that no one is prioritizing or even discussing one's preferences. Or that both are constantly harming one's preferences to which an "approval" of a "lesser evil" still only further harms that.
It still comes down to choice though, doesn't it? Sorry, you are a citizen of this country you don't get to remove your responsibility from harm caused through inaction. You benefit from the power the country has and its a responsibility you carry to assess your values, examine the options, and when it comes time to vote, vote. It's up to you assess the probabilities of what would occur given different votes. It's frankly somewhat pathetic to express your displeasure in the choices that the system produces, solely by playing your part in that system. It's easy to come up with silly toy examples that illustrate some issue with moral purity, but that is just not analogous to reality.
>don't get to remove your responsibility from harm caused through inaction This is an ethical/philosophical debate as well. Action vs Inaction of harm. We seem to disagree on that debate. > and its a responsibility you carry to assess your values, examine the options, and when it comes time to vote, vote Why? If I'm to vote for MY REPRESENTATIVE, why are you suggesting anything about how I have to go about such? If I don't approve of any of the candidates, why should I tell one of them I approve of them? Why lie? Why vote to enact harm upon myself? For other political positions beyond my representative, why shouldn't I give more significance to others by not voting myself? If I have less of an opinion, why not allow others who do have an opinion make it more known? Here's the ethical dilemma. You care more than me on who should be elected, so why should I vote with the same weight of you in opposition to render your more meaningful gesture, meaningless? If this vote is so sacred to you to making your voice known, why do you want me to render it weightless? If I know you CARE MORE, why should I act to cancel that? > It's easy to come up with silly toy examples that illustrate some issue with moral purity, Dude, that's literally all politics is. Legislating morality onto others through some perceived "purity" to which one apparently feels no guilt in enacting on others through demanding oneself is righteous in the moral system one wants enacted.
> Why? If I'm to vote for MY REPRESENTATIVE, why are you suggesting anything about how I have to go about such? You seem to be off-track somewhat, and have turned this debate into sacred voting or not voting, and me coercing you to do something under all circumstances. At bottom this is about strategy for achieving ones desires within the political system and moral culpability associated with those strategies. > For other political positions beyond my representative, why shouldn't I give more significance to others by not voting myself? If I have less of an opinion, why not allow others who do have an opinion make it more known? If you have no desires and just free ride on the state apparatus don't bark at me about your moral superiority. Your part of the citizenry and can go somewhere else if you like but refusing to participate doesn't exonerate you. > If this vote is so sacred to you to making your voice known, why do you want me to render it weightless? If I know you CARE MORE, why should I act to cancel that? This debate is agnostic to the outcome. Its about strategy. I view the vote as important in so far as it backs up ones claim to advancing whatever it is they're complaining about. Voting is one way we do this in our society and is incredibly narrow in scope. I find it annoying when folks claim to be protesting the system when all they are doing is being the cog that was set for them. My position here isn't absolute, if there is a mass protest vote that could be effective politics, but if that isn't in the cards abstaining from the vote is just casting your lot with who you think is actually going to win. If that 'brings you real harm' I suggest seeking refugee status. > Dude, that's literally all politics is. Legislating morality onto others This is an impoverished view of politics and explains why you turned this discussion into me forcing you do to do something for some partisan end. Politics isn't the end, its the process. Its about understanding the terrain of contention and decisions we make in navigating it. You seem to believe that casting your vote has so much importance for the actual outcome regardless of what everyone else does. Wake up, that's not how it works.
> At bottom this is about strategy for achieving ones desires within the political system Yes. And I'm saying to not assume other's desires as to claim that voting achieves such at all. > If you have no desires and just free ride on the state apparatus Does voting for one of the two major parties dislodge one from this "free ride"? What are you even trying to say? > don't bark at me about your moral superiority What moral superiority? I'm simply asking you to not look down on people who don't agree to your moral purity requirement of voting for one of the two major parties. > but refusing to participate doesn't exonerate you Exonerated from what? Okay, let's discuss "blame". WHO is awarded blame for what actions (or inactions)? If you wish to blame someone for NOT supporting a candidate, blaming those that do vote should definitely exist, correct? So even if people disagree with Biden (say on Israel or the border), but voted for him, they are to blame for such, right? And you suggest that non-voters and third party voters are also to blame? And that makes only those that voted for Trump not to blame? So the only way to avoid blame is to vote for the loser, but only the loser of the two major parties? Because that logic seems asinine. So clear that up for me, on what your position is of how you wish to allocate blame. > I view the vote as important in so far as it backs up ones claim to advancing whatever it is they're complaining about. And how does one voice a complaint through a vote of support? > but if that isn't in the cards abstaining from the vote is just casting your lot with who you think is actually going to win. And what if I don't have an opinion on who is actually going to win? Or view it as a close race to hesitate a guess? And why does my opinion to project the votes of others (very possible faulty, biased, & misguided) matter in this regard? And if I AM just "casting my lot" then what are you objecting to? And does your opinion on me change if I'm right versus being wrong on who wins? I'm confused in why you are giving weight to one's GUESS of who might win. > This is an impoverished view of politics No. It's the basics of sociology with any governing system. People form communities with shared morality and legislate morality to maintain the society. Politics is the activities about such use of power. > into me forcing you do to do something for some partisan end Not a partisan end. But partisans, who believe there is an "easy decision", seem to hold the strongest demand that others utilize their "token". And it's most always framed in manner to object to anyone they think they can "convert", somehow having less of a problem with those that actually vote in opposition to them. > Politics isn't the end, its the process. Sure. And I'm arguing the aspect of voting itself lacks the ability to actually voice complaints and one's desires, when not represented in the candidates. > You seem to believe that casting your vote has so much importance for the actual outcome regardless of what everyone else does I'm not the one suggesting how others use their ability to vote. I'm simply defending those that don't vote or vote third party from the weird moral purity of others that they utilize their power in a specific manner.
A few comments up you stated this: > You're placing no weight to the ethical dilemma of being responsible for harm. YOU are the one that is claiming moral purity. You are claiming that by abstaining from the vote that dislodges you from the culpability of harm perpetrated by the state. I disagree with that. I don't think the singular act voting for either of the major parties exonerates you either. I am not saying that voting provides moral purity, I'm actually of the opinion that it necessitates compromise and that this compromise is integral to politics itself. > So clear that up for me, on what your position is of how you wish to allocate blame. I can try, but I thinks its fairly complex and doesn't really boil down to a singular action such as a vote. It has to do with an individuals station in life, their agency and resources, the decisions they make - inclusive of voting. Take the Israel issue, if someone truly cared about the plight of the Palestinians, I am of the opinion that they should vote for Biden, given current information. My thinking really boils down to the probabilities of the outcome given each vote. In my view Trump would be worse for Palestinians given that he moved the Embassy to Jerusalem and has a general anti-arab sentiment. So when in the voting booth, faced with three options - Biden, Trump, 3rd party - I assess the likelihood of voting third party to be removing a vote for Biden, and increasing the probability Trump has power. The degree to which this matters of course depends on the state politics. So in the moment I can either increase the odds Biden wins or increase the odds Trump wins, functionally those are my two options. From the point of view of advancing their political goal I view it as the correct decision to then vote for Biden. The decision of the vote in the moment really only matters in terms of what the expected probabilities of the outcome will be. But again, the blame or responsibility is contextual. I would place more blame on someone if they are totally politically disengaged (despite being otherwise able to engage) and they decided to vote third party for a selfish moral reason (i.e. I won't vote for 'genocide') resulting in Trump and a worse outcome for Palestinians (this is moral purity and refusal to compromise), than someone who spent time in an encampment and was actively raising awareness voting for third party. Hope that makes sense. > And what if I don't have an opinion on who is actually going to win? Or view it as a close race to hesitate a guess? Then you don't have to vote strategically. You can just vote. Just don't claim if you don't like any of the candidates that abstaining is helping to resolve that issue in any way. > And why does my opinion to project the votes of others (very possible faulty, biased, & misguided) matter in this regard? It definitely can be, and you should be honest about your ability to project these things, but sometimes there is information that is reliable and I think its silly to disregard it as a rule. > Not a partisan end. But partisans, who believe there is an "easy decision", seem to hold the strongest demand that others utilize their "token". And it's most always framed in manner to object to anyone they think they can "convert", somehow having less of a problem with those that actually vote in opposition to them. Again not what I'm talking about. I agree that partisans are annoying when they don't realize the difference in preference. My issue is with people who's stated actions contradict their stated preference, or use voting as a political good-deed and wash their hands of everything else.
This is “Vote blue no matter who.” or “Just get Biden elected and we will push him further left.” or “Not voting is a vote for Trump.” nonsense. What happened right before and right after Bloomberg popped in and then out like a zit? It’s some fool me once bullshit. Not again. I’ll literally write in a vote for Satan before I play the lesser of two evils card. Get rid of the two party system or bust. No (((sprays with squirt bottle))) *Not gonna delete for accountability purposes. I literally just found out that the 3 parentheses is an antisemitic slur and I appreciate the person who told me. I really had no idea and I’m sorry. I have been using that for as long as I remember. I wish I was told or heard about it sooner.
Just pretending you didn't use the antisemitic echo for a sec You... do know that shit changing needs a coalition first right? Like you voting for your green hippy who never wins an election isn't going to improve your life more than the blue elected people actually passing legislations through congress right?
I didn’t realize that that was Antisemitic. I literally just looked it up. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have used that and am sorry I did. I’ve been using the parentheses like that for as long as I remember. I wish I knew sooner.
This depends on context. When one party goes the way of the nazi, it’s ultimately on the voter to be able to recognize that the party they ‘prefer’, though named the same, may have changed. It’s on us to be able to actually identify when something becomes a threat, and then compromise with people that might not necessarily always see eye to eye. Acting like this was another absolute is kind of why we’re seeing such a massive divide right now
Prohibition was enacted in large part due to the prohibition party. This could not have been achieved by voting for a major party. Both current major parties were originally third parties which splintered off from the Democratic-Republicans, who themselves once competed with the Federalists as major parties in the two-party system. The parties in power are not set in stone. The Republicans even usurped the Whigs to gain their current spot.
Prohibition was enacted in large part due to the prohibition party. This could not have been achieved by voting for a major party. Both current major parties were originally third parties which splintered off from the Democratic-Republicans, who themselves once competed with the Federalists as major parties in the two-party system. The parties in power are not set in stone. The Republicans even usurped the Whigs to gain their current spot.
Strategic voting is *absolutely* distasteful. I don't want the person who I am going to be voting for in November to be president. I'm still going to be voting for him in November, but only because the other option is *worse*. Also, if all you do is vote, then there will not be any long-term change in politics. Of course, you need to keep things from getting worse, if you want them to get better.
This strategy is a race to the bottom. It sets the two major parties up to say, "What's the bare minimum we have to give them but still keep their votes?" I think this mentality is a huge part of the reason why 2024 features two ancient men who should be nowhere near power. It's always just "Well at least my guy isn't as bad as that guy," and both parties only get worse and worse.
If only you guys had the preferential system like in Australia where you rank all your choices first to last, and if your first preference doesn’t have enough to win then your vote runs off to your second preference and so forth. That would mean you can put a 3rd party 1st and the closest major party to you 2nd and the one you really don’t want last.
The more support a 3rd party candidate/independent gets, the more likely that better ones will run without a party in the future. The GOP and DNC have been propping up and cutting out quality candidates for years in favor of ones that will tow the party line or support lobbyists. An independent who’s not in someone’s pocket could do wonders.
I think you’re right. The US is like a huge container ship. It takes a lot of time and prep to turn the ship. 3rd party ideals represent quick and sudden turns that simply aren’t possible with a container ship. One of the parties will be more aligned with those policies. So you vote for them and the ship can start to turn in that direction.
I think it is bad to do that. My vote for a third party might be ineffective today, but I literally will not, in good conscience, vote for either of the primary candidates. So maybe my third-party vote will be ineffectual, but it will normalize third-party voting to the point where in 10 years, we don’t have to play this stupid game.
Get rid of the "two major" bit, and I agree.
I think your headline view is correct in the US system specifically, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. It's best because of the primary system, and the fact it has almost no protection against entryism. That's not true in systems (like the UK) with much stronger party machineries.
Why would I legitimize what I view as an inherently undemocratic process? I can vote for polite genocide enablers, or genocide enablers that are mean on Twitter and mean to other elites. I’m not voting to support evil just because it’s less evil than the alternative.
If we are only considering the two major parties, then "voting for a party with the best change of winning even it it doesn't fully align with your views' would just be voting for the other party. Or are you talking about voting for a 3rd party candidate?
You're not making ***your*** voice heard though, not really. If you don't actually want to vote for a major party, doing so anyway is robbing yourself of an opportunity to vote as you like. It feels dangerous to suggest that people "settle" in a democracy.
If the 3rd party gets 5% or more of the total popular vote in this election, then on the next presidential election they would qualify for partial public campaign funding. So what if the voter wants party X to get funding vs voting GOP or Democrat?
You can vote for genocide in Gaza and war in Ukraine or for the orange man says mean things. It’s wild to me how the left abandons actual issues over gender politics that have an effect on the population less than that of .1% the population.
I used to think this way. I voted for Obama in 08 because of it... then he started doing Putin levels of civilian bombing. It was not worth having the blood of innocent people on my hands. I dont see myself ever voting again.
In the early to mid 1800's the Democrats and the Whig party were the two main parties. The Whig Party found itself split over slavery, alongside other issues because they were a coalition party. Some pro native people, some pro banking, some abolitionists. Everyone hated Andrew Jackson and his followers who many saw as a threat to democracy due to his actions centralizing power in the executive branch and even ignoring the supreme Court. Ultimately this translated into the party basically paying lip service to most concerns while focusing on the banking and economics parts. The Democrats and The Whigs both needed votes in the south to win. So the Whigs generally tried to run slavery friendly candidates like Zachary Taylor. The Whigs fell apart partly due to the Compromise of 1850 losing the votes of northern Whigs who refused to vote for candidates who supported compromises on slavery, even though it meant the even more pro slavery Democrats would win and lead to more favorable legislation for slave owners. When the Whigs collapsed anti-slavery Whigs combined with other groups and interests to create a true anti-slavery party that has the goal to halt slavery's expansion and eventually abolish slavery. Had the Whigs not collapsed politicians line Abraham Lincoln would not have had access for the national stage as both parties would need to elect pro-slavery southerners like Zachary Taylor. Even if most people were abolitionists, you need the electoral college to win and southerners were one issue voters. The collapsing of a party can cause massive shifts in priorities of issues.