I think you’re mistaken about the Libertarians. They run dozens, if not hundreds, of non-presidential candidates every election. They almost never win, though.
Yes, this. How are David Duke and Louis Farrakhan going to balance each other out? They actually agree on many things: Racial separatism and the baleful influence of Jews, for instance. The only disagreement they have is whether Blacks or Whites are the superior race.
Like **Ravenman **says, the only thing this will accomplish is to disrupt an already clumsy legislative process. Extremists aren’t good for anything.
Yes, and part of it is the fact that there are factions working within the parties all the time (the Tea Party, Dixiecrats, Blue Dog Democrats, Democratic Leadership Council, to name a few that actually had formal names). You’re better off as a faction within a big party that can win elections than a small party that never wins anything.
Well, that’s a decision for you to make in the voting booth – also, for the Reform Party leadership to make when they draw up the list. If Roe is known to be unpopular among the Reform base, no doubt they would take that into account.
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Never heard “optics” used in a racial-political context before.
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I’m pushing for PR because I believe a multiparty system is better for America than a two-party system. “Proportional” representation means the legislature proportionately reflects the voters’ political views/ideologies, not their ethnicities, but see below.
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I am not trying to undercut the political clout of any racial/ethnic minorities – to the contrary, I am pushing a system that allows even geographically dispersed minorities to pool their votes behind a candidate of their own ethnicity should they wish to do so. That is a much better solution than gerrymandered “minority-majority” districts, which lock the voters there in to voting along racial lines or voting for a loser, and which also have the effect of keeping minority voters out of the adjacent districts.
That fact is something we need to change. From a voter’s POV, it is better to able to trust the label of a smaller ideologically-homogenous party, than to be stuck with a “big tent” party candidate whose politics might not be close to the voter’s at all.
Why is it better to have kooks like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan (your two examples of people who might be elected under your plan) serving in Congress? Just because of a couple quotes said 230 years ago by two founding fathers?
Simply because there are significant numbers of Americans who believe as they do, and they have as much right to a voice in Congress as saner/wiser Americans have.
Now, if you still don’t like that, a PR system can always be designed with a bar, say, no party gets any representation unless it can garner at least 5% of the vote. That’s how they do it in Germany, and it has been effective in keeping neo-Nazi groups out of the Bundestag – also, much of the time, keeping out the Greens.
From urbandictionary.com
You go on:
So you say. You may even believe this, although I’ve never understood what these third-party pushes mean in terms of real-world policies, legislation, or coalitions. And I also believe that concentrating on single issue ideologies, the inevitable outcome of third parties, is the worst possible outcome, not the best. Parties should not be about ideologies at all.
But I’m telling you what it looks like. And what it will look like to a major group of voters. It doesn’t matter what you believe you are doing, the visible fact will be that you are pushing the agenda of a group of white males. You can’t just say that this will help minorities. The Virginia redistricting while a civil rights veteran was at the inauguration was done under the guise of gerrymandering an additional black district and so increasing minority representation. No one outside the 20 legislators who voted for it believes that story.
You can’t convince me, a white male, that proportional representation will have any real-world effect that will not greatly benefit the minority of white males who yell about it on the Internet and therefore hurt minorities coming into power. What minorities will see - optics - is another Virginia, a way to ghettoize them to keep them from gaining the power that has been given to all other emerging voting blocs over the past 200 years. Whether you intend that or not, that’s simple reality. My opinion is that it’s not just perceived reality, but that actual effect in the real world.
But we vote for the candidate, not the party he’s in. That’s ultimately how it is supposed to work.
You’re both right and wrong.
The Voting Rights Act requires states to create such “minority-majority” districts - directly in response to the “cracking” of minority-concentrated areas that was done to dilute their power.
This can, as you note, have side effects that end up weakening them overall. And that’s a problem we should deal with. It’s not always deliberate though. No doubt that Republicans have figured this out, and are using it, as they tried to do in Virginia. But it’s not always a play to hurt blacks - just the opposite. It is a technique that has been used for decades to allow more blacks to elect blacks, for what that’s worth.
No, I don’t believe that fringe groups have a right to have their political party in government. They have a right to vote, they have a right to bring their grievances to their elected representative, but they don’t have any right to a guarantee that their representative will not regard them as kooks if they are on the fringe.
Besides, I see such a system as being a huge benefit to political parties, which are really little more than the original PACs. I find no need to strengthen the role of parties in our electoral system.
All groups of voter should have representation proportional to their size, don’t you think? Wouldn’t that be simply democracy? Why do you think you are entitled to declare someone a “fringe group?”
This strange bias against parties is one reason we can’t have meaningful reform.
Why “original PACs?” Are you saying they have a significant role in financing candidates? Did you check first?
I argued extensively about that in this thread. Please review. See also here, here, here, and here.
:rolleyes: :dubious: What bullshit! Of course political parties should be about ideologies! And nothing else! Their existence is you-the-voter’s chance to translate your ideology into public policy, leaving the fine details to pols who share your politics. If not ideologies, then what should parties be about?! If not parties as an expression of ideologies, then what can fulfill that role?!
And I still don’t get that. Where is that even coming from?! What “white males” want PR? Those in the Libertarian and Constitution parties, perhaps, certainly not Republicans. And PR is the perfect way to do an end-run around Republican gerrymandering. It is our present SMD system that allows the Pubs to have a majority in the HoR even though they won a minority of aggregate votes cast for the HoR – that could never happen in a PR system.
If we had a PR system, the party I’d be backing would be the Working Families Party. It is a left-progressive party, not at all what you are thinking of when you think “white males.”
No, I just said that I don’t think that all groups should have proportional representation. Even BrainGlutton suggested that groups that can’t get 5% of the vote shouldn’t be entitled to seats in the legislature. I’m entitled to think that certain political beliefs are nutty, and adherents to those beliefs are entitled to disagree with me. But if political candidates or parties aren’t even close to competitive in single member districts, that’s probably pretty good evidence that the candidate/party is on the fringe.
Strange bias against parties? I think it’s a well-founded bias based on the history of political machines in this country. I’d rather have individual candidates that stand for election on their views and record in primary and general elections, rather than parties determining who the best candidates are.
And as far as parties financing elections, the DNC and RNC combined spent $660 million for the presidential election. The Romney campaign spent just $50 million more than the RNC did on Mitt’s behalf. Did you check?
Sure, that’s fine.
As long as you define “fringe” objectively, such as with a de minimus.
But parties don’t do that. Or at least they don’t have to. In any event, what the hell do you think they do now? They pick the best candidate to run.
What you’re objecting to is how they pick. They used to use machines and insiders. Now the members of the party all decide through primaries, for the most part.
I believe those figures may be for joint campaign activities that go toward all candidates, not just presidential, and may also include expenses for the conventions. In any event, party money is a small part of congressional races.
Still, so what? Shouldn’t parties fund their candidates? What’s wrong with that?
It has worked in the past. That doesn’t mean it will work the same way in the future. But I really wasn’t debating whether the Virginia action was good or bad, but of the way it was perceived by minorities.
Who says?
I mean this very seriously. When both parties had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings it was rational to say you were voting for the candidate. In today’s political climate, it is at least as rational to vote entirely based on parties. If every Republican is to the right of every Democrat - which has been true in the Senate for a while, according to some analysis - and if the parties vote in tight blocs - as they do - then it is entirely irrational to vote for someone of the other party, no matter how good a candidate. They will not vote independently of party in the majority of cases and therefore you will not get anything you support.
BrainGlutton would take this as a point in favor of proportional representation. I disagree, because parties must vote on hundreds of issues and take their stances according to the intra-party consensus. A party that formed around an issue will not have positions on the hundreds of others. It’s why Amazon thrives even though every individual item has webstores dedicated to it. The learning curve to determine the value of 500 stores (really 500 times however many stores there are for that item) is daunting. Broad-based parties serve a huge purpose. Especially since the parties go from the national to the local level. Issues are not the same as ideologies. This is far more than semantics: it’s a way of thinking.
The real solution is for move diversity within the parties, not among groups of parties. If both parties went back to having three wings that had to deal with each other and worked with their like-minded counterparts in the other party, it would be much harder to advance strictly ideological positions. Not impossible, but those would have to be majority consensus issues, the way Jim Crow laws and anti-gay laws once were. The tyranny of the majority is a problem but an unfixable one, except over long periods of social change. The Founding Fathers were far more afraid of the tyranny of the minority - the ability of small groups of partisans to push their ideology down the throats of an apathetic majority. That’s what we see today. We need much less of it, not a way to ease its path.
“Nonpartisan elections” never are, in practice. And the essentially technocratic idea behind them – “There is no Democratic or Republican way to pave a street” (a Progressive-Era reform-slogan) – is bullshit, anyway. You can’t pave a street without deciding whom to tax how to pay for it, or which streets get paved and which don’t, etc., and all those questions depend on ideology as well as on group-interest, which means political parties should be involved.
I’m not saying anything about de minimus standards. Libertarians are fringe. The Green Party is fringe. The Constitution Party is fringe. I see no reason to reform the electoral system to accommodate these parties if they have weak support. Once they start garnering significant percentages of the vote – let’s say, 30 percent or something – I might start calling them non-fringe. It’s more likely, however, if the Constitution Party starts polling a 40% that I will regard this country as being well down the road to the loony bin.
I didn’t say anything about nonpartisan elections.
I also don’t like the idea of multimember districts. I think it is good that if grandma’s Social Security check gets screwed up, there’s one guy representing 700,000 people in DC to take the phone call and get stuff fixed, rather than five elected officials representing 3.5 million people.