I’m currently a bit torn between Democrats and third party candidates in the US Presidential election, depending on the eventual D nominee and what third party candidates emerge. However, the chance that I’ll vote for Trump given current information is very close to zero.
I disagree with your basic viewpoint. Who you support for president shouldn’t be the least evil that is electable. I just vote for who I think will do the best job for the country. For me that means I generally vote libertarian. I think the loony portion of the libertarian platform will be mooted by having to pass through a republican/democrat congress while their good ideas that are shared by both parties will actually succeed. On the other hand if someone like Warren or Sanders becomes president their worst ideas will not be fettered by congress especially for their first two year and we’ve just watched what Trump was able to do just with control of the senate for two years. There is no chance of a Libertarian majority in either house of congress so it would result in the best overall policy.
I voted Obama in 2008. My reasons were two-fold.
First, we had a historic crisis that represented a failure of the market which required government intervention. Nobody is better at doing that than the Dems and McCain was still doddering about with his free market talk. He simply did not give me confidence that he was up to the task.
Second, Sarah Palin. She was woefully unfit to become president and McCain was an old man at the time.
It took a lot of thinking, but Obama was the choice that year.
In what reality do you ever see one of the Libertarian candidate getting elected? Perot didn’t win a single state despite making the debate stage. The only third parties that have won anything in modern were the white supremacy spin offs.
There have not only been two parties throughout history.
If the people shift their thinking faster than a monolithic structure can shift with them, an upstart can and will take over.
Granted, I would find it unlikely that a pre-existing party like the Libertarians would be the one to take over. A relatively young party, with clear leadership, is more likely to come in and take over.
Pretty sure I covered that in my post . . .
Yep, sure did. Not a thing about voting for electability just who’s best for the country. I think the people who vote on electability rather than doing good for the country are 99% responsible for Trump and all of his evil.
But they’ll usually be there years down the line, when something egregious and patently bad happens, to self-righteously say, “How could this happen? They’re all crooks.” When their kid gets deathly ill from environmental contaminants, or their property gets ruined, or when whatever has happened and it’s too late, that’s when they ask, “How could this have happened?”
Yes, they’re uninformed. They sure have all kinds of time to watch bullshit TV shows or whatever, but to actually learn about something in order to vote? No, they’re too fucking lazy to do that. Because they’re only watching bullshit TV shows all the time they aren’t capable of seeing potential long-term effects in the future. Their attention is only concerned with instant, cheap gratification.
“Politics? Oh, that doesn’t affect me.” Until it does, but then it’s too late.
Except for bizarre schisms like 1860, that hasn’t happened. And we don’t have anything like the slavery issue today.
Pedantic mode: they didn’t run against each other - the main Democratic opposition to Schwarzenegger in the “who should be governor if Davis is recalled” election was then-lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamonte.
But I’m the same way - I am a registered Republican (which, in California, is only meaningful in Presidential primaries, as those are the only races not open to candidates of all parties), but that doesn’t mean I vote anything close to a straight party line.
Actually, the ones who stubbornly insist on voting third party are 100% responsible for Trump. If Jill Stein voters would have voted for Hillary, she would be President.
I don’t understand this stubbornness. Sure, you think your third party candidate who will get 0.2% of the vote is better than the mainstream candidate, but why throw your vote away? I mean, I think that I share by own views better than any other candidate, but I don’t write myself in because I cannot win. What is the point of voting for also rans?
And if the never-trumpers had voted for the candidate they thought was best for the country instead of who could beat Hillary we wouldn’t have Trump.
I get it winning is all that matters to you. Its your tribe vs the other guys and you have to be on the winning tribe. This has cause candidates who run from the middle so they don’t get primaried from the Left/ right and then try to drift moderate during the general. This mindset also reduces voter turn out in non swing states I won’t vote for the winner so why bother.
Historical major parties:
There is no law saying that the current parties have to stay in place.
It is conceivably more likely that we’ll turn into a dictatorship or get hit by a solar flare before the parties change again, but it is not an impossibility and - for all you and I know - could happen any election if the right people with the right message came along.
Trust in government is at an all-time low. That’s not a bad sign for change. I don’t expect it, but it is false to state that the status quo is inviolate.
Funny you mention Jerry Brown. I’ve been guilty myself of claiming that Bernie Sanders’ lingering around longer than he was welcome hurt Hillary Clinton, but at least Bernie was mostly polite toward his adversary. Jerry Brown was a bare knuckle fighter in that 1992 primary and he really hurt Clinton - to the point that Bush would have probably beaten him had Ross Perot not been so egomaniacal and stayed in the race.
And yet years later, I must say that my image of Brown has done a 180. I love the guy. He was my hero as governor when I was living in California. He brought California back from the brink of financial disaster that the Republicans single-handedly caused before 2009.
Right, we would have Hilary. Most of the never Trumpers saw that and decided that they would rather have Trump than Hillary. That’s how elections work!
That’s how elections work! You want to win, not lose. Why else run in an election if you just want to lose?
The last sentence seems to be a complaint about the EC and not the waste of time of voting for a third party, which would still be a waste even in a popular vote system.
The Progressive Party was a basic nothing third party that happened to luck into minor prominence for one election. In which they received 27.4% of the vote.
The other examples all date from before the Civil War, when the Republicans, formed and Democratic Parties got locked into dominance. What changed? The parties started building solid organizations from the local areas on up. Every single wide spot in the road had Democratic and Republican candidates (except some places in the South). Local committees ran them, looked for candidates, raised money, kept close tabs on the voters, and rewarded friends and punished enemies. These local committees worked with city committees and county committees and state committees. They were chains and franchises and interlocking directorates before corporations thought to emulate them.
A U.S. presidential election is a weird, one-of-a-kind beast. Therefore, in weird times a third party candidate is not unthinkable. Teddy Roosevelt came closest, but Ross Perot drew 18% of the vote in 1992. Of course he didn’t win a single electoral vote. The chances are extremely low but the world is rapidly changing.
That’s still enormously different from saying that a new party will replace the reds and blues. The two-party system is entrenched much deeper than McDonalds and Walmart put together. The only hope for a new entrant is to take over much of the apparatus of a party that has virtually disintegrated.
Again, that is not inconceivable. I keep saying that the demographics of the Republican Party are so incredibly unfavorable that it’s doomed to permanent minority status* unless it finds a way to suddenly start appealing to minorities, city-dwellers, the young, and women, all of whom now find the party hateful by large percentages, instead of rural elderly white evangelicals, all of whom are shrinking in numbers. Even so, huge incentives exist for the current party to hold itself together for as long as possible in hopes that the culture will again shift.
For any foreseeable future, the U.S. will have two-party politics. There is no center for a third party to latch upon, no set of issues that are not being addressed. There are no “right people with the right message.” Maybe, just maybe, one side will become so extreme that a less extreme wing will break off but unless that wing finds a way to appeal to the other side and break off pieces of it, that’s just another recipe for permanent minority status.
Otherwise, you’re merely in your 167th year of saying a new party could form any day now. That’s a track record just as good as that of the world-will-end folks. Not great company.
*Not next year, but within a decade or so.
Yeah, we while we could see some weird 1860 schism for one election, let’s say the Bernie Party, the Hillary Party, the Trump party and the Romney party, that just can’t survive with the electoral college (which isn’t going anywhere) determining the winner. And the alternative is even worse. Can you imagine if an election gets tossed into the House of Representatives? One representative from Alaska has the exact same power as the entire state of California. Alaska doesn’t even have the population of a good sized Los Angeles suburb.
In every single US election except some state propositions, and the presidential race, whichever side takes a simple majority, wins. With the current electoral structure, a (D) candidate needs an even greater popular supermajority than Ms Clinton won. Installing losers shows that elections DON’T work.
Yah yah, Tramp won the game, which remains rigged. I intensely dislike rigged games.
The Tramps did not look at all happy on election night 2016. They still don’t.
It’s even worse than that. I haven’t started fully evaluating the Democratic field, because I don’t get to vote in their primaries. Nor do I want to, since registering (D) effectively means I give up my right to vote in every single election on the ballot. Why waste my time researching candidate planks and policies when most of them will be losers? I’ll look into it when the DNC makes their nomination.
~Max
Had Ross Perot not quit the race in 1992 before getting back in he could have done much better than 19%. Slight chance he could have even won.