In hindsight one need not be very extreme, to judge that little difference between Nixon and Humphrey.
Well, only if by “winning nationally” you mean only the WH. It does not seem to harm their prospects in Congressional elections all that much.
Following up on my earlier comments on how the two political parties are so entrenched in the electoral system in the US, I just recalled the comment up-thread that Cantor would be barred by law from running as an independent in Virginia, because he didn’t get his party’s nomination.
My reaction to that is 
WTF does his failure to win a party nomination have to do with his right to stand for election to the Congress?
We don’t have any such law in Canada, and my gut reaction is that such a law would be unconstitutional, as interfering with an individual’s constitution right to stand for election to Parliament. The members of a political party shouldn’t be able to defeat that constitutional right by denying the party’s nomination. Apparently political parties in Virginia do have that power.
Again, your pissing match with the Democratic Party is more important to you than the well-being of the actual people that progressive policies would help. If they must suffer in order that the Democratic Party gets properly chastised, then that, apparently, is the way the cookie crumbles.
What a repugnant attitude.
As an aside to my main point, how do you know this? What other ways have been tried?
A “sore loser law” is about having one’s name pre-printed on the ballot. Any eligible person can run as a write-in candidate. Cantor could, but has chosen not to.
Yes, I gathered that from the comments up-thread.
Depriving someone of the right to be on the ballot because they did not get a party’s nomination strikes me as bizarre. It means that the parties control ballot access.
That’s what I mean by saying that the parties are strongly entrenched in the electoral process in the US, unlike in Canada.
When you add up all the different ways they are entrenched (and I appreciate there can be considerable variation from state to state), it helps explain why the two parties have a dupoly in US electoral politics. It’s not just First-past-the-post, which is what started me on this discussion.
It’s not hard to understand. First-past-the-post produces a two-party system, and the resultant two parties use their power to maintain it and keep potential third-party rivals and nonpartisan candidates marginalized.
Exactly. There is no mention of parties at all in the Constitution, and hardly any anywhere except in state election laws and Congressional rles.
Also, should a third party or candidate gain traction with an issue that neither major is seen by the public as adequately addressing, the major whose philosophical alignment comes closest to adopting it will do so (e.g. Ross Perot and balancing the budget, which Clinton proceeded to do). That’s why third parties never last long, especially not those amounting to ego trips by guys running on the ever-popular but pointless “None of the above” platform, like Ralph Nader or John Anderson.
Yes, it does mean that. The parties are entrenched, as part of our governance as well as our elections, by the very fact that they do NOT have other legal standing at the federal level and very little at the state level. The parties are, essentially, coalitions of factional interests that generally align and are constantly shifting through time; we just don’t have formal structures and names for the various factions that would be formal parties in a parliamentary system.
The law also means that a candidate has to first show he can “work well with others”, particularly those within the party with whom he’d have to work closely to do anything. A mere hothead/ideologue/radical who cannot get supported by anyone but a small faction has a harder route to getting elected because of the ballot-access rule, but isn’t that generally a good thing? If his ideas are good or even merely popular ideas, they’ll get supported by a party that does, after all, want to win. If his ideas are bad, well, at some point you have to put the kids to bed and let the grownups work things out.
I like jungle primaries. It means you can’t possibly “waste” your vote. You vote for who you like, and if that person doesn’t win, then you move on to the lesser of two evils in December.
Plus it means you’ll usually have the two most popular candidates face off. If we’d had a federal jungle primary, the general election probably would have been Clinton vs. Obama, which I think was more enlightening to the public than what we actually got with the McCain/Obama race.
You also wouldn’t have had a problem in 2000. The Nader voters wouldn’t have had to hold their noses and he could get his 5% or whatever, then in December everyone gets down to choosing between Bush and Gore. Without Nader to muck things up, that race probably goes to Gore in Florida.
True, but also note, as Michael Lind writes, the essential nature of the American party system has changed a lot in recent decades (and probably not for the better):
You realize that Wall Street is furious about the new regulations. right? And have stopped giving money to Dems. Obama is paying way too much lip service to balancing the budget, and did not get a big enough stimulus through, but it was sure better than what McCain would have done. In Democratic controlled areas the minimum wage is increasing.
It is not at all clear what is illegal about what they did - even if it should be. They did jail some insider traders. HSBC wouldn’t even have been shamed under the Bush SEC. That is a too big to jail problem mostly.
But look, on one side we have a party who hasn’t done enough for various reasons, and on the other side we have a party with that fucker Cantor who came out gloating that he cut food stamps and took food from hungry children.
Let’s concentrate on getting a majority again. In California we kicked the Republicans to the curb, and everything is running much smoother.
Remember two years ago when Tea Party primary victories lost them some easy seats? If the Tea Party makes them older and older and whiter and whiter in the long run we win. First we have to de-gerrymander the states.
And it appears that the Tea Party is mad at Wall Street also. I don’t think Cantor being knee-deep in lobbyists helped him any.
When you say “we”, do you mean progressives or Democrats? Becuase while things look good for the Democratic Party in the future, the progressive wing faces demographic problems much like the republican party does.
Ralph Nader thinks that could actually be the basis for a left-right anti-corporate alliance.
Cite?
We’ve discussed this before. While it won’t be a problem for YOUR brand of progressivism, the progressivism popular with the wealthy white liberal class, otherwise known as “limousine liberals”, where environmentalism, gay rights, etc. are the preeminent issues, is going to be supplanted in the Democratic Party of the future. The Democratic Party in 2050 will be economically populist, very Catholic, and Latino-dominated.
No, what’s going to happen is that social conservatism is going to die out entirely, or at least to a degree that it will no longer be politically relevant. And you will not live to see environmentalism lose its relevance, quite the reverse, it’s going to grow ever more important as the need for it becomes ever more obvious.
First environmentalism has to gain relevance among anyone but the rich liberal donors. Then it can lose it. The issue has little significance to working class Americans:
http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/
As the Democratic base grows more and more working class, it’s going to start looking more and more like the Democratic Party of the Roosevelt-LBJ era. It’s base will be provincial, economically populist, and uninterested in issues that the limousine liberals regard as of vital importance.
On the bright side, it may also end up as dominant as the Democratic Party of the 1930s-1960s. But progressives will find as they did then that the Democrats aren’t much better a home than the Republican Party. Progressives being dominantly Democratic is a pretty recent development, and one that will be short lived. Once the Democratic base stops being interested in them, they’ll do what they did then, be a loud minority within both major parties.
If Democrats get their wish to go to public financing, this trend will be accelerated because the only reason environmentalism is even on the radar of Democratic politicians is the rich donors.
I think he is correct here. The environment is, of course, extraordinarily significant, but given the levels of education and scientific literacy among the general population plus what polls reveal, people don’t care about it (belief) even as it affects them strongly (science). And beliefs carry the vote.
We’ve seen this demonstrated time and time again on a local and regional scale. People will happily toss the environment, and their long-term futures, under the bus for a little short-term job security. Sadly, I don’t see any evidence that this is changing.
I think that is true so long as the environment doesn’t affect them directly. We’ll see what happens when the ocean starts lapping at the ankles of the Floridians and their governor keeps saying climate change is a hoax.
Something is going to happen to convince people. The convincing might not be scientifically justifiable, but ignorance might work for the planet for once.