That’s not true either. If you can afford the filing fees and amass the necessary signatures on petitions, you have a 100% chance of running. You have a considerably lesser chance of winning.
And you seem to be talking only about presidential elections. The vast majority of elections are at the local or state level, where the party has even less control over who claims to be one of them and throws a hat into the ring.
The reason “independents have no chance” is because there’s absolutely no advantage to running as an independent and plenty of downside, and there’s lots of advantage to running under one of the major parties and no downside.
If you’re running for dogcatcher, you can put a D or an R after your name and get help stuffing envelopes and whatever. And you have absolutely no obligation to sign on to any party platform, or vote any particular way, or carry out any particular policy.
The elected officials control the party, the party doesn’t control the elected officials. So if you’re running for dogcatcher tomorrow what makes sense? To run as an independent? Or run as a D or an R? If you want to win running as a D or an R will help, running as an independent will not help. And so 99% of the people who seriously want to hold elective office run under one of the major parties. And that means only cranks run as independents or under a minor party.
If you really are a social democrat you don’t go out and find the party with the platform that most closely matches your ideology and run for office affiliated with them. You just run as a Democrat. While the Democratic party doesn’t match your ideology perfectly, so what? If you win elections they’ll help you win elections. Do you want to get elected or not?
At the local level the parties have more control. Do you think it’s easy to get signatures on petitions to run? The parties will challenge anyone they think is a threat, and you’ll have to fight those challenges in courts packed with party members. I’m not going to say the party control in every state has an overwhelming advantage because I only have experiences in the northeast states to look at, but in PA, NY, and RI independents have a very hard time making it on the ballot making their way through the system.
You just made my case. You need to affiliate with a major party to participate, that is wrong on it’s face. There are more independents now than members of any party, if not for the undue influence of the parties on the process they would fade away.
Yes, I see it all the time – people standing outside of markets collecting signatures. Depending on the office, it may not be very difficult at all.
Court? I’ve never even heard of a court case where a party successfully sues to stop an individual from running as a candidate using the party name. That’s something they can’t even seem to go for national level candidates – Trump and Lyndon La Rouche come to mind. Can you point to some examples?
That’s nice. But I can’t even imagine what you think you mean by that revolution and you’ve given no clue that you do either.
I mean, you want the government to control who becomes the parties’ nominees. Have you thought about the implications of that for five seconds?
Only to participate in that organization’s activities. Just like the 4H club or a shareholder meeting. Why is that wrong?
TriPolar, you’re projecting your own beliefs. Just because you support outsider candidates doesn’t mean the majority of voters support those candidates. Because if the majority of voters supported those candidates, they wouldn’t be outsider candidates.
There’s no conspiracy forcing people to vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders; people are just making a choice you don’t agree with. The only way you’re going to “fix” that “problem” is by abandoning the core principle of democracy.
Look at the Republicans. The leaders of the party made it clear they didn’t want Donald Trump as their candidate - but the voters picked him anyway (and this is in a system with no superdelegates). If political parties controlled the system like you claim, they would have denied Trump the nomination.
I give Sanders credit. He ran a good campaign and did much better than I think anyone expected. He most likely changed the future direction of the party. But the reality here and now is that he came in second. Deal with that - just like Clinton supporters dealt with it in 2008.
A lot of people think the parties came into being and then took over, but parties grew organically from the system. You will have factions in any system. Heck, Alexander Hamilton complained about how it’s impossible to do away with factions without either doing away with all freedom or doing away with all differences between people.
Parties are simply big factions. That’s all they are. People say “Hey, there’s a benefit to working together” and then they work together.
You will not stop it. You can change the label, but you will not stop it. And I doubt there’s a good reason even to argue that you should stop it.
Here are the rules for getting on the Presidential ballotin Texas. For major parties, minor parties, independents & write-ins.
We have open primaries here; other states do not. But every state has rules. Anyone interested in running can learn the rules. Getting signatures on petitions might be difficult, but no court cases are required.
Of course, if you pay no attention to “minor” elections & offices but suddenly want Your Hero to magically appear on the Presidential ballot, coming out of a fog shortly before election day will frustrate you.
And are those elected or appointed, and if appointed, by whom?