As per request, I have turned this Pit thread into GD. Debate away.
Sure, sign me up. Just don’t put a hotbutton word in your party’s name. Like the Dixiecrat’s did.
Choose something confusing, like Bullmoose.
You are asking for a polity where the participants discuss the issues instead of trading petty insults. How did your pit thread turn out?
It reminds me of the discussion in Principles for a better GD. Some people think that debates are about attacking your opponents weakest points or mis-characterizing their arguments. Others think that debating=name calling.
Sadly those people make up for their minority status by the quantity of their output so, if there are any honest and charitable debaters they are lost in the noise.
Judging by the number of supporters of the Better GD motion, your party would get about 7 votes.
Do you want to give a precis of your new party’s principles? I only skimmed the second page of the Pit thread to which you linked, and it is not particularly enlightening.
Regards,
Shodan
Malleus was kind enough to start this GD at my request ('cause I was da shy). As usual, I have way more questions that solutions, and wanted this debate to see who out there might have some ideas.
Here are some of my questions.
Regarding, first of all, the formation of a new party: What might it take for a new, viable party to emerge? I mean viable in a national sense, since I know there are politicians from other parties besides the Dems n Pubs who are holding offices.
Second (and this relates to what I liked about Malleus’s OP in the Pit), is it possible that some Americans could come together and form a party in which the first/primary plank concerns the expected behavior of politicians? 'Cause I way like that idea.
Third, it seems like there are pretty serious conflicting beliefs with the current Republican party (not that there aren’t conflicting beliefs within the Dems or within pretty much any institution, but let’s use the R party as a fer instance). Could this be contributing to Republicans losing seats all over? If the R should fracture, and have two spin-off parties, say, that may seem on the surface that it would only intensify their loss of power. But what I’m wondering is if the large number of people who are now self-identifying as Independent or are refraining from voting out of frustration with their party of choice might find a voice in one of these two emerging systems, empowering one of these parties emerge as sort of a replacement of the current R?
Out of the three questions above, I’m sure y’all kind find lots of suppositions or guesses I’ve made that can be corrected, so feel free to address any or all. 
Maia
The only way a third party will ever become a reality in this country is if we adopt Instant Runoff Voting (IRV).
For example in the 2000 election, many think Nader (Green Party) sank gore in Florida. Nader lost the votes of those who atually preferred him but recognized that they would be throwing their votes away and decided to vote for “the lesser of two evils.” Gore lost the votes of those who have much prefered him to Bush but wanted their preference for Nader noted.
Had we been using IRV, Gore probably would have won, Nader would have established the Green’s eligibility for federal funding and we’d be on our way to a viable third party. Unfortunately, the one true bipartisan position on the hill is that “There shall be no third party.”
I will go door-to-door for any mainstream candidate who is for IRV. I thought I’d found my man in Howard Dean. I think it was in 2004 that he appeared at some mid-western college and on the topic of electoral reform said that if he had his way, we’d institute IRV. Wow, I thought. After Obama was elected, I received an email from the Dean folks soliciting questions for the Dr. I asked him about his stand on IRV and have yet to hear from him.
Missed edit, good link here.
Third parties can work, but they almost all try to elect presidents, which simply doesn’t work. The Green Party seems to be working from the bottom up, and that’s having some dividends last I heard.
First of all, I think you’d need some pretty substantial segment of the electorate that feels it’s way underserved by the two existing major parties, and whose members are for and against roughly the same things politically.
If you don’t have an underserved market, there’s no market for a new political party, period. And if that underserved market is scattered in a whole bunch of different places in terms of their political stances, it really isn’t a single market, but many splinter markets that can’t be brought together to form a single party.
Second, I think the new party, in addition to serving such an underserved political market, would need a fairly charismatic leader to get its message across, especially given the way third parties tend to get dismissed and ridiculed. (Given that the last minor party to become a major party was the Republicans in the mid-19th century, such dismissal isn’t without reason. But it’s one of the obstacles a new party faces, and there needs to be a way of overcoming that.)
Third, I think such a new party would have to try a different strategic approach from past third parties, which traditionally have gone after the Presidency first, typically with counterproductive results: the relative success of a third party of the left or right in a Presidential election risks throwing the election to the major party on the opposite side of the American political center. (See Nader, 2000.)
The approach I’d recommend would be to run candidates in safe Democratic (Republican) districts if you’re a third party of the left (right): that’s where your strongest support is likely to be found, and you don’t risk strengthening what you’d regard as the worse of the two major parties by running in those districts.
In addition, such a party could run candidates in the opposite major party’s districts, since the major party that you’re ideologically nearer to isn’t going to win those seats anyway, and you might as well run candidates just to show the flag and get people thinking. Even in the safest districts, there’s going to be some people open to any message.
Once you actually start winning some House seats, you can think about running a Presidential candidate.
No. Politics is about what you want government to accomplish - what problems you see in the country and the world, and what you think the fixes are. For instance, if you believe anthropogenic climate change is a reality, then the behavior of politicians is a hell of a lot less important than whether your politicians can address global warming in an effective way.
On the GOP side itself, I doubt it. If there was a moment when a spinoff from the current GOP, the one where the cultural conservatives have won, could have had tremendous influence, it was just a few years ago, in 2003-04. If Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee, and whatever other moderate Republicans were then around, had formed a third party, or even a distinct caucus within the GOP, they could have swung the direction of the GOP for at least those two years, since their votes were needed to pass GOP legislation. The reality is there aren’t enough Republicans who are unhappy with, say, calling Sotomayor a racist, to be much of a base for a GOP unlike the one we’ve got.
On the Dem side, it’s only been three years since the party was in the minority, and given that they’re mostly a party of scared rabbits anyway, they’re sticking together out of fear that their fortunes could turn anytime if they do anything to jinx things.
I think there’s a small but significant chance that the GOP might do a downward spiral into nativist, Christianist irrelevance, and that the two major parties would become the descendants of the Blue Dog Dems and the more progressive wing of the Dems. But it would take a decade or three for that to happen, and I wouldn’t place money on it anyway: a lot of forces conspire to keep the game limited to the existing two major parties.
Can you explain to me the fetish that IRV adherents have for the ‘instant’ part? A number of states have runoffs when nobody gets 50% (Georgia and Louisiana, for instance), but the runoffs happen a few weeks later, rather than right away.
Reason I ask this is that, no matter how good a technical change like this might be, it doesn’t tend to win much support if it comes across to most voters as something strange. People know what a runoff is, but they don’t have much clue about IRV. I can see increasing the number of states that require runoff elections when no candidate gets a majority of the votes, but I can’t see IRV getting much support outside of the wonks.
I agree that having runoffs of some sort (I don’t care which) would help with getting minor parties off the ground. If voting for a minor party doesn’t potentially put the greater of the two major-party evils in office, one is a lot more willing to consider voting for a minor party candidate, and the actual support level of a minor party platform can be more accurately gauged.
I suppose it’s both the expense of the new election and the problem of getting everybody back out to the polls, not to mention additional weeks of bothersome campaigning. Here’s a short flash video that sums things up.
I also find on the same site that Dr. Dean is still stumping IRV. Good.
Just how much do elections cost now, as part of the overall cost of state and local government? It’s got to be pretty small, and the occasional runoff election surely can’t add much to that. So I’d regard the cost issue as more of an excuse than a reason not to do separate runoffs. And the “additional weeks of bothersome campaigning” are simply democracy in action.
The substantially lower turnout in runoff elections is a potential concern, but IMHO it only matters to the extent that runoff voters are such an unrepresentative sample of Election Day voters that it frequently skews the outcomes of the runoffs.
IRV is a truly lousy electoral rule and we are fortunate that the US has not embraced it, and the arguments for it in this thread range from lousy to nonsensical. But that is beside the point.
Accepting as given the electoral rules we do have, the last time a successful third party emerged, we fought a particularly unpleasant civil war. Fragmenting political coalitions can be quite painful. For a particularly lucid discussion, please read This starting at page 148. It’s a wonderful article by Barry Weingast about the political instability that drove the runup to the civil war.
Irritatingly, the above-linked article is not completely available in preview. I will try to find a more comprehensive source. I have and love the book it is published in, but that is not a generally available cite.
True, but you’re still calling IRV ‘nonsensical’ and dismissing the arguments for it without giving any grounds.
I don’t see a reason why the diminishment of one of the major parties today, with some evolution into a new political order, would involve the risk of anything like what the U.S. went through back then. It’s not like a bunch of Southern states, accompanied by Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska, are going to try to leave the Union if the GOP becomes noncompetitive nationally.
You would need [ul][li]A set of ideas whose time has come, and which something is preventing either of the other two big parties from adopting.[]A charismatic leader.[]Deep pockets.[*]Patience and a disinclination towards ideological purity.[/ul]The most recent example I can think of is Ross Perot. He got 19% of the Presidential vote the first time he ran. He had the first and third factors, and ISTM that the reason the Independents Party never went anywhere is that he didn’t have the last. If he had spent the last twenty years party-building, he or someone like him might have been well-positioned in 2008. [/li]
There is often a lot of talk about how we need to jigger the election system to give third parties a chance. I think this kind of approach is doomed. If you can convince the electorate that you have a good set of ideas, and a plan to implement them, you don’t need the rules to be changed. If you can’t, then I am not open to the idea that you are entitled to change the rules just because you can’t win under them.
I doubt it, frankly. To take another more current example, our current President sold himself as a new kind of politician. One of the bits that he used to convince people of this was that he was going to follow a promise and run on public funding for his campaign. Then he realized he could raise more from private donations. So he changed his mind. And he still got elected.
Suppose he were a member of a party that said they would never use private donations. What are they going to do - repudiate their President?
Thing of it is, negative campaigning works. That’s why they do it. A party that says they will not adopt a legal and winning strategy is a party not destined for power.
I quite doubt it. This is the kind of thing that is going to be seriously over-stated on the SDMB, by the MSM, and other liberally-oriented media. Most of it is wishful thinking. The Republicans lost because the economy was tanking, and neither McCain nor anyone else did much to convince the electorate he had any idea how to deal with it. And McCain is like Dole - not a very charismatic guy, especially not compared to BO. That’s why McCain picked Palin (yeah, yeah - blah blah blah Palinevilbad - save it for the Pit).
But come 2012 and the economy is still tanking, and we now have a quadrupled national debt and a huge current deficit and the other inevitable problems related to being the world’s only superpower, then the Republicans’ task is to show a reasonable plan and pick a charismatic candidate. Despite what you will read on the SDMB, the election of 2012 (or even 2010) are by no means sewn up, just yet.
Certainly if some other new party comes along with the above, and the Republicans pick another retread like Dole or McCain (or Gingrich), then it is possible that the new party will replace, or merge with, the Republicans. But I think it is more likely that the Republicans will co-opt or adopt whatever new ideas come out than that someone else beats them to the punch.
80% of the SDMB won’t vote for a Republican no matter what. They would be delighted if the GOP split, not because they would consider voting for either of the sub-parties but just because that increases the chances of a Dem getting elected.
Regards,
Shodan
Because debating the relative demerits of IRV is kind of a hijack. I also admit to having participated in way too many electoral rules threads over the years so rehearsing the same fundamental issues with IRV (or most other systems) is tedious.
I am not suggesting that we are due for another Civil War. But let’s think about it this way. A major component of the previous administration’s winning coalition managed, by dint of its activism and discipline, to secure overrepresentation in the executive and legislative branches. They lost the executive and have experienced major losses in the legislative. They are probably headed for more erosion of their power and credibility.
The worst outcome for this group would be the reversal of all of the gains they have made in the past ten years, no, thirty years or so. They could potentially lose even more than that, when the traitorous liberals mandate abortions for some, sodomy for others. The question is, what would this group be willing to gamble to avoid its worse case scenario?
The south gambled on secession and war to avoid political outcomes it knew would be utterly disastrous. I am not suggesting that the same would occur again. But the fact is, we just don’t know what will happen when a broken-off piece of coalition has the choice between going gently into the good night and doing something else, possibly something very unexpected. Splitting coalitions is risky business.
A. We’ve had several successful third parties, though rarely for very long (Progressives around the turn of the last century), and none of them created any strife.
B. The Republicans weren’t a third party. They essentially replaced the Whigs and became one of the two major parties.
A) The Progressives were by no means a very successful party, and as you say, they did not last for very long.
B) The Republicans were most definitely a third party. The Whig coalition included both pro- and anti-slavery elements. This coalition became unsustainable as Southern expansion peaked and the anti-slavery side knew that legislative victory was pretty much inevitable. The coalition cracked over Fillmore. The Republican party had a very different coalition and electoral preferences. it just inherited most of the abolitionists and northern Whigs.
I probably wouldn’t ever vote for the GOP - even a non-crazy half the GOP that formed a new party. But I’d certainly vote for a new party that formed from the non-crazy half of the GOP and the non-crazy half of the Dems.