I’ve been listening to a lot of Lincoln Project type never Trumper podcasts lately and as a moderate Democrat I find myself wondering how centrists from both sides of the aisle could find enough common ground to cobble together a new third party.
How about:
Making abortion obsolete via advances in contraceptives and their availability and reproductive education.
Continued separation of church and state.
Solid support of science and evidence based policies.
Backing all the proposed background check and gun show loophole regulations without bans of currently acceptable weapons.
Firm commitment to a better voting system, all eligible voters votes will be counted, no ineligible votes count.
A better alternative to the whole gerrymandering fiasco.
I’m just dreaming out loud here, anyone else have any suggestions for planks in the new party’s platform?
I wasn’t aware that “counting ineligible votes” was a problem in need of solving.
I think there’s a difference between moderate and centrist Democrats in that the latter believe we should still try to work with the other side of the aisle. Which is naive in my view and is the biggest apprehension I have with Biden. I don’t think that even Lincoln Republicans would be willing to agree on most of these criteria, although some would on some of the issues.
Although I agree that the more centrist never Trump Republicans and the centrist Democrats might form a new party which pays lip service to ideas like these, even if it wouldn’t adhere to them if it gained power, but I don’t see it garnering more than around %10 of the vote.
I don’t think most people honestly think this would work. Everyone knows you can’t force people to be responsible with contraception - you simply cannot do it. There are always going to be a nonzero number of heterosexual couples willing to throw caution to the wind in the heat of passion - ALWAYS - and as long as they exist, there’s going to be demand for abortion.
The best position on Abortion that this OP’s hypothetical political platform could have, would be to not have a position.
Election security and verify-ability is what I was going for I guess. A system people could have more confidence in.
I am trying to imagine ways to coalesce people from different sides of the two sides of the abortion debate. Maybe a commitment to pushing the abortion rate towards zero via science and education? Granted, the abortion divide would be one of the most difficult to bridge. Just spit balling here.
It’s a hopeless idea.
The temptation is great to list items that I would personally like, as opposed to those with greatest political appeal.
But, trying to avoid that trap, what about state’s rights? Let New York and adjacent states keep the gun controls that contribute to their relative safety, and Louisiana keep its gun freedom that contributes to the high gun death rate there.
Same with abortion.
Same with affirmative action. Allow a state referendum, as in California.
I’m not saying that this theme is wonderful from a policy standpoint. But for a new party to really pull off loads of votes from both older parties, it has to have an easily sloganized popular theme. NIMBY, if renamed, could qualify.
Unfortunately, what America needs isn’t the centrists on both sides to unite; it needs the extremists on both sides.
We need UBI, single-payer healthcare, criminal-justice reform, prison reform, major gun control, high taxes on the wealthy, a major move to rein in carbon emissions, ban lead aviation fuel, etc. You won’t get that from moderate Democrats; only the leftists.
We need strong free speech, opposition to PC, strong freedom of religion, voter ID, ban of affirmative action, only two genders as identified by DNA/anatomy, etc. You won’t get that from moderate Republicans; only the righties.
So if we could get some quid-pro-quo party where the radicals unite and each give some stuff to get some stuff…
As somebody who used to be a moderate Republican, I’d say this train left the station long ago. We all left the Republican party as it became dominated by the crazies and we’ve joined the Democrats.
The Lincoln Project Republicans have no interest in working with the Democrats for any greater good. The only objection they had with Trump was they felt he couldn’t get re-elected.
Either I’m being whooshed, or you didn’t realize that’s an Onion article. From what I could find, Lincoln Project seems to be pretty OK with Biden.
Aside from freedom of speech and religion, we absolutely don’t “need” any of those things.
They should be independent long enough to let the GOP die. They can rename their party whatever they want after that.
You’re being whooshed. I was aware it was a joke. But like many Onion jokes, I feel it’s based on a non-joking reality. I don’t feel the people behind the Lincoln Project have any interest in forming a long term alliance with Biden or any other Democrats. They were just working on the same side as Democrats because they shared the common goal of getting Trump out of office.
But I feel that now that that short term goal has been achieved, the long term interests will once again diverge. The Lincoln Project wants conservatives to hold power and saw Trump as an obstacle to that goal. That’s obviously not a goal the Democrats are going to share.
I am part of that 10%, and I think it is a great idea.
It always amazes me that everyone knows that you lose 100% of chances you do not take, and that even a small chance for success is better than 0% – yet they still don’t want to even consider thinking about it. This could work and there is no better time for it than now with all that is going on.
Even long time die hard Republicans are fed-up with the direction the Party is headed. I am one of those and I know plenty like me and I can assure you embracing science is the beginning of breaking the insanity of the right wing.
The left wing has its own strong voices who are even now clamoring to be a part of Biden’s Administration and feeling left out. What is wrong with CONSIDERING a moderate, middle of the road association of voters who are disillusioned with more extreme views?
Abortion might not be the one issue they agree upon, but compromised views on a range of topics will appeal to some and I am one of them.
There is almost never such a thing, the numbers can be counted without taking your shoes off.
Abortion is the sticking point here. Either is it allowed- or utterly banned.
I’m a bleeding-heart liberal and AOC-adoring social justice warrior and I don’t see anything about your platform that is an issue. Other than perhaps the gun stance, what makes this “centrist” or Republican in any way?
The conservative platform you describe seems to be about ensuring the majority has special privileges and the minority settles for second-class citizenship.
Why would anyone want to do this in a first-past-the-post Presidential system? Say the new party gets 10% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans - the Republicans would salivate as they’d be likely to win far more elections. And both parties know this (and the centrists of both parties know this).
Look at Maine, a state with a long history of independents running and winning - Senator Angus Young is an independent, who caucuses with the Democrats. This tradition led to the election of Trumper Governor Paul LePage twice as center-left independents took ~30% of the vote. This led directly to the push for Ranked Choice Voting, which passed and is now used in Maine, so that another LePage win could never happen.
Without a Parliamentary system or Ranked Choice Voting, this is a non-starter.
The thing is: we already have a very secure and robust election system. It’s distributed, so there’s no single point of failure. It’s got massive paper trails at every level that enable the post-hoc discovery of fraud. It has pretty good procedures to handle people who are legally allowed to vote but happen to be unable to prove it at the time. It allows for multiple observers to the process, but also maintains physical security so randoms can’t mess with the ballots.
People lack confidence in it primarily due to propaganda and ignorance.
So that plank in the platform would be to fight ignorance and propaganda about election security?