If you're a Bernie supporter, are you willing to vote for Hillary?

Politics & Elections
221

Kasich scores fairly high on those points as well, although I’m not overly clear on some of his domestic policy. As far as foreign policy, I think he’d probably be shaped a lot by the office and his advisors. He’s a hypothetical, though. I don’t think Trump will step down, nor will the GOP commit electoral suicide by nominating Kasich. They’re stuck with the evil they chose.

With Hillary, I’m not sure she can get much done at this point, not because of who she is but because of the House. Obviously, that could change at midterms. (I assume here the Dems win the Senate and make gains but don’t get control in the House.) I expect to see her trying to advance women’s (and other equality) issues, children’s issues, and to keep pushing ACA, basically working on domestic policy primarily, although dealing with ISIS and foreign nations will always be a concern. But I think she’ll be more of an activist for change than you expect.

222

Frankly, I’m not even sure why I’ve been engaging with you on the issue. I simply reject your premise that Hillary is a weak candidate.

223

All the talk about Kasich leads me to repeat myself again.

Kasich is an extreme right-winger. Had he been a serious contender for President 10 or 20 years ago, rational-thinking Americans would have been horrified. Kasich has acquired a false persona of “moderate” just because the top competition on the GOP stage — Cruz, Trump, Carson, Rubio — was all so laughably extreme or incompetent.

Despite his bombast, Trump is, from a practical standpoint, the most moderate of any of the Republican clowns on the stage. With all the focus on Trump’s idiocy, I now worry that 2020 will bring a candidacy of Kasich or someone of his ilk, and that extremist will be touted as a “moderate.” :rolleyes:

224

Because one of these two sides is right. One of these two sides didn’t hold the government’s credit-worthiness hostage, shut down the government in another attempt at taking hostages, completely refuse to compromise on anything, even rejecting deals where they got everything they asked for to spite the president, or nominate a racist, shit-flinging howler monkey as their presidential candidate.

Call it partisan all you want, the fact of the matter is that 99% of the problems with American politics right now come down to the republican party.

225

I voted for Sanders in the primary while having every intention to vote for Clinton in the general.

226

Get out much? To the just one example, the U.K. “Republican equivalent” party wouldn’t mess with their single-payer system in a million years – and Obamacare is a far cry from even that.

And, culturally conservative (in many ways), overwhelmingly Catholic Argentina and Mexico City legalized same-sex marriage before we did. So, nope, no liberal points for us there, either.

Looking at the bigger picture of the developed world, we have a center-to-slightly-right party (D), and a far-right-or-maybe-just-so-incoherent-and-off-the-wall-as-to-defy-analysis party (R).

227

It’s hard to “blame” the party that nominated the winner.

228

You’re pissing in the wind since the United States has been more or less a two-party system since the 1790s. It’s not in the Constitution but those pesky founding fathers (save for George Washington who hated the idea of any parties, even just one of them, let alone two or more) seemed to warm up to the idea pretty quickly.

Your best bet is for a party that closely aligns with what you believe splinter off and that splinter group becomes the second party while the ones who stayed behind get lost and wither away.

And let’s face it, the American history of third parties is pretty shabby.

Ralph Nader was an egomaniacal blowhard whose useful days were way behind him when he decided to play spoiler. H. Ross Perot was insane, racist, cantankerous and unfit for office. The Libertarians are… Libertarians, a joke if there ever was one.

The Know Nothing Party made a little noise and helped hasten the demise of the Whigs in the 1850’s but honestly, they were a footnote notable only because they seem to have been revived with the Trump movement:

[QUOTE]
By 1856, the Know-Nothing party was in decline. Many Know-Nothing officeholders were relatively unknown men with little political experience. In the states where they gained control, the Know Nothings proved unable to enact their legislative program, which called for:[ul][li]a 21-year residency period before immigrants could become citizens and vote;[/li][li]a limitation on political office holding to native-born Americans, and[/li][li]restrictions on liquor sales.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
They weren’t keen on Catholics either.

Your best bet is to have a Parliamentary System where multiple parties are more common. I would have said this wasn’t likely, but given the complete stop that Republicans have done because they didn’t like Obama (and surely will not change much under Clinton), maybe having a leader who is voted in with a majority of a parliament is what we need to actually, you know, pay our bills and other icky stuff governments are supposed to do.

I’m still not really sure that we can make such a drastic change even as one party decides that actual governance is bad, but that’s your best bet if you really want to tear the system down and two parties aren’t enough to satisfy you.

ETA: And another perfect example why a third party isn’t a panacea for our problems — Maine. Ask any Mainer what they think of their governor who won his first term with barely a third of the vote thanks to two independent candidates on the ballot and then got reelected with less than half the vote thanks to another independent on the ballot. So how did that third party influence help Maine exactly?

229

Why? The GOP is to blame for Nixon, isn’t it?

230

In theory you can have more than two parties in our system. THe factors that make it difficult are real, but can all be overcome:

  1. Major parties tend to adopt the most important parts of a third party’s platform if the third party is gaining enough support. Example: deficit reduction became a top priority thanks to Ross Perot’s run.

  2. Third parties tend to attract the disaffected, and the disaffected always include the bigots, which tends to strangle third parties in the crib. The Reform party only took four years to basically become the protectionist, anti-immigrant party, and while not technically a third party, the Tea Party also attracted that crowd due to its being opposed to the GOP establishment, which as pro-free trade and pro-immigration. However, the GOP is now THAT party, so a non-bigoted conservative or centrist party has an opening.

  3. Third parties have trouble attracting qualified candidates. But when they do, they historically do quite well. Ross Perot did well without that experience, but prior to him there were three third party tickets with major governing experience: the two segregatinist tickets(Thurmond in 1948 and Wallace in 1968), and Theodore Roosevelt’s third party run in 1912 in which he actually finished second. This cycle features an LP ticket that would have been a legit Republican ticket in any other election cycle, while the Republican ticket was rejected soundly by a THIRD party(Reform) in 2000! If history is a guide, this LP ticket should do quite well.

  4. Ballot access, but we all know about that. I’ll also throw in debate access. I’d normally throw in media coverage, but that wasn’t a problem for Perot, Wallace, or TR, and it’s not looking like a problem for Gary Johnson either.

  5. The realities of our winner take all system. Third parties can function best regionally, such as the Progressives in the early 20th century, who were able to do a lot of winning in the Midwest, albeit technically under the Republican banner. Libertarians and Greens might consider attempting the same thing in friendly territory. Greens could go for House seats in some areas of California and Vermont running under both the Green and Democratic banners, and Libertarians could compete in the West as LP and GOP.

Then there’s also as I said before jungle primaries, which not only mean no “wasted votes” on third parties since it’s probably going to a runoff anyway, but are also a more effective way of adjudicating inter-party wars. CAlifornia is definitely going to send a Democrat to the Senate in 2016, but if the party had their way it would be Kamala Harris, Alas for the Democrats, the people of California all get to vote on it in the jungle primary, so it will probably be Harris vs. Sanchez in the general and I think Sanchez will win due to support from the Latino community and she’ll be the lesser of two evils for Republican voters.

231

And for Hoover and GWB. I was referring to elections only here. Bad Presidencies are a different subject, and yes, if Trump is President and is bad, that’s on Republicans. Losing to Trump in an election though, that’s on Democrats. That should never happen.

232

Neither should nominating him. You guys had a dozen and a half candidates to choose from, he’s who you picked.

I am not a Republican. I didn’t vote in the Republican primary. I was powerless to stop him from being one of only two candidates with a shot at getting the presidency.

But I expect nothing else from the party of personal responsibility to man up and blame Democrats if he gets elected President.

233

And your party had great candidates not under investigation and scandal-free to select from.

234

You’re not getting the point. Or, if you are, you’re evading it.

Now try again.

235

Etc. We do have those things now, they do constitute progress, we would not have them with the Regressives in control, and it is “not getting out much” to claim their equivalence or the insignificance of what has been done. Yes, we should and can go farther and do more, and the way to do it is to elect the people who can *do *it. Not preening ideologues.

236

Entrenching the insurers by passing laws forcing people to do business with them is not progress towards getting rid of the insurers entirely.

237

Only if you define the problem as the insurers’ mere existence.

If you instead define the problem as people having guaranteed access to affordable health care, then we have made major progress. And Hillarycare made it possible, yanno.

Could it be that you’re defining the problem so it fits Bernie’s vague promises better?

238

Oh, I’m a 100% Hillary supporter, and I’m furious at Bernie and his fans. The Democratic Party is what it is, and I’m proud to support it in word and deed. “Progressives” (I generally consider myself one) should feel more at home within it than many of them have claimed to lately.

But there’s no reason to pretend that the two main US parties aren’t anomalously right-shifted. I’m happy living in the US, and I feel fortunate to have been born there, but I’m also aware that certain historical and geographical tendencies (individualism, church attendance, distance from wars…) have created a somewhat unusual situation.

239

I wouldn’t say it’s unusual so much as a natural reflection of the American experience. In some ways it actually works for the left, as in abortion laws, which are more liberal than most. Our system and culture naturally make expanding freedoms easy, taking them away a lot harder. This is a feature, not a bug. Other systems descend from hundreds or thousands of years of authoritarianism and that’s reflected in the bias towards making it easier for government to do things, even regulate basic rights like speech and religious practice and abortion.

To take ACA as an example, if Britain wanted to pass a law of this type, they’d just do it. One party would probably have a majority and the PM is of the same party and there are no possible constitutional challenges to the law. Over here, the law has to be free of constitutional defect(it wasn’t), and it requires the cooperation of the 50 states(not forthcoming). And to even get passed in the first place it needed majority votes in both chambers of Congress(it also needed to overcome a filibuster) and needed the President’s signature. And then comes the final obstacle, enforcing it against a population that isn’t really inclined to go along with it and has the courts potentially on their side if the government tries to enforce it.

It’s a really tough system to govern in, which makes a President Sanders’ goals unrealistic even if he has likeminded people in the majority in Congress.

240

Yes, I agree with that analysis, adaher. It is still unusual, though.