Heh. Yep, in order for a third party candidate to win, they’d actually have to get a majority (plurality actually) of the votes. That means getting more votes than the Republican candidate and more votes than the Democratic candidate. You have to be the most popular guy running, funny how elections work.
If you have a third party candidate who can get 40% of the popular vote to win a plurality and a majority of the electoral college, that same candidate could win much more easily as the candidate of one of the major parties.
The third party candidate can only win if both major party primaries are so broken that they both come up with unelectable hacks. And then the question becomes, why didn’t the third party candidate that everyone loves run and win in one of the major party primaries? If you can’t win the primary against the tired old hack then how exactly are you going to win the general, when that tired old hack has the enormous institutional backing of the major party behind them? If you were going to win in the general you should have won in the primary, if you can’t win the primary there’s something seriously wrong with you as a candidate. If you’re going to bring in all these new voters fed up with the same old hacks, why didn’t you bring them in to vote for you in the primary?
You can’t win the election without winning the election, and that means getting more votes than anyone else.
IOW, the people who give the money to fund Dem candidates are increasingly representative of Dem voters.
Not only is this a Good Thing in terms of democracy (since if this trend continues, it’ll eliminate a lot of the disconnect between what the rank and file are for, and what their representatives support) but concerning the thread topic, it means that there are a diminishing number of Dem voters desiring an alternative party.
What’s so McGovernesque, so radical, about being against the Iraq war? There were no WMDs, and there’s not going to be a real democracy with human rights and stuff; if we (and Iraqis) are lucky, we’ll leave a reasonably stable Shi’ite state behind us, that will be friendly to Iran and will enforce a fairly strict version of Islamic law. And that’s the good outcome; it’s unclear that we can get there. The facts are radical.
My take on it is that the Reform Party thrived in 1992 in large part because it turned a bunch of ordinary citizens into activists who felt they could make a difference (the petition drives to get Perot on the ballot in every state), and it failed to thrive afterwards when it became clear that Perot considered the Reform Party to be his personal toy, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else have a role in deciding what to do with it.
Consequently, I regard the success of 1992 and the failures of 1996 and beyond as two essentially separate things.
I’d argue that the resentment is the same, the cultural divide runs down the same lines, and only the issues have changed: discrimination against blacks and women is out, replaced by discrimination against gays. But what’s happened is that that resentment, that side of the cultural divide, has found a happy home in the GOP.
OTOH, I agree that what constitutes ‘impressiveness’ is purely opinion.
Sure. The Democratic party had to chose a chairman, and they ended up choosing a verbal bomb thrower who is to the party what rjung is to the SDMB. They had to chose a leader for their party in the house and they chose an ultra-liberal from San Fransisco. These people have no chance of appealing to the middle. They are indications that more and more the party is being controlled by extremists. I see no reason to think that this is a party that won’t choose yet another extremist to run for president in '08. The last presidential candidate they picked was the most liberal in the Senate.
Great. I hope so. I’m certainly not saying that this is impossible. It’s just certainly not the direction that the democrats are heading in if you look at their other recent choices. I’d love it for them to change course. I’d even consider voting for such a candidate, but I’m not holding my breath.
I never said it was a bad thing - I was just saying that these are the forces pulling the Democratic party to the left.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between the average Democratic voter and the motivated ‘base’ represented by groups like MoveOn and KOS. If that base has a disproportionate affect on the Democrats due to its fundraising/organizing/Demonstrating prowess, then it’s actually going to pull the Democrats away from their core constituency.
This is exactly what happened with the Republicans and the religious right. The fundies actually make up a small percentage of the Republican voter base, but they have a disproportionate influence on the direction of the party because of their fundraising/mobilizing abilities.
The problem both sides have is that politicians have to serve two masters: on the one hand, they need the votes to get elected. On the other, they also need money. When the people with the money do not have the same interests as the general voters, you have a problem. That’s why Democrats and Republicans both tend to run to their ‘base’ in the primaries, and then move back towards the center in the general elections.
Until recently, the Democrats got their money from trial lawyers, big unions, corporations, hollywood, and deep-pocketed philanthropists. Campaign Finance Reform made that much more difficult, and the internet opened up a new venue for fundraising, driven by the activist, grassroots ‘base’ of the party. That has pushed the Democrats to the left.
The same phenomenon pushed the Republicans to the right, although differences in the way each party has been traditionally funded made the difference less stark for the Republicans.
This actually HAS opened a pretty big gap in the ‘middle’. The question is whether it can be exploited.
I never said being against the war is radical - I said that the war has re-motivated the radical base of the Democratic party. In other words, being against the war isn’t radical, but the radicals are all against the war, so they are starting to be heard as a force once again, and that’s spilling over into other policy decisions.
I don’t see it. Could you give some specific comparisons showing how the Dems have been pulled to the left of where they used to be?
Perhaps. But the MoveOn/Kos money isn’t replacing the money of other voters; it’s replacing the money of business interests who didn’t really represent any significant group of Democratic voters.
And that’s not pulling the Dems away from any actual Dem voters. For instance, there’s no significant voting bloc in the party that supported the new bankruptcy law, or the new restrictions on class actions.
Where do you get that the fundies make up just a small percentage of Republican voters?
And while their fundraising skills aren’t trivial, they’re still second fiddle to all those Rangers and Pioneers who raised megamillions for Bush last year.
As far as mobilizing is concerned, isn’t that another name for getting people to the polls? It’s hard to argue how good they are at that, while saying they aren’t that big a chunk of the GOP voter base.
Funny thing is, most commentators agree that Bush in particular never did this in 2004 - rather, his strategy was to mobilize the base and win a high-turnout election.
Well, it’s pushed them away from whoring to business. Like I said above, it isn’t so much to the left in terms of pushing them away from people on the right, but pushing them towards people in general and away from business in general. These are very different things.
Who are the voters in this gap, and what are they for/against?
Once again, which ones?? Absent a for-instance or two, you’re talking in complete generalities, and it’s hard to determine what you’re talking about.
And he still got 48.25% of the vote, against the supposedly popular incumbent President Bush, so it’s obvious that the Dems as a group aren’t particularly extreme. Compare that with how McGovern did against Nixon.
I think Sam has a point in his response, but I think that the real problem is not with ideology or extremism. The real problem is a practical one. The political Duopoly has made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for a third party to have a successful run at the presidency. Even with resources of great wealth and logistics, the task is a very hard one. There are ballet access laws that sap the treasuries of third parties, who must spend a large portion of their funds just to stay on ballots. There are exclusionary collusions like the presidential debates. There is federal welfare, ostensibly available to all, but in practice available only to the two, because of their in-place infrastructures. The powers that be have shut the doors of active participation to all but themselves.
What this means is that anyone who has any serious interest in politics joins one of the major parties whichever one is least objectionable to them, or goes into issue advocacy, rather than trying to start a third party. If you care about a particular issue it is much more effective to start a lobbying group for that issue and try to influence the politicians in the major parties and/or public opinion than it is to start a political party around that one issue.
If you believe in liberal values, the effective thing is to try get politicians in both parties to embrace liberal values, and to try to influence public opinion on liberal values, rather than starting a libertarian party and trying to get members of that party elected.
It’s simple mathematics. You need a plurality to win as a third party candidate, which means 40% of the vote. If 40% of the voters believe in your pet issue that strongly, lots of politicians in the major parties are going to profess to support that issue themselves.
The lack of understanding of the process that’s on display in this thread is startling. The primary reason, though, would be the adaptability of the major parties in co-opting the platforms of any third party that gets serious public support. That’s inherent to a system in which parties have nearly no official status - the a system with 2 major parties, one generally favoring larger governments and one smaller, follows inexorably. We’ve had 2 major parties right from the get-go, with only some fracturing and recombination during the run-up to the Civil War to break up the string, and that’s hardly coincidental. The only role a third party can play is to force one of the majors to take on an issue that neither has addressed but which has broad public support anyway.
It’s happened every single time that one has been founded on an issue, or set of attitudes, rather than a personality. Whenever a third party has appeared and gotten any traction at all with its issue, that issue has been adopted by a major party. The 2-party system is not fairly criticized as rigid, it in fact is highly flexible and adaptable, and is actually inescapable without our switching to a parliamentary system. It is not time for a third-party candidate to actually win and it can *never * be time. It cannot ever get that far.
Elvis’s post reminds me of the supposed truism in American politics that third parties can have a major influence on one election (‘Bull Moose’ - 1912, Reform Party - 1992, Green Party - 2000), and that’s it.
The other thing is, people are thinking too much about presidential elections. A reform party candidate did win the governorship of Minnesota, and an Alaska Independence candidate won the governorship of Alaska.
But how many other third party Governors, Senators, or Representatives are there? Bernie Saunders. Out of some 600-odd top offices, only one person who isn’t a major party member. And Bernie Saunders is a Democrat in everything but name.
If you don’t like today’s Democratic party or Republican party, just wait another 30 years. I guarantee you that the Republican party of 2035 won’t be very much like George Bush’s Republican party of 2005, any more than today’s Republican party is very much like it was in 1975. Exactly how conservative was Gerald Ford?
Nothing “supposed” about it, marley. It’s worked that way every time, even for and especially for personality-based parties like TR’s or Nader’s rather than issue-based ones like Perot’s or Wallace’s.
BrainGlutton, there is no role in the Constitution for parties, and very little in the law, either. Only Senate and House rules, agreed upon by the already-existing parties, give them any role at all. Presidents are nominated by parties, yes, but they don’t have to be, elections are structurally nonpartisan. Judges are even *supposed * to be nonpartisan actors. It’s true that states provide facilities etc. for party primaries for efficiency’s sake, but they don’t have to, and the parties don’t have to use primaries instead of caucuses or conventions to choose their candidates.
The consequence in an officially nonpartisan legislature is that any group of supporters of an issue they wish to promote must make alliances or deals with others to get it passed. The usual alliance/deal partners are going to be those other legislators with generally shared broad attitudes about the role of government, and those people are in turn going to want alliances or deals with the group first mentioned. If they don’t do it, they’re going to lose to a group/alliance that does do it, and if they care about either the issue or the attitude or simply power, they’ll have to adopt that approach. The level of formality will vary, but not the broad 2-party system.
Hell, even if there were no tribes on “Survivor”, there’d still be 2 major alliances and perhaps a few hapless/clueless fringe players in “third parties”. Congress isn’t all that different and neither is Presidential politics.
I wonder if we had maintained a much more federalist type system, if that would have encouraged more 3rd party success at the state level, which then would have translated to 3rd party success at the federal level. I’m not familiar with the history of party politics in pre-20th century America-- does anyone know if 3rd parties were more viable in the earlier days of the Republic?
I think that both Lemur and Elvis have made excellent points. A libertarian tends to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, so that it is easy for the Republican Party to co-opt, say, reductions in corporate welfare, while it is easy for the Democratic Party to co-opt, say, protections of civil liberties. I suppose that it is possible that the two parties might one day shift from a left-right polarity to a libertarian-authoritarian polarity. But that’s about it. There will never be three. Or four.
I think that a parliamentary system is necessary to sustain multiple parties, just as a polygamist system is necessary to sustain multiple spouses. The Republicans and Democrats are like spouses: they fight amongst themselves, but if anyone else intervenes, they turn together and devour the intruders.
What’s that got to do with it?