Well, I don’t expect much, I’m just saying that I’ve read about a lot more work being done in this area.
I guess they figure most people aren’t extremists. Probably a safe bet.
I’m not leaving it out, the voting system is. If we had approval voting rather than first-past-the-post I’m 99% sure Gore would have won.
I can’t help you. It seems quite obvious that that is the way a person should vote: select candidates most likely to win, and choose your favorite among them. In general, most people have already aligned with one political force or the other in our two party system, either because they toe the party line or because they genuinely prefer this candidate to the others. This means the results of the election are already narrowed down for swing voters to the two major candidates, almost like there have been preliminary elections, only this time held in the court of public opinion (or how the media chooses to represent it, if that’s your bag). The options remaining are:[ol][li]Don’t vote because your candidate already cannot win[]Vote for your candidate anyway in hopes of securing enough votes for funding in the next election[]Realize that someone will be elected regardless of your favorite candidate, and use your vote to at least tilt things your way[/ol]Perhaps my bias is showing in these pants, but I consider 3 the only real choice there. 2 is what burned Gore last election.[/li]
Hysterical? You mean completely founded and borne out?
Nitpick: “among” implies more than two. We get only a “between” in terms of candidates most likely to be subsidized by taxpayer funds and have favorable legislation passed on their behalf, or as you have put it, most likely to win.
Hyperbole much? If you object to Guin’s characterization of the content of your posts as martyr-like, please tone back on all of the ‘evil’ and ‘knife in the back’ stuff, okay?
Voting is more than a moral exercise. In fact, I like to divorce the entire thing from morality- hence, I don’t find Nader voters or Republicans to be ‘evil.’ People vote for whoever they want- it’s not a reflection of how good a person they are, nor, despite my own personal prejudices, is it a measure of how intelligent they are. While I like to consider myself quite wise, I know that my solutions are not perfect, and do not delude myself into thinking that everyone would agree with me if only they thought about it rationally.
However, i can find fault with people whose stated aims and their actions are at odds. If you want the country to move left, but you vote in such as way as to promote the right, then you are either misinformed or willfully obtuse. The first rule of warfare is that any move that advances your position or hinders the advancement of your opponent is a good one. Hard ideologues tend to reject the latter in their pursuit of the former- quite often with disastrous results.
A better analogy would be a soldier in the midst of a firefight complaing that a fellow soldier has dismantled his rifle in a futile attempt to make two rifles out of it.
Let me reiterate this point, and opine further that because of the nature of the far Left (essentially that they don’t merely disagree with those right of center, but that they think they are BAD PEOPLE,) they are particularly susceptible to down-with-the-ship idealism. In fact, it may be the Left’s primary Achilles’ Heel.
Actually, I’m a little curious as to what Nader supporters, or people who are likely to vote for Nader, believe that Nader stands for. I think I have a pretty good feel for what Bush supporters/voters and Kerry supporters/voters believe their candidates stand for, or the America they’re likely to see if their candidate wins. But what would America look like under President Nader?
Kerry has to win the Center. He can’t be more right-wing than Bush by definition. So saying that Kerry has to go to the right is a fallacy. But he will have to be at least plausible to the Left, just to get enough votes, because Bush has the Right, at least the big-government, global-projection-of-power Right, all sewn up.
Anyone else ready for a proportional representation parliamentary government?
I’m not going to vote for Nader, but I’m likely to cast a vote for the Green Party. There are two reasons:
I live in MA. Kerry will win MA. My voting Green won’t change this. If I thought there was some danger that voting Green in MA might endanger Kerry’s chances, I’d vote for Kerry, simply because Bush is so horrific.
If a third party gets enough votes, they will get Federal campaign funding, and hopefully more of a voice. I’d like to do my part to help this happen, since I feel both the Dems and Pubs have sold out egregiously, and essentially don’t stand for anything anymore. I need a political voice, and essentially don’t have one as things are.
It seems America would benefit a great deal from a preferential voting system like the one we use in Australia. This article explains how it could work using relevant examples.
Is there any reason that anyone knows of as to why this system was never implemented America?
The only people disaffected by the American system are people who believe in political systems way out on the political fringe, or out of sync with American values and the Constitution.
The American system favors centrist, moderate, broad-based parties. I think this has gone a long way toward steering our politics in a centrist, moderate, broad-based direction. That’s a very good thing, in my book. It has spared our country from poisonous ideologies like fascism, Communism, and whatever weird stuff the Greens believe in.
Refresh my memory. Did the Republicans win outright, or through a bunch of tricky maneuvering to discount votes, organized by prominent members of their party, in one very closely contested state, and then pushing for a Supreme Court decision? The political circus after November 2000 had a lot more to do with Bush’s win than the votes for Nader did. Yes, the Democrats lost, but because Gore lacked the spine to call Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris on their outright horsehockey shenanigans. Not because there were peope who preferred Nader over both him and Bush.
If the Republicans and the Democrats didn’t guard the national political arena so jealously, the field of “likely to win” wouldn’t be so narrow. They’re the ones, you may recall, who have set the bar for eligibility for payments from the Presidential Campaign Fund (read the PDF here if you’re so inclined) - based on previous election turnouts. In other words, new political parties have to go it entirely on their own through a whole election cycle against the two big boys and hope 5% of the population votes for them so they can get federal election funds four years down the road. Let’s also not forget that the Commission on Presidential Debates (chaired by Democrat bigwig Paul G. Kirk Jr. (bio) and Republican powerbroker Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. (bio)) seems to have conveniently excluded Nader from the three debates they sponsored between Bush and Gore in October 2000 - using criteria that are actually more stringent than the federal requirements for election funding! I love this line right here in Criterion 2:
Emphasis mine.
It seems they operate from the same “likely to win” perspective you do, erislover. Tell me, how is a third party supposed to become “likely to win”, or at least get 5% of the electoral vote in a Presidential election to qualify for later federal funding, when they’re stuck raising the funds to run their first campaigns on their own, and have to find other ways of getting their views across besides debating the more (privately and federally) well-funded candidates, since the commission overseeing the debates won’t let them in because they’re not likely to win in the first place? I suppose you could be ultra-rich like Perot, but that, obviously, is not a route available to everyone.
Face it, eris - the gate is locked to third parties, and if we only restrict our votes to those candidates “likely to win”, the gate will stay locked.
Yeah, well, this doesn’t say those same parties can’t radically change over time. The Republicans used to be an isolationist, protectionist party. They were the ones that torpedoed the League of Nations and passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
The Democrats, in turn, favored Free Silver at one point. Many of their Southern members favored segregation and Jim Crow laws until the mid-20th century.
This change comes not only from pressure from external events. It also comes from within. Bailing on the parties removes this impetus for change.
For example, if the environmentalist wings of the Democratic and Republican parties go off and become a Green Party, it actually takes pressure off of the major parties to adopt environmentally friendly policies. The Green Party can never win, but the major parties can. And a situation where the Green Party can play the spoiler or tiebreaker will be rare indeed. Their leverage will be limited.
I didn’t quote the rest of your misdirection since it was irrelevant to the point at hand. You do not bolster your own point by invoking whatever problems I might have with Guin.
The hyperbole is a metaphor conceived by a man who did not have a knife in his back, but felt that a knife in the back was metaphorical for the conditions of oppression under which he perceived he suffered. Your point had been that we should settle for getting something if we knew we could not get everything. And that is exactly what people did with Clinton. Lo and behold, we got Janet Waco and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. 10,000 gays were discharged from the military under that policy (Cite) and has ruined more lives than before it was enacted. Don’t preach to me about voting. It’s enough that you deny me a decent set of choices; don’t tell me how to make my decisions.
Granted, this may have been true in centuries past. But right now one could not seriously sya that the US was ‘centrist’ with regards to the rest of the industrialised democratic world - it is way right, and would be still even if Kerry won this time.
Incidentally, to all those asking me personally why I don’t do this or that, you will note by my location that I have no US vote. I am simply providing a reasonable answer to “What are Nader supporters thinking?”.
If moves evermore rightwards by the two main parties have no electoral consequence, they will do so. Leftward moves by both parties would likely increase the votes for right wing independents, and rightly so. What kind of state has a less than 50% voter turnout but denies that policy shifts might have negative as well as positive consequences for the shifting party?
As I say, I have no dog in this scrap. But I would like to hear that Ralph Nader had telephoned John Kerry and gave him the ultimatum: “Hi John. Implement Kyoto and I’ll step aside. Bye.”