The FF’s were against a partied system at all, much less a two party system. Nonetheless, a two party system sprang up within the first few election cycles, when pretty much all the ffs were still alive, and they didn’t do anything to fix it.
I think that just getting rid of the majority requirement, and go with a plurality (and get rid of the electoral college entirely), and then we can have multiple parties, but as long as the president needs 50%+1, there will not be room for a third viable party.
The fact that most of the people who wrote the original document were still alive when it started doing things that they didn’t want it to do just shows how hard it is to fix any problems with it.
Going back to the OP, and discussion this topic in general, I think that anyone having absolute deal-breakers is bad for democracy in general.
Democracy works (at least kind of on a theoretical level) if people vote for the candidates who will best represent them. If you are an absolute single-issue voter on abortion, or gun rights, or whatever, then all someone has to do to get your vote is to agree with you on that one issue. Someone else might actually be better for you, even by your own standards, but you won’t vote for them if they don’t agree with you on that one issue. And sure, that issue might be very very important to you, I don’t want to be doing the condescending thing of saying I know what someone else’s priorities should be. But I’m strongly for gay rights. Would I vote for a candidate who was absolutely ideal in all ways, who had both the ideas and the capabilities to push the US in what I considered the right direction, on everything EXCEPT gay rights? I sure as heck would (well, depending on who the other candidate was, I suppose).
And to be a bit more cynical about it, when an issue becomes a wedge issue like that, you might argue that it even makes those politicians who agree with it less likely to actually do anything about it. As long as abortion is a hot button issue, any conservative politician can have a baseline 30% of the populace vote for them (number made up) just by being anti-abortion. If abortion ever did become illegal, and that issue no longer existed, then suddenly all of those pro-life people are going to have to stop and reassess who it’s actually in their interest to vote for.
I’m single issue on gun rights, but it is more of a prerequisite than the end of the story. In other words, if we disagree on guns then that person will never get my vote, but agreement on guns doesn’t mean they get it automatically.
I’m pretty much fine with litmus tests. People decide what they think is important and what they can live with. For me, If all candidates were pro gun then they have cleared the first hurdle and the rest of their positions can be examined.
Bone, just curious - what if neither of the candidates in a two candidate election meets your litmus test on guns? Do you not vote, or do you hold your nose and vote for the least bad of the two?
If they don’t meet the litmus test, they won’t get my vote. I make sure to vote in each election I am able to, and in those cases I will often find the libertarian candidate or vote write in.
I know I’ve discussed this with you before, and while you’re clearly an intelligent and thoughtful person, I just can’t wrap my mind around your position. It’s one thing if you think that gun rights are the single most important issue. That seems weird to me, but hey, people certainly get to choose their own priorities. But by making yourself a single issue voter, you’re not only saying that gun rights are the most important issue, you’re saying that they’re more important than ALL OTHER ISSUES PUT TOGETHER. How can that possibly be true?
Would you rather live in a society that exactly fit every ideal you could possibly imagine, except that it forbade civilian ownership of AR-10s, or a society which got a D- on everything you graded it on, except for gun rights, where it got an A+?
It’s not that gun issues are more important than all other issues, it’s that on that issue there is the greatest chance of effectiveness. I see gun issues on the cusp - things can go either way. In recent years, things on balance have been going favorably in my view, but that could easily shift. But for 100K votes and a Clinton presidency, I would have expected 2nd amendment rights to be severely curtailed over time as the judiciary shifted. If the NRA wasn’t as well funded, if they didn’t contribute 30 whatever million dollars, maybe that comes to pass. I want all politicians to view gun control as a non-starter and to the extent any pursue gun control I want them to lose. The way this happens is if people of like mind mobilize against any candidate that even hints at gun control.
I’m also very strongly pro equal rights - and being in CA this is realized pretty strongly in the LBGT community. I don’t see this issue nearly as perilous as gun rights. I would say free speech is way more important than gun rights, but I don’t think speech is in any danger. So it’s not that it’s more important than all other things, it’s that it is what needs support the most.
Trump won a plurality, not a majority. He got 44.9% of the Republican primary vote. Trump benefited immensely from the voting system not having a property called the “independence of irrelevant alternatives” – since the Republican party was such a circus with so many candidates, “old guard” style people split their votes between mostly functionally identical candidates, while people who liked Trump’s ideals voted for the one guy peddling them. The result was that the “old guard” vote ended up spread between a bunch of people and Trump got more votes than any one of them, but not as many as them combined. You could easily argue that the party selected non-Trump values, given how radically different he was from their other candidates (even Cruz who was his own departure to the traditional party values, but not to such a degree).
But this is tangential to the litmus test point, I don’t have an issue with litmus tests necessarily, but the Trump situation is more complex than that.
So what you’re saying is that you’re not a single issue voter because of how important gun issues are, you’re a single issue voter because of how delicately balanced gun issues are?
Still seems weird to me, but I guess I can see your logic.