If you want me to vote for your third party, it would help if:
You didn’t put forth the lazy meme that the Republicans and the Democrats are exactly the same. If you aren’t smart enough to tell the philosophical and political differences between the two, you aren’t smart enough to be in charge of any part of the government.
You damn well better have more for me than “Vote for us because we’re different!”
Make more than vague statements like"We’re for the people!" and “We’re for liberty!” -no shit, Sherlock. Who isn’t?
Don’t make sweeping promises that show me you have no idea what the powers of the president are. If you can’t tell the difference between an emperor and a president, you are too ignorant to get the job.
Don’t make campaign promises that would obviously take the support of the Congress and the House to make happen, unless you can tell me how you plan to get the support of those two groups when you don’t belong to either major party. The last thing this country needs is four years of “I would have accomplished so much if they hadn’t blocked my every move.” The fact that they block each other at every possible opportunity wasn’t a big enough clue for you?
So, are there any third party candidates out there that I might go for?
I’ve found that this isn’t well-known outside of the political sphere, but the major parties change relatively frequently. You just never notice because they always keep the same name. It’s a bit like a sports team over time- players change, strategies change, strengths change, fan bases change, but the name never does.
We’re actually on our fourth set of Republicans and fifth set of Democrats. We’re now in the Sixth Party System. Read up on it here. In thirty years, they’ll change again, and still most people won’t notice and they’ll scratch their heads and ask “where’s the third party?”
OK, but what the heck is a third party supposed to accomplish?
Unless they can win a plurality of votes in an election they accomplish absolutely nothing except to help elect the candidate who is most unlike them. So if you want a left-wing candidate to defeat the center-right Democrat and the far-right Republican, you’d need a plurality of left wingers in your locality. Except, if you’ve got a plurality of left wingers, you can elect a left wing Democrat instead of a center-right Democrat. It’s much easier to help your left wing candidate win the Democratic primary. If your left wing candidate can’t even win the Democratic primary, how the hell can they win the general election?
Lather rinse and repeat for all variations of wanting a left-wing party, a centrist party, or a right-wing party. If you can’t win a major party primary as a leftist, or a centrist, or a rightist, then you can’t win a general election either. Which leaves your crank parties that are neither left, right, or center. But even cranks like Ron Paul find it easier to win a major party primary and run as the major party candidate than try to run as a crank third party candidate.
As I say over and over, in the American system the candidates are independent. And so if you have a potential candidate who’s got everything you want in a candidate, there’s no sense in smashing that candidate into a brick wall by running them under a third party. Join one of the major parties, and make those bastards work for you.
Or, if you’ve got some issue that isn’t being addressed by the major parties, how does forming a single-issue political party help? It doesn’t help. What you do instead is form a single-issue advocacy group, and start campaigning for candidates who agree with you, and against candidates who disagree. This is why we have the NRA who support pro-gun candidates and fight against anti-gun candidates, rather than a Gun Rights Party that every year puts a guy on the ballot and gets 10% of the vote. A major party candidate who gets elected because your group’s support put them over the edge is a heck of a lot better than a guy who never gets elected.
And even if your advocacy group’s preferred candidate doesn’t win, the spectre of your group constantly fighting against them concentrates the mind of the opposing candidate. Maybe they’ll give up on opposing your issue because they’re tired of having to make that extra effort to defeat you. And this is why gun control has disappeared from the Democratic platform. They got tired of constantly fighting the NRA and gave up.
The Constitution Party: Pat Buchanan, followed by Alan Keyes, followed by fundamentalist pastor Chuck Baldwin. Right wing fringe personality parade.
Green Party of the United States: The biggest name candidate they ever had was Ralph Nader…and he didn’t even belong to the party! Pulls in very low numbers at the polls. Big on stating their goals, but a bit silent on how they could possibly get anything done as a minority party.
Libertarian Party: Upside-they get more votes for the office of president than the last two parties. Downside-that would be a whopping 1.1% of the vote. Actually has over 400 members holding low level offices around the country, which is a good start, but they really need to resolve the differences between their conservative and moderate members if they want to get that necessary long-lasting base support necessary for seriously running candidates.
Of the rest on the list, the majority of them consist of those that only run candidates so that people will listen to whatever cause they support, personality parades, and hate groups. The exception seem to be:
4. The Modern Whig Party: Supposedly centrist and made up of war vets, picking things from both parties they support. Claim to have tens of thousands of members, but I suspect they are counting people who have served with them as being “members in spirit.”
What America needs, IMO, is a progressive party, defining “progressive” as something well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist” and not quite so eco-focused as the Greens – in Euro terms, social-democratic, more or less. And you won’t find any on that list. The New Party was an effort in that direction, but its electoral-fusion strategy worked only in the minority of states where that is already legal, and their Supreme Court challenge to make it legal everywhere was unsuccessful.
That isn’t a list of problems that a multiparty system will solve, but rather a list of problems that must be solved before we could have a multiparty system. OK, if we changed our political system in various fundamental ways we could have a multiparty system like they do in some European countries. And then what? What good does that do us?
As for your notion that we need a social democrat party, what exactly would hiving off any potential social democrats from the Democrats accomplish, except to marginalize social democracy?
If you think there should be a social democrat party, your only hope is to turn the Democrats into that party, or at least create a social democrat wing of the party. But before you can even think about running social democrat candidates you’ve got to accomplish the Sisyphean task of building a base of voters who want social democracy, since such a base is currently nonexisistant.
And the good news for you is that there’s plenty of room for social democrats in the Democratic party–as long as social democrat candidates can win elections in their localities, they’ll be warmly welcomed into the party. If they can’t win elections, well, there you go. If you had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.
I didn’t read the thread, but just wanted to say :
From my external point of view, it seems to me that the US wouldn’t need three, but four parties. Basically to split the two existent parties. Out of the democrats, one really leftist party (where a lot of American dopers would fit, from what I see), and one moderate (for the like of Obama, for instance). Out of the Republican, a religious, moral order party (for the followers of the tea party, for instance) and another for traditional conservatives and free-market oriented people.
Then you could play the game of coalitions (right wing together, left wing together, or moderates of both sides together, depending on the election results).
But under the American system, the candidate who gets a plurality of votes wins the election. And this is why you have two parties, or 1.5 parties in some places where one party or the other dominates and the real election is the primary and the general election just ratifies the result.
As BrainGlutton pointed out, a two party system is a natural result of a first past the post system of elections, where every election is local. A party that gets 20% of the vote gets nothing. A party that gets 49% of the vote gets nothing. Therefore, a serious party has to be one that appeals to nearly half the electorate. This means there’s no room for niche parties and the two major parties are already coalitions of all sorts of people. If you’re dissatisfied with the direction of your party you can either try to reform your party, or vote for the other party.
Yep the powerful figures that drive the agenda.
Anyway what the rightys think.
Obama is far right of center . He drives the Dems.
Until a 3rd party can get involved in the debates, they will have limited effect. They work with far less money, far less airtime and much less print and TV notice.
You know why the Democratic Presidential candidate and the Republican Presidential candidate have a debate? Because they have to. What incentive does a Democrat or a Republican have to debate with the Social Progressive America First candidate? None. It’s not like a presidential debate is a requirement. There’s no upside for a major party candidate to debate a third party candidate, and so they won’t do it. And this is because third parties are fringe.
The supposed strength of third parties is actually their greatest weakness-their willingness to take their ball and go elsewhere instead of compromising with the larger parties. Once you get more than a handful of people together there is going to be differences of opinion, but if your political platform is one of uncompromising “purity of purpose”, dissident voices in the party are either cast off or take off on their own to form yet another “third party.” By their very nature most third parties are incapable of growing large enough to be be effective.
Read those two paragraphs together. If we had those reforms, the social-democratic party would not be marginalized. That is what good it would do us. Libertarians, etc., will have their own answer.