No. People keep saying this in other social media circles, it’s nonsense. As has been discussed ad nauseum, the US election system eliminates the possibility of a legitimate 3rd party. We’ve been at this for 250 odd years and people have been wistfully (naively) dreaming about a 3rd party since basically day one. It cannot and will not happen barring a complete and total reworking of the way we elect people. And let’s be real, the parties in power would need to legislate against their own interests to make that real. It’s never happening, and people need to stop voting like it can happen. Protest votes or whatever are perhaps the single most counterproductive thing a citizen can do.
Now, what might be interesting is if a cohort of anti-Trumper right-of-center pols were able to fund and establish a spoiler party. We have the Libertarians, but they seem to not really be a serious movement. There’s the Greens on the left playing this role in some minor way. The risk to this is that they peel off moderate Democratic voters at a greater rate than post-Trump MAGA voters. A fracturing of the right is our best hope to right the ship, but GOPers have been trained over generations to be loyal. I don’t know what it would take to break that, they apparently favor loyalty over every single one of their stated principles.
If enough right-wingers cared about their political principles enough to form a parasite party to weaken the Republicans, like the Greens are to the left, it would’ve already happened. But the only principle right-wingers have is ruling over everyone else. Few people enjoy being on the principled losing team.
Libertarians aren’t even worth talking about. Like centrists they loudly proclaim independence but when push comes to shove, many or most of them will vote Republican. Except Libertarians are more open about this than centrists.
IIRC the only reason we got the modern 2-party system today is because secession basically divided and destroyed the Whigs’ political power. Currently there’s no kind of black swan event that threatens the collapse of either party. And if there’s one party that’s a fragile coalition of contentious factions on the edge of collapse, it’s not the Republicans, it’ll be the Democrats.
As long as elections are going to be decided about what puts the most money in people’s pockets, it’s going to be Republicans. Not because Republicans are actually doing that, but they’re really good at convincing enough people that they’re doing that.
If/when a third party arises, it will be in the aftermath of national pain and suffering that this nation literally has never seen, could not comprehend today, and would likely destroy the current Constitutional order as it now exists. It will make the Civil War look like a soccer hooligan riot, it will make Covid look like a prolonged snow day. If you’re not ready for that, don’t hope for a third party.
Probably no one. Ezra Klein pointed out that, globally, just about EVERY party or leader that was in power in 2021-2022 has been rejected resoundingly by their voters. The amazing thing isn’t that Trump won, it’s that he didn’t win by a greater margin (and that’s because Harris is actually seen as likeable, Trump is not, and she ran a near-flawless campaign*, given the circumstances.) The immediate post-COVID global feelings of unease and economic strangeness have been brutal for whomever happened to be in power.
Trump is a very lucky man. He lucked out twice: first by threading an electoral college needle, and then by running against a party that happened to be in power in the aftermath of a global pandemic.
(*Her saying on The View that she would do “nothing” different than Biden was a mistake, and inconsistent with the rest of her speeches.)
This is an interesting point. Seeing a woman actually be a commander-in-chief might have helped her a bit, and more of the low-information idiots would have had time to “get to know her.” But this might have been offset by her truly having to “own” events of the last year (chaos in Israel/Palestine, e.g.). In any case, I doubt it would have overcome the global anti-incumbency wave I discussed above.
If we accept this as a given – that a Republican was destined to win this past Tuesday, period – the only way to have avoided a second Trump term would have been in the Republican primaries.
Not to fight the OP’s hypothetical with a hijack (I already gave my answer above), but the question then becomes – could anyone have beaten Trump in the GOP primaries; and if so, who?
(No need to answer in this thread – it leads to yet other questions, like "am I really asking if a Republican that’s unliked by Democrats but at least somewhat normal and wouldn’t cause enormous fear and sadness and loss of sleep if they won - a “Mitt Romney type,” if you will - could have won? Nikki Haley’s loss in the primaries suggest the answer is “no.”
Or is Trump, the man, uniquely awful, — ANY other Republican, even a JD Vance, say, would have been less crushing a blow to Democrats and less devastating to the country over the next four years – and so the question is, could a non-Trump MAGA type like Vance have beaten Trump in the primary? If this is the question, it may be moot, since Trump might die rather soon, so we might get our Vance presidency after all…).
The reason no Republicans have broken off yet is that Trump and his MAGA fans are still in power and will go after any disloyalty. Once he’s gone, who knows? Does the MAGA movement break up? If so, a splinter movement might work.
A bunch of Republicans have either explicitly broke with Trump and/or just run as essentially pre2016 Republicans and the voter base that supposedly exists for that direction never turns out in a real election. It’s not like the actual voters are cowed into rejecting that ideology, that ideology is just not nearly as popular as people thought.
Right but what happens once he’s gone? Does the MAGA base break up into various factions? Does it coalesce around JD Vance, Don Jr or someone else? Things could get better or they could get far worse.
Indeed. Because Harris didn’t lose on either policies or personality; she lost on perception.
I just had a co-worker tell me that he liked Trump because he was “strong”. Which is ludicrous enough, but the co-worker is gay and married. There is no candidate - no reality - that can overcome that level of delusion until the Feast of Leopards begins, and even then there are many who will insist that it isn’t happening.
By that measure, Lucas Hatton could have won in a cakewalk; he’s the current winner of the America’s Strongest Man competition. As you said, it’s a ludicrous reason to select a president and ludicrous to think that Trump is in any way strong. We’re centuries past the idea that the village chief is the one who can defeat all opponents in hand-to-hand combat.
Over a hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” It’s possible to exercise power and influence in a more subtle way than blustering. One is to establish and strengthen alliances like NATO.
Well with the electorate we have now, either the GOP either successfully runs more populists and the conservatives stay on board or they reject or lose the populists and the populists go elsewhere.
If there’s going to be a third party it’ll be made up of the populists, provided they don’t quit politics or go to the Dems. The traditional GOP voters have shown that they’ll keep voting for the populist version of their party.
The problem is that the leopards will not discriminate as to whose faces they eat, so either or both of us could be kitty chow in the not-too-distant future.
That’s the way it’s always been. They used to be part of the Democrats and controlled that party; then moved to the Republicans when the Democrats embraced civil rights and took control of the Republican party.