Ah, I remember when I thought voting third party would matter. Hey kids. Take it from someone who voted for Johnson in 2016. I get that voting strategically fucking sucks, and you want to make your voice heard, but it is not worth getting Donald Trump elected just to be part of the 3% that said "I don't like either of these people." With any luck, third parties won't give the presidency to republicans next year, and one or two supreme court justices will die or retire in the next five years, allowing us to start repairing our rights. Because justices nominated by Biden will suck, but justices nominated by Trump (or God forbid, Desantis) will suck in the same ways and much, much worse.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Yes, exactly. Both of these things can be true at the same time:
- First-past-the-post plurality voting is a crappy system, devised before humanity discovered the math of voting systems. It has all kinds of predictably terrible results.
- It is currently the system we have. Because of this, if people who object to fascism fail to vote for a non-fascist candidate who can win, then the fascists will win.
Anyone who disregards point 2 because of point 1 thereby ends up materially supporting fascism. This is unfortunate but that doesn't make it false.
"But I want to vote my principles!" Great! Is one of your principles "fascists should lose"? If so, then please make sure to take the steps that support that principle!
Currently in the US there are two parties that can credibly take the presidential election: the center-right party and the fascist party. This is unfortunate but that doesn't make it false.
Vote third party in local elections. Elect a Socialist mayor or a Libertarian judge; a Green sheriff or a Communist dogcatcher. Build those local party networks. Support approval voting or other voting systems that actually make some mathematical sense. But please don't let the fascists win because you're pissed off at the voting system.
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One thing I liked about living in a safely blue state is I could vote for whoever I wanted without risking the destruction of the planet.
But Fetterman's my senator so I guess that's cool
I don't think so I'd consider PA safely blue. Fetterman is cool though.
I'm sure third party voters aren't turned off at all by people condescending them and calling them children.
I didn't mean to call all third party voters kids, I was addressing people for whom '24 will be their first election. If it's not your first election and you still haven't figured out that third parties are a trap, I'm not even gonna try to convince you otherwise.
Take it from someone who voted for Johnson in 2016
You mean a Republican who smokes weed? 🙄 If the libertarian party was your first choice, the GOP were your second, so by your own binary logic, that was a vote taken from Trump, not Hillary.
Nah, by the time November rolled around my choices were Johnson>Clinton>Trump
I was 18, not exactly the most politically intelligent kid
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For everyone arguing about the validity of voting for a third party: contact your representatives and push them to support ranked choice voting initiatives. Maine and Alaska already have some form of RCV. RCV in the US
They won't, of course, because then they couldn't scare you with threats that the wrong lizard will get elected.
If a third party is enough to spoil your election, you should probably run a better candidate instead of complaining about it.
The third party here is a spoiler to try to bleed people from the left to think there's a legitimate other option when their motive is to get a Republican elected. People on the left may not be equally susceptible to bad faith arguments, but that doesn't mean they're immune.
So fund the libertarian party then. I'm sick of wimpy ass Democrats whining about how unfair everything is instead of actually fighting back.
You are not going to win over third party voters, so stop trying. Invest in spoiler candidates and spend most of the party's money on GOTV instead of blowing it on ads for the presidential candidate. It's honestly shocking how incompetent the Democrats are compared to the GOP, who pay for their voters to throw literal GOTV parties with neighborhoods full of GOTV organizers and canvassers. There's a reason they keep elections close despite being a minority.
Meanwhile Dems will just fucking blame voters if they lose again.
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By your logic, every election was spoiled. There hasn't been an US presidential election without any third party candidates as far as I have been able to find.
The way to win elections is by running candidates people want to vote for. Complaining that people are running for office in a representative democracy is not a good way to win votes.
This is valid logic in normal times. But these are not normal times. Let's get real here.
The First Past the Post system means Third Parties are virtually unelectable. Add to that the US system of government (needing a majority of votes to elect a Speaker or Senate Majority Leader, Electoral College, Majority needed to avoid POTUS picked by the House, etc), and we've got our own unique challenges to Third Parties, and those problems are going to need a Constitutional Convention to fix. People who willingly ignore this are stupid, and only serve to damage their political side.
If you need this explained again to you, here we go. Suppose 50.1% of the nation leans Left, while 49.9% leans right. That's a pretty narrow split. You really can't afford to lose anyone. But then some doofus comes up with a Left2 party and claims the mainstream Left party isn't doing enough, and if you just elect them, they'll give everyone the shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows they swear they are owed. It doesn't take much. If 0.3% of the voters in the country believe that Left Party isn't doing enough, and switch their vote to Left2 Party, suddenly it's 49.9% Right, 49.8% Left, and 0.3% Left2, and now EVERYTHING Left and Left2 cherish is torn down by Right party, and you regress.
This is fine in most circumstances. You don't always get what you want, and sometimes, Left2 voters need to be reminded of this harshly by the Right party, and maybe in the next election, they'll figure out how voting works in the Not-So-United States of America, and they'll turn out to vote for Left party despite not getting the shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows because they realise they aren't even getting a broken down old donkey from Team Right.
But these aren't normal times. We don't have Left and Right parties here in the USA today. We have Centre-Right and Fascist parties. You aren't getting a shiny golden alicorn that farts rainbows. Your choices right now are a slightly used donkey from Team ~~Left~~Centre Right, and a jackboot on your face from Team ~~Right~~Fascist. Team Shiny Alicorn is there to suck your votes away, but when you lift the curtain JUST a little on Shiny Alicorn, you see one of Team Fascist's goons operating the controls. We're just trying to ask you to make the smart choice here, buddy. But I'm helping my wife get set up for school in New Zealand, because I don't trust the rubes who will fall for the bait and switch with Team Shiny Alicorn...I half expect Trump to be POTUS and his goons to start looking for people like my Bisexual Black Pagan Goth Wife, and people like me who dare sully the White race by being with someone like her. Please prove me wrong....
Let me be clear: this specific third party is most likely a GOP-led operation to bleed votes from the left. They do not have real policy goals that align with what people on the left actually want. Their goal is for a Republican to win, not someone from their party.
The spoiler effect has been mathematically proven to be one of the defects of first-past-the-post elections by game theorists for quite some time. It doesn't really have anything to do with the candidates.
It is the job of elected officials to write and change laws. As this is a known issue of first past the post, democrats had every opportunity to push for amending elections to not use first past the post.
Its not right to complain about spoilers in elections when you have the power to do something about it, but chose not to.
No Labels? Isn't that Andrew Yang's deal?
In Arizona, 15,000 people is enough to swing an election.
In 2020 the final count was:
Biden - 1,672,143
Trump - 1,661,686
10,457 vote difference... but that belies the bigger picture:
Jo Jorgensen (Libertarian) - 1.5% - 51,465
Howie Hawkins (Write-in) - 0.0% - 1,557
Jade Simmons (Write-in) - 0.0% - 236
Gloria La Riva (Write-in) - 0.0% - 190
Daniel Clyde Cummings (Write-in) - 0.0% - 36
President Boddie (Unaffiliated) - 0.0% - 13
I think it's less likely that a 3rd party would draw from Biden or Trump and more likely they'd draw from the other fringe candidates, esp. the Libertarians.
Really wish the Democratic establishment would start treating centrist "Democrats", who actually do get Republicans elected, as antagonistically as they do progressives. The people who jump in with "both sides" when one side is getting massively worse aren't committed to centrism, they're laundering conservatism and/or trying to blunt the damage from their party's extremism. No Labels has been a transparent Republican op from the start.
If the Democrats are worried maybe run a candidate that isn't 100 and make changes that matter. If both parties are right of center there's gonna have to be a new one that's left
Yes, we need an actual left, but No Labels isn’t it. They preach centrism. But from what I’ve seen they’re just a way for right wingers to try to hide the fact that they’re right wingers.
Yes, when one side is saying, "fuck peaceful group X, they don't deserve to live." and the other, "hey, maybe don't hate on people you don't even fucking know?" only a fucking moron thinks there's an acceptable middle ground.
Centrism is the ideology of the ignorant, gullible, and stupid. Nothing more.
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Yeah, with people like Lieberman and Manchin signing up for this nonsense, it's not the hope for a better party. It's an attempt to poach off from the rightest most extent of the Democratic coalition, while parties like the Green Party poach from the left-most extent. At least the Libertarians are poaching off 'decent Republicans' on the other side, but we've got to be smarter than the Republicans here and NOT split our coalition in a voting system that gives the nod to the party with the largest unified coalition.
Agree. However, if we get to the general and it's far right or democrat, I hope people choose the ancient democrat to the more fascism-friendly alternative.
That sounds like a Biden problem. Dems need to decide if they really want to keep Republicans out or try to make sure their side wins. If it's to keep Republicans out they need to all vote 3rd party because most of us won't support your milquetoast conservatives again.
If it's to make sure their party wins, they are gonna lose.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
PHOENIX (AP) — More than 15,000 people in Arizona have registered to join a new political party floating a possible bipartisan “unity ticket” against Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The very existence of the No Labels group is fanning Democratic anxiety about Trump’s chances against an incumbent president facing questions about his age and record.
Fontes has not commented publicly but is expected to announce a decision in the coming weeks after telling No Labels he may take action against the group for failing to register under the state’s campaign finance law.
“It’s kind of like a performance art piece,” said Richard Grayson, who promptly after switching to No Labels endorsed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
But supporters of No Labels insist that the political climate is far different heading into 2024, with wide swaths of voters in both parties exhausted by years of turmoil and chaos in Washington.
About half of registrants in August were formerly independent and another quarter were newly registered, according to Sam Almy, a Democratic data analyst based in Phoenix.
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