Story Highlights
- Third time support has exceeded 60%, along with 2017 and 2021
- Republicans primarily behind the increase, with 58% now in favor
- Political independents remain group most likely to favor third party
RANKED CHOICE VOTING
make parties irrelevant
make parties irrelevant
Precisely why they will never let this happen
Yep, all of us plebs want RCV. But the problem is in order to get it, we need one of two major parties in control to make the change. But they don’t want to make the change because they know if they do, us plebs will actually start voting for independent parties and they’ll lose their power. :(
It’s not about voting for a party in RCV. It effectively solves almost all of the US political dysfunction. With RCV…
- each political party in the mix will actually have to campaign to win elections (no swing states),
- gerrymandering will be a thing of the past,
- the electoral college will finally die,
- the people will get a candidate that more closely matches their desired candidate, and
- best of all, we wouldn’t have to vote between a douche or a turd sandwich.
Honestly, I get erect just thinking about how much better things could be with this system of voting. It’s essentially like a unionization for our political system, which is why it will never happen.
Why would the wolves opt to remove themselves from the hen house?
So you gonna just keep complaining online or do something to make them?
Pleasantly surprised to see this is the top comment.
Comparison of various voting systems…
I’m personally in favor of STAR, takes how leading candidates fair in head to head matchups against each other without confronting voters with the possible ballot Atlas of a true condorcet vote
This is a core policy of the Forward Party along with open primaries and independent redistricting commissions.
Let go full stv
Stop Tim (my neighbor from) Voting? I’m for that. Dude is a giant dork and votes explicitly for things he thinks will fuck things up, not things he thinks will improve society. He’s a doomsday dude, wants society to go to hell in a handbasket so, per his religion, his god can come and fuck it up more. I mean, believe what you want, just, let’s try and make this place better not worse.
I want third parties, but before that happens we need Ranked Choice Voting or Approval Voting. Otherwise, voting third party is essentially just taking votes from the major party most closely aligned with that third party.
I know RCV is the zeitgeist, but I really think Approval Voting is better and easier for the public. I’m glad you mentioned it
And yet when I say this people look at me like I’m crazy and tell me “Sir this is a Wendy’s”
Seriously, though, Approval Voting is literally the simplest voting method (vote yes or no on each candidate) and yet it has zero traction.
What you need is proportional representation like most countries have
That’s why I always mention it. I personally would prefer Ranked Choice. However, considering the introduction intelligence of many Americans, telling them “number 1, 2, 3, etc based on how much you like the candidates” might confuse them. Instead, “mark the ones you like” is much easier.
The main problem with Approval is that it still encourages strategic voting. If a 3rd party I really like is close to beating a mainstream party I’d tolerate, I’m incentivized to not select the mainstream party.
I seriously doubt a Approval would ever elect a 3rd party candidate.
The Center for Election Science disagrees and says that RCV is more likely to encourage extremist candidates:
"Tactical Voting
Approval voting performs rather well in the face of tactical voting. Like any voting method, approval voting does have tactics and strategy such as the “threshold strategy“. Under basic assumptions with tactical voting, approval voting elects beat-all winners (Condorcet winners) when they exist. Computer simulations using Bayesian regret calculations (shown at bottom) demonstrate better utility outcomes in elections using approval voting versus RCV even if all approval voters were tactical and all RCV voters were honest.
RCV is susceptible to tactical exaggeration. This is so much so that when voters are tactical, RCV can degenerate approximately into ordinary plurality voting. Note how approval does not degenerate into plurality. RCV’s tactical vulnerability can also mean voters do not rank their favorite candidate as first."
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
I watched their video about this and I don’t think it’s really that simple. Yes, approval voting means your first choice will never harm your second choice, but your 2nd choice can still absolutely harm your 1st choice. In a situation where there are 3 (or more) approximately tied candidates, voting for any candidate which is not your favorite is likely to harm your favorite’s chances.
Also, their example of a “spoiler” effect doesn’t really convince me. Sure, they negatively frame it by calling the winner party “bad”, but that candidate got more first round votes than the other candidates so it’s logical for it to have an advantage over a candidate who is mostly a second choice.
It doesn’t seem like a likely scenario either, it requires a scenario where voters who prefer candidate A want B as their second choice, but voters who want candidate B have no agreement with candidate A.
False. It sends the message that if that major party wants those votes they need to align with the 3rd parties policies. You keep narrowly losing elections because voters don’t support what you do, you’ll change if you ever want to win again. People are more concerned about winning every election, voting for the lesser of two evils, then wonder why our candidates keep getting shittier and shittier.
but before that happens we need Ranked Choice Voting
…which, of course, Florida banned a year and a half ago. :(
Now ask those people what the third party’s platform should be.
Not right, not left, but a secret third position
What if we just took all the leftist policies that Republican voters say they love in polls, but just replaced their names with new names that Fox News hasn’t had a chance to program their viewers on? Instead of Universal Healthcare, we’ll call it the American Bodily Integrity Defense Initiative or patriot care or some shit. No, no, it’s not high speed rail, it’s the Uncle Sam Express. No, no, it’s not universal college, it’s the “Beating China By Investing in Education Strategic Defense Initiative”. Etc.
That might help black folks, so it won’t work.
Maybe name it something racist? The Jim Crow Comprehensive Medical Reform Package.
The humor is definitely appreciated 😂
The political realities unfortunately are that a lot of our systems are not designed as lassiez-faire capitalist ideological manifestations but socialist for a white anglo-saxon colonizer nation (one might say, national-socialist) which often implies delegating the discrimination through proxies like corporate employment or residence in neighborhoods of a certain character.
Realistically there are 3 major groupings already:
- Progressives
- Corporate centrists
- Unrepentant Nazis
You said “Democrats” twice.
Edit: man, I can’t figure out who this pissed off- people who don’t know progressives and corporate centrists are in the Democratic party, or Republicans.
Pretty sure you got downvotes for explaining something obvious…
That’s what I get for thinking someone set up a joke and trying to deliver the punchline 😅
The problem is the corporate centrists would and often do ally with the Unrepentant Nazis when the owners bribe them both and give them their marching orders on economic policy.
The supposed “voice of sanity” corporate centrists would literally rather have Nazi Germany than universal healthcare or a UBI. It’s a better outcome for corporate profitability.
Neoliberals dislike Republicans, but both they and Republicans loathe leftists/progressives. Probably because neoliberals and Republicans have had a quiet agreement since Reagan to bicker on social issues but do what they’re bribed to do on economic policy, while progressives understand our current, rigged economic structure to be the root cause of most of our many crises.
Neolibs and Repubs just want to play fight about social wedges while they drink from that unlimited gravy train plugged directly into their PACs. They both consider it their higher duty to undermine any economic extremists trying to legislate a more equitable society. That’s the opposite of what the owners that pay any willing federal Democrat or Republican to play ball want.
A quote I think about a lot is one by Susan Sontag, and I think it maps pretty well to what you’ve laid out (just obviously not in that same order!). "10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
Something that is not “too extreme” - something that strikes a compromise with fascists that want to kill fellow citizens for merely existing (gays, trans, POC, etc.) or disagreeing with them and people that support the Constitution and civil rights and institutional norms. Because that second group is just so extreme.
I like the idea of Schrödinger’s party. It’s either hard left or hard right but, like a mystery prize on a shitty gameshow, you won’t find out until after the votes are placed.
Does this country even have any hard left politicians?
cornel west is running for office now
There’s “that man”. Can’t think of any others.
Do people think “third party” literally means one and only one additional party? Or am I getting wooshed
In case anyone does think that… It does not
Now there are five parties!
How about a data driven platform determined solely by what gets at least 65% majority support in two or more national polls?
Given political preferences tend to fall along a normal distribution curve, rather than drawing a line in the middle and catering to two parties necessarily based by the split toward less popular ends, it would make more sense to focus on two std deviations from the norm and ignore the extremes of each side, leaving it up to national discourse to move the median in one direction or the other and have representatives literally just represent whatever the majority holds.
If only the politicians in the dominant parties had any incentive to make elections fair for all parties. As it stands, the dominant parties have too many systems in place to give themselves advantages.
Rank choice voting seems like an obvious upgrade to our current voting system but is nowhere to be found other than a couple states.
Rank choice voting seems like an obvious upgrade to our current voting system but is nowhere to be found other than a couple states.
Because the two “private parties” have an insane amount of control over our political system.
And both of them count on getting a large amount of votes because people hate the other side.
If there’s literally any viable third option it fucks their system up, which would take power away from the people leading those private organizations
For example, say a far right party shows up. That hurts republicans, but it means Dems would win in landslides. Once that happens, Dem voters are going to start demanding things get done. Which means we’re suddenly going to have more Manchin’s voting against the party. Leading to increased primary challenges and maybe even a viable progressive party.
Both parties have a bunch of reasons to keep the status quo
There’s like 12 imperfect voting systems that are still light years better than our current system. I wish we would just pick one and roll with it already, even if it’s a temporary fix.
Approval voting is mathematically sane, rewards candidates that are broadly acceptable rather than extremists, and is easy to explain to voters: “Vote for every candidate whom you would be okay with.”
Candidates get more votes by building big tents than fanatical bases; voters maximize their power by honestly representing their views, and (unlike IRV) there’s no case where thinking better of a candidate will lead you to vote in a way that causes that candidate to lose.
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Primaries are nothing like ranked choice voting in the outcomes they produce.
I believe the only reason a “crazy second choice” exists is because we have such limited options to choose from when voting.
With rank choice voting, more candidates could run within a party without competing for votes because you would be able to vote for all of your favorite people in order without worrying what party they fall into.
We could vote for people we like instead of voting to avoid the person we hate.
But also? We already more or less have that. Both major parties (I think also most of the “independent” parties?) have a primary where party members can select the nominee from those running
Those are a formality…
There is no law that would force a party to run the person who won their primary.
After the last couple of years, I struggle to understand how people think that’s “good enough”.
As long as the US sticks to it’s long outdated and undemocratic FPTP voting model, you won’t see a relevant third party in congress.
Does the GOP still count as a political party? What is their platform, anyways? I don’t think “install a dictator and oppress minorities” counts as a platform. Point is, maybe we should look at getting a second political party first. One that can actually represent conservatives.
The Republican Party is representing conservatives better than it ever has. Installing a dictator and oppressing minorities is what conservatives genuinely want, and always have wanted.
If you see what set off someone like James M. Buchanan, as well as people like Falwell: it was about maintaining segregation. This is what motivates so very many of them. Their claims of “conservative values” are so much noise.
Yep, and the thing the founders of conservative ideology – Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, etc. – had in common was that they were defending monarchy. Conservatism is an unbroken line directly from Royalists, to Confederates, to Nazis, to the alt-right of today.
To the extent that the Republican Party of a few decades ago was not Royalist or Confederate or Nazi, it was only because the conservative influence was tempered by having to form a coalition with other factions and constrained by having to work within a liberal democratic system. But now those other factions have essentially been ejected from the party and it is working with 100% laser focus on breaking the liberal democratic system, so here we are. And the conservatives are loving it.
If by conservatives you mean Americans who describe themselves as conservatives… that’s a ridiculous claim. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Republican who openly wanted a dictator. I’m sure they exist, but it’s not the majority view within Republican voters.
If you mean something else, please define what you mean by conservative.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a Republican who openly wanted a dictator.
The key weasel-word there is “openly.” Even in your rebuttal, you tacitly admit I’m right.
In supporting trump, they support someone who would gladly take that role if he could. I agree.
But the contradiction is deep within themselves not just held for outsiders to see. They aren’t lying when they say they support democracy and say they support trump at the same time. They’re contradicting themselves, but they aren’t lying. I don’t know why that happens, but I guess they have been deceived.
But it’s important to have that distinction, otherwise we dehumanize millions of people, and destroy hope of showing them the truth.
openly
Is the key word, almost none of them will admit it, often even to themselves. They’re so deep in brainwashing and doublethink that most of them are convinced they’re standing for democracy and freedom even though their actual beliefs and policies clearly show that what they actually want and are actively working towards is an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.
Absolutely! But to accuse them wanting a dictatorship will only drive them further into the deception, because they aren’t lying when they say they don’t want it, despite them supporting a path towards it.
Accusing a person of lying when they are not willing always get a strong reaction against you because they believe they are morally right and you are lying to them.
You’ve touched on a major issue which is that many Republicans do NOT think that they are openly supporting a dictator, they don’t realize the danger.
I’m guessing they’re caught off guard by the fact that these acts (which resemble an attempt to establish a dictatorship) ARE being done fully in the open.
How else can you succinctly describe the brazen, persistent, and unprecedented attempts to overthrow the results of a democratic election? What about their published plan to fire employees of the federal government (who are not political appointees) and replace them with loyal sycophants?
It seems like a move towards some kind of dictatorship to me. If you’re working to hold on to power despite the votes of millions of people we have a word for that: dictator.
I can only hope that this turns out to be some kind of clever plot by the Republican party and they don’t actually still support Trump. Maybe the people who still say they support Trump despite his naked attempts to become a dictator are just trying to “own the libs” some more and don’t actually want him as dictator? Maybe the party leadership knows that Trump is done and they just need him to throw his support behind someone else before he gets thrown in jail and they too recognize the danger?
I can agree that Trump and those like him are moving towards that kind of power structure.
And yes that means that those who support trump and deny that want a dictatorship and at some level contradicting themselves.
But that is a different thing tham actually wanting a dictatorship.
Misrepresenting people will get us no where. It will dehumanize those we disagree with and will create enemies from those who could be allies.
At a certain point, it becomes hard to separate the fascists from the moderates, and it ceases to become a misrepresentation to call Republicans fascists.
It’s the same as with the police… a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If these organizations don’t start strongly denouncing the bad apples, then it’s perfectly valid to regard the entire group as spoiled.
Let’s see more moderate Republicans denounce Trump, and louder. Let’s see some moderate Republicans willing to compromise with Democrats to get legislation passed instead of being held hostage by the extremists in their own party. Let’s see more people like Romney and Liz Cheney calling it like it is.
When that starts happening on a larger scale, then maybe it will be a misrepresentation to refer to Republicans as fascists or supporting a dictator.
I think it’s a good idea to separate the politicians and party leaders from the rank-and-file members.
The organization knows what it is they are doing. But the members… I think of lot of them are just completely deceived in various ways about various things.
So when someone says “republicans want a dictatorship” it can be true in one sense, and nonsense in another.
Let me tell you about the cult I belonged to once that explicitly preached the US was made by their god, but also wanted to install the head of their cult as king of the US (because the united states didn’t fight two wars to get rid of those) and eventually world.
They have no platform, they didn’t even bother to make one during the last party convention
They had that one banner that said something like “we are domestic terrorists.” I think that’s basically their platform.
The funny thing is that they did. They copied their 2016 platform - including language that denounced the current administration. (At the time it was originally drafted, Obama, but on reuse it targeted Trump.) They can’t even copy paste properly.
Why stop at three parties. We need like seven.
We need Ranked Choice Voting at all levels including the presidency before we can have lots of different parties.
I’m still annoyed that the Massachusetts ballot question on RCV failed to pass because of the unclear phrasing
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You would need to get rid of the “first past the pole” system anyway to allow for other parties to have an actual chance. As soon as that’s done, more parties can easily be done.
But well, the people who would need to make that happen are the same people who currently benefit from the system as it is.
FYI it’s first past the post, not pole.
Whoops. Thanks for the correction.
I’m not from America so I have no idea how this party system works, but the point here is I love parties 🎊
Let me educate you:
It doesn’t!
Basically, we’re only allowed 2 parties per year, and if you want any more, you have to buy a subscription, or else the party police will take away your party privileges. We’re hoping that with enough complaints, they’ll allow us another party before having to pay.
Well, you see, we have the party of empathy that caters to big business, and then we have the other one that was once more traditional and is now kind of crazy that caters to big business.
Ahh, which is which?
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Yet talk about voting 3rd party and get attacked by straight ticket absolutist
Yep. Because US isn’t multiparty system yet, and just voting 3rd party in president elections is not viable and not smart. It doesn’t mean that people don’t want US to be multiparty system
Pasting my comment from further down the thread
False. It sends the message that if that major party wants those votes they need to align with the 3rd parties policies. You keep narrowly losing elections because voters don’t support what you do, you’ll change if you ever want to win again. People are more concerned about winning every election, voting for the lesser of two evils, then wonder why our candidates keep getting shittier and shittier.
Primaries are for sending your message. The actual election needs to be handled as harm reduction considering the options are mashed potatoes personified vs literal fascists. Neither is desirable but one is far more undesirable than the other.
Primaries do fuck all. If people are running for 3rd parties what is a dem or republican primary going to do?
That relies on the idea that those major parties care more about winning than the policies they are currently pushing.
I don’t know too much about the US but if winning is not too important to that party voting for someone else won’t do a thing.
Another option could be that party believes they will lose more votes than gain them with the policies of that 3th party.
I don’t know if you’ve been aware, but the last couple of elections had the potential to be our last free election. Your mindset of “it’s not about the results of this election, it’s about sending a message” takes for granted stability and ignores the danger of fascism removing or drastically diluting our ability to vote itself.
For example: What message do you think you’ll send by splitting the left vote and putting Trump back in the White House? Do you think he’ll moderate his policies because a further left party got 10% of the vote rather than 2%? Do you think he’ll decide not to suspend elections or give himself another term, given the chance?
If you want to vote for a third party in that setting, first you fix the system (ranked choice, etc) to avoid that vote leading to catastrophic outcomes. You don’t just ignore the catastrophic outcomes.
I’m more concerned about moving the moderate needle of democrats like biden who threatened striking railworkers with prison. Who has carrot on a sticked legal weed since before he was elected and continued to move the goal post ever since. Moving trumps needle isn’t going to happen. There are more independents that would align with dems if they actually supported liberal policies than libertarians that would ever align with a republican. You’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that IF trump or any other authoritarian dickhead gets control again and actually destroys our democracy that you and anyone else that wants to fix it will have to fight to do so. The other side is already ready to fight to take away your rights.
Would love a third and a fourth and a fifth party. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in a winner-take-all system based on the Electoral College.
Yeah, I feel like any 3rd party is just there to siphon votes away from one of the other two parties. We need a change to the system, along with additional parties, so that it’s not just tilting the balance back towards one of the top two. I wish we could also somehow decouple Supreme Court nominations from the Presidency, or add additional justices to make it more representative. As it is, we’ve got a ridiculously small group of nine people making decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions.
Because the tea party and libertarians are such awesome options. How about no parties and ranked choice voting.
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While it may be reasonable to remove the display of party affiliation from ballots, you can’t prevent people from forming political groups. Banning “political parties” would not really prevent the damage that they cause.
Indeed. This is well-evidenced by the forming of political factions in one-party states. Even though no new political parties can form, individual factions will form in the single party based on individuals or popular policies.
then make those positions Non-renewable, similar to Jury duty. So it creates and fosters an environment where the best decision is made based on the facts presented
That also fosters an environment of “Make the decisions that make me the most money in 2/4/6 years when I leave this job and get a cushy position at the company that has been lobbying me.”
It would work maybe with another species, one that doesn’t have tribalism ingrained in every fiber of their being.
“man is by nature a political animal”
You can protect the people’s right of assembly, or you can ban political parties. You can’t do both.
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You cannot stop people from agreeing to all campaign for a single candidate, but you don’t need to put it in big letters on the ballot. A ballot can just be a list of names. The major parties can inform most voters who they endorse for president. They may also be able to get most people to associate a Congressional or Senate candidate with their party. But, when a voter is looking at their ballot, there is no way that they will know if a party enforced “Smith” or “Jones” for state treasurer, unless the candidate changes their legal name to “Democrat Jones”.
It would probably mean that most voters will just not vote for down ballot candidates, except a very few who brought along the party’s list of recommended candidates or crazies like me who try to research candidates on the ballot.
Also, there is no reason for the state to host and administer primaries for major parties, police that a given voter does not vote in multiple parties’ primaries, or forbid a locally popular candidate from appearing on the ballot just because they are a member of a national party who endorsed another candidate.
I am not sure if it would be the best choice, though, since it would make it more likely that a party insider would get elected (since they are going to appeal to party die hards).
A third party in the US would just replace one of the 2 existing parties so within one or two election cycles we’d be back to two anyway. And with the way the parties are acting currently it would probably be the Republican party to collapse and be replaced.
And with the direction the Republican base is going, whatever party replaces the GoP is probably gonna think Hitler’s biggest problem was his accent.
Yes, this 58% Republican support isn’t “Libertarians” finally smartening up and realizing the neocons want a police state, it’s Trumpers who want the Trump Dynasty.
I went third party in 2016 because I was disgusted and at the time I didn’t think my state would ever be anything but red. Since then I’ve learned that I am very much in a swing state and Republicans have made it very clear they are going full fascist. There is at least one conservative think tank spreading the idea that we need a “Red Caesar” which sounds a lot like Mussolini to me. I don’t know if it’s possible to shift the Democratic party further left or not at this point, but I won’t be voting third party again unless there is some massive change in the way we handle elections.
Regardless of what side your on as a Canadian I’d warn you that you need ranked voting for this kind of thing to work. We don’t have that here.
We have one prominently right party and 2 left parties. This heavily skews the votes towards the right as left votes are being split between 2 parties. Often as a left voter you have to vote for the more popular party even if you don’t like them in order to keep the right leaning party from winning.
Ranked voting would fix this issue but neither of the 2 popular parties on eatch side, who can fix this want to fix it. Both the popular left and right parties work to supress all other parties.
If your not getting ranked voting that 3rd party will only exist to split the vote for whatever side its on.
I’d argue the situation is even more complicated in Canada Federal politics than you suggested. There are many ridings where the Green Party is a viable option and splits the vote on the left even further. That’s before we get into Quebec and the complications the PQ adds to the mix.
This is true. Green party was pretty big in my hometown and the local representative was great. But it was considered a “waste of a vote” to vote on them so everyone left leaning often voted for the liberals out of fear that the conservatives whould get in if they didn’t.
