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Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different

Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.

tveita 7y ago
The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.
  - dmurray 7y ago
    The last UK leadership election for the Labour Party [0] had a turnout of 500k+, or roughly 1% of the population. I won't bore you with the details of whether it's correct to think of all 500k as "dues-paying members". That's a lot less than the 30 million or 10% of population [1] who voted in the last Democratic primaries in 2016, but not "nothing like" it. And we could pick other years the turnout was much lower, e.g. 7 million [2] in 2012 where Obama did not have meaningful opposition). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_election_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_e... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presiden...
    - tveita 7y ago
      UK is not a good counterexample here. It also uses the first-past the post voting system, which trends towards two parties since any third party becomes a spoiler. With a different voting system there would be a wider range of smaller parties, so you don't need to wrest control of a major party to be represented.

Having the most votes in the party caucuses is definitely not equivalent to having the best chance to win the election, where you have to appeal to a different set of voters.

tveita 7y ago

The major deficiency of the two-party system is that the parties have to resort to this kind of second-guessing the "average voter" instead of just presenting all the options and letting the voters choose for themselves.

umanwizard 7y ago
In most democracies that don’t suffer from the two-party system, there is as far as I’m aware nothing like the American primary/caucus system. The parties just decide who their candidates are with no input from anyone but dues-paying party members.
- dmurray 7y ago
  The last UK leadership election for the Labour Party [0] had a turnout of 500k+, or roughly 1% of the population. I won't bore you with the details of whether it's correct to think of all 500k as "dues-paying members". That's a lot less than the 30 million or 10% of population [1] who voted in the last Democratic primaries in 2016, but not "nothing like" it. And we could pick other years the turnout was much lower, e.g. 7 million [2] in 2012 where Obama did not have meaningful opposition). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_election_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership_e... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presiden... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Democratic_Party_presiden...
  - tveita 7y ago
    UK is not a good counterexample here. It also uses the first-past the post voting system, which trends towards two parties since any third party becomes a spoiler. With a different voting system there would be a wider range of smaller parties, so you don't need to wrest control of a major party to be represented.