9 ms·

It's not completely up to voters, it also requires credible third party to exist and gain traction. Because both Republicans and Democrats seem incapable of suc

• SR2Z 1y ago
  Democrats have instituted independent redistricting commissions, finance transparency laws, the popular vote compact, and many others. Do not imply that both parties are the same on this. That is factually incorrect and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated an interest in improving democracy. The GOP, on the other hand, is cheering Trump on as he arrests judges and ignores due process.
  • lesuorac 1y ago
    They are the same on boxing out third parties. While Democrats don't like losing to Republicans they also don't like losing to a third party. Elected Democrats oppose any system that modifies the status quo that "correctly" elected them.
    • jeffrallen 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • ecb_penguin 1y ago
        > There is no party less democratic than the Democratic party This is such nonsense there's no reason to take you serious as a person. The two independents in Congress caucus with the Democrats. > Their preferred world is a two party system where the Republicans are losing. A private political party doesn't support other private political parties?! Definitely a first in the world.
        • jeffrallen 1y ago
          The problem is that their revealed preference is "keep a two party system", when another choice would be "support coalitions in order to broaden the discourse and ensure the most democratic outcome possible".
          • FireBeyond 1y ago
            And yet there's multiple areas where Democrats have introduced systems for getting better support for independent and third parties... Meanwhile Republicans have pre-emptively banned all forms of ranked choice voting at all government levels in eleven states. But do go on.
          • ecb_penguin 1y ago
            A private political party does not have to support positions it does not agree with, while simultaneously losing strength to advance their own agenda. Democrats are an organization with a specific political agenda. As are Republicans, and every other party. It doesn't help that most of our third parties are terrible choices too.
      • Braxton1980 1y ago
        What's the preferred world for Republicans?
    • TimorousBestie 1y ago
      They are not. Some form of non-first-past-the-post election system is necessary for any third party to become viable. Democrats pushed for Ranked Choice Voting in Maine and Alaska. Republicans have been trying to repeal both since implementation, and now have proposed a federal ban on RCV. These are not the same.
      • pxx 1y ago
        It doesn't matter. Hare/Instant Runoff voting (deceivingly marketed as "ranked-choice voting" in the US) neither empirically [0] nor theoretically [1] improves the viability of third parties. Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing. Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2]. [0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html [1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congressional_district_special_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congr...
        • TimorousBestie 1y ago
          I would be happy to support literally any alternative voting scheme, but the context of this thread is actually-existing American democracy.
          • pxx 1y ago
            Why? IRV will poison the well against actually usable voting schemes. It practically already has.
        • Izkata 1y ago
          > Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2]. And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.
    • V__ 1y ago
      To make third parties viable would require to move away from "First-past-the-post", which is much more heavily opposed by the GOP then vice versa.
    • ramesh31 1y ago
      >They are the same on boxing out third parties. Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.
      • JohnFen 1y ago
        > If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.
        • ramesh31 1y ago
          >I don't see any reason to think this is accurate. We are living through a successful attempt at this right now. The Tea Party completely engulfed what was once the GOP and morphed into MAGAism. Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late.
          • JohnFen 1y ago
            How is that an example? That's assuming that the Tea Party has good ideas and that's why it was able to take over the Republicans. It may very well be that the Tea Party's success had nothing to do with the merit of their ideas and more to do with an expression of rage.
          • tstrimple 1y ago
            The Democratic party does its best to isolate their more "radical" voters and politicians and does whatever it can to try to appeal to whatever their consultants tell them the "median" voter is. The Republican party embraces its most crazy elements from the depths of Twitter and puts them on a national stage.
          • alabastervlog 1y ago
            > Sadly the progressive wings of the Democratic party never got the memo, and wrote them off until it was too late. Eh? They've never meaningfully had control of the party, and are surely far more willing to e.g. abandon neoliberalism to avoid that handicap vs. a MAGA-ified Republican Party that's abandoned neoliberalism, than most of the rest of the Democratic Party is. It's the 3rd-way sorts and "centrists" who've been, and remained, in charge of setting direction and who've just kept on trucking with the "we mustn't upset the status quo!" and "maybe courting traditional Republicans will suddenly start working, so we should keep trying that" strategy, no?
    • alabastervlog 1y ago
      That's structural. Our system stabilizes at two viable parties. For one of the two to encourage a third party, without changing the system first (which would likely mean constitutional amendments, so, will never happen) would be to invite the imminent destruction of one of the two existing parties—probably their own, if they're promoting parties at-all similar to theirs.
    • enragedcacti 1y ago
      Democrats at state and local levels have implemented ranked choice voting in dozens of municipalities despite it being beneficial for intraparty challengers and 3rd party candidates. Republicans have preemptively banned it in 11 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • platevoltage 1y ago
      Democrats are in no danger of losing to a third party. They are in danger of being spoiled by them. It makes sense to oppose them. If they don't like it, they should be pushing for ranked-choice voting.
      • poulsbohemian 1y ago
        >If they don't like it, they should be pushing for ranked-choice voting. The Washington State Democrats are about to have one of our regular meetings this coming weekend, and I guarantee as is the case all all of our meetings, there will be a contingent encouraging all of us to support RCV. As a candidate, I've already been approached again this year as to whether I will support it. It's absolutely a discussion point within our party.
  • grafmax 1y ago
    Dems are the lesser of two evils. As long as we don’t have ranked choice voting, which requires a constitutional amendment, we will continue to vote in the servants of the billionaire class. Next time around, it may be the servants of the liberal billionaires instead. The underlying reality is that wealth inequality is anti-democratic as it concentrates power in the hands of the few.
    • brewdad 1y ago
      If a third party ever truly gained traction on the national stage, what makes you think they won't be bought by the billionaire class? Musk basically bought the government purse strings for less than $300 million. That's pocket change for the truly wealthy.
      • grafmax 1y ago
        American society is in crisis and this crisis will likely continue to grow economically as well as due to larger effects on the horizon such as global warming. From a practical standpoint if we are serious about unseating the power of the billionaire class (which is highly realistic as society continues to self-destruct over the long horizon) things like ranked choice voting should serve as tactical goals in a broader struggle for democratic process in our country. But yes it would be naive to consider ranked choice voting to be enough on its own to unseat them.
        • poulsbohemian 1y ago
          RCV is a weakass attempt to move us in the direction of the Westminster system without actually just fixing the system. You want Westminster just go there and don't fuck around half-assing it with RCV.
    • Izkata 1y ago
      Ranked choice is a bad idea if gaming the system is any possibility. Approval voting gets you all the benefits ranked choice claims to have with none of the downsides, with the bonus that it's easy to explain to people.
• timeon 1y ago
  > third party If you had open system (not one or two-party system) there would be more than three parties.
  • setr 1y ago
    it is an open system; the two-party-in-practice nature of it is a result of optimizing over the ruleset. specifically, you need to get rid of the winner-takes-all vote
• poulsbohemian 1y ago
  Why should the Democratic party support something that would A) weaken the Democratic party and B) Potentially throw more votes to the Republicans as exactly happened this past cycle? The Democratic party is a god damn big tent. It's the equivalent of 3-5 parties in any other country. It is mind-blowing how much diversity of thought exists in the Democratic party and we spent an ungodly amount of time and effort fighting amongst ourselves to produce meaningful policy and platform ideas. If you don't like our party, the best thing you can do is join us and use the party as a vehicle to go in the direction you want. I can't say enough - people need to understand that you don't need another party, you just need to understand how you can shape the party to be what you want. It's absolutely mind-blowing how much opportunity there is to work inside the party and move the ball forward rather than stand on the sidelines trying to form some other party and all the BS that would go along with trying to be viable.
  • rini17 1y ago
    You believe people don't try to reform dems from within? Of course they do, but it does not work, at least in recent decades.