Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.
Tinidril
joined 2 years ago
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn't cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it's not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don't, because you can't.
I'm not being "defeatist", I'm saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it's a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
it's a cognitive bias
No, it's game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it's not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn't new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren't proposing anything new.
That's only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
Well, you go ahead and convince the ENTIRE POPULATION to vote third party and I will absolutely eat my words.
I'm just curious though, what do you plan to do differently from previous elections to achieve that aim? It's not like this is a new argument, and it's never worked before. I've jumped on that wagon myself in my more naive days, and the ENTIRE POPULATION wasn't interested in playing along. What changed?
The politicians? Top of my head, stimulus payments.
The voters? Trump's suckers agree with whatever Trump says, so their entire political view is compromise, if not complete capitulation. Traditional Republicans compromised left by voting for a populist candidate, though they probably understood he was full of shit.
Fuck the Republicans and fuck the Democrats, sure. But voting is about politics, not making a personal moral statement. That kind of thinking is dumb as fuck and would have been self defeating in every election since George Washington. Politics is always about compromise, and compromise about issues that matter is always a punch in the gut. Effective activism is about winning what you can, taking the hits, and showing up to do it again and again.
Voters who had a choice between two candidates that both support a genocide are not responsible for that genocide. I know a few things about moral reasoning, and no moral system I'm aware of would ever come to such an insane conclusion.
I think they would have if Trump hadn't won. The political establishment has never actually seen Trump as one of them. Unfortunately for them, and all of us I guess, Trump managed to force himself into a seat at the big table.
It's a "chicken or the egg" question. We have the Democrats we have because of the voters, and we have the voters we have because of the Democrats.
It's a responsibility of the citizenship to be aware enough to make informed decisions and not be led by the nose. Americans in general are pathetically ignorant and disengaged.
Watch some random street interviews with average voters and it becomes crystal clear that fascism is what we collectively deserve.
I'm more concerned with what our descendents are going to think.
So what? It's not like there is much of anything to be done about it. On the other hand, Democratic primary voters (in the instances where the establishment allows us to have primaries) could get their heads out of their asses and actually nominate somebody who isn't a damn corporate bot.
Just read the whole thread again. No guilt trips, or anything that could be interpreted as guilt trips. Nothing even close really. Persecution complex much?
The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn't even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That's hardly a record that's dispositive of anything I have said, and it's still focusing on just one office that can't do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn't include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.
I'm not asking for a prediction, I'm asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren't going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that's just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don't even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?
If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn't take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.
Repeating bullshit over and over doesn't make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.