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Joe Biden campaign volunteers are quitting in "droves"
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Do you really have no other choice but one of those two over there?
We really have no other choice
Their system automatically makes a winner of the biggest party. In any country that uses that system, it automatically leads to two main parties alternating in power. The advantage is that you don't need "messy" and "unstable" coalitions, but can have strong leadership with a solid base instead. Except that perhaps string leadership is a dangerous thing to have in many cases, and except that if the balance tends towards 50/50, you can easily have problems getting anything done.
Yup, so sayeth both sides of America's one-party system.
It's the structure of our "first past the post" system. Basically, each party gets one representative on the presidential ticket. The two major parties have primaries where the top candidates compete in a vote within themselves, and the winner gets put on the presidential ticket for that party.
The obvious problem with that is that the party convention picks the candidate, not the voters. So it's possible to buy a party's candidate or for the conventions to snub popular choice in favor of not shaking things up too much in the status quo.
The latter point, the democratic party picking lukewarm candidates that are moderate at best because the establishment doesn't want to disturb the status quo, has been a problem for a long time and is a major reason democrat voters don't go to the polls.
People are afraid to back anyone but the big two. They say things like "throwing your vote away" and "you're letting them win" if you don't vote one of the big 2.
I understand their point, but we need a systemic change to our political system for the kind of change we want to happen to actually happen.
For the two parties in power, what's better than convincing people that this is true? Actually making this true.
This isn't just a thing that's "said." It's actually the case, and it's been proven both statistically and experimentally. The system has been crafted specifically to cause that outcome, reinforced over decades to ensure that there are no other viable opportunities for choice.
A third party would have to win an absolutely massive percentage of the vote; Ross Perot in 1992 did better than any non-major-party candidate in the prior 80 years or any year since, he won nearly 20% of the popular vote, but took exactly zero electoral votes. (By contrast, a major party politician could conceivably game the electoral college—that is, get exactly 270 electoral votes—and take office with just 23% of the popular vote.) In fact, no third party candidate has taken any electoral votes since 1968; and no third party has beaten the trailing major party since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, who still only came in second.
"The system is perfectly designed to produce the results it's producing." If it never produces a third party victory, that's because it can't.
Unfortunately, to have any hope of changing it, we have to vote for the people who actually want to keep having elections.
Change can happen internally as well. That's what happened to the republican party. It's not the same party it was 20 years ago.
But in order to break the 2 party system, it likely has to be done on a grassroots scale in local elections first and slowly climbing to a national scale.
Change can happen internally, yes. And I hope it does. But the means to do that isn't "not voting in the general election," especially when the stakes are so high. The way change happens internally is the same way we break the two-party system, because they have no incentive to change if everything is working fine for them right now.