At this point, the country is run by a gerontocracy, and they are blatantly grasping at the last scraps of their grift as the ship goes down. It's sad to see -- really pathetic.
edit: Tow => toe
It's a two-party system, you have to vote for one of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYsZUMuj0M, The Simpsons S8E1 - Treehouse of Horror VII - Kang and Kodos
Or more accurately, they've gotten really good at getting people to focus on hating the other guy or getting wrapped up in partisan BS.
* elections in the US require a fuckton of spending. AOC raised millions for a House district that wasn't even competitive, meanwhile the British Parliament has a 30,000GBP spending limit. It is a lot easier for upstart parties to raise tens of thousands of dollars rather than millions.
* third parties in the US have a habit of mostly trying to go for broke and failing. The general track record of successful ones elsewhere is that they usually cut their teeth in lower levels of government before they start competing well in national elections, and on top of that the lower level elections are generally easier to win (much lower voter count = much lower spending, thinner electoral margins, etc.)
* the US lacks regional parties, which is another source of third-partyism, but depending on your views this might be a good thing.
[0] for an example of the top of my head: vote as in single-member FPTP, determine the proportion of first place votes globally by party to determine how many seats each party must win, and then globally order candidates from each party entitled to at least one seat in descending order of their vote share in their district. Starting with the party with the candidate with lowest maximum vote share, assign that candidate as the winner from their district, removing all other candidates from that district and dropping the party from further consideration if it has been assigned the number of seats it is entitled to; proceed until all seats are assigned.
This sounds to me like artificially creating an election-wide multi-member district. I don't think it's standard to allow votes outside of a particular voting district to affect the results in that voting district.
I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.
Edit: apologies if this feels like moving the goal-post. I need to think a bit more about what could happen for example in single-member voting district with ranked-choice voting system - I think it would not lead to a 2-party system, so you're right here and changing the voting system may be sufficient.
I can see that.
> I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.
Ranked choice methods with single-member districts can slightly mitigate some of the problems, but yes, I’d agree that realistic solutions that do more than nip around the edges require multimember districts.
Even though a lot of people argue that, if it weren't true things would be far worse. Despite the differences, there needs to be something resembling a governing consensus.
(30K GBP is an average, since consitutencies in the UK have variations in population size. Constituencies do not get regularly recalculated unlike Congress redistricting every decade.)
IIRC, for a lot time the two major US parties were effectively federations of different regional parties (e.g. your farm-state Democrat had a very different set of positions that your northeastern urban Democrat, ditto for Republicans). That's collapsed in the last 20 years, and everything's basically national, which is a big part of the problem.
An alternative voting system might have voting for many offices together, with many winners. In that case the winners can be distributed among the various voter preferences proportionally. Some countries already do this and therefore have reasonably robust multi-party systems - though I don't think it's at all clear that this is better at serving the needs of the public.
It's just a feature of US politics that movements like the Tea Party or DSA decide to shake things within existing parties rather than launch new ones. Even the new ones that launch like the Working Families Party often just support two-party candidates.
Andrew Yang has the right idea. We need to break the duopoly by implementing Ranked-Choice Voting and Nonpartisan Primaries.
> Andrew Yang has the right idea. We need to break the duopoly by implementing Ranked-Choice Voting and Nonpartisan Primaries.
Those sound like a technical solutions to a social problem.
They can be part of a more holistic solution, but here they were presented as the solution. And if you only have half a solution, it may turn out to be half of the wrong one.
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
A gerontocracy doesn't directly relate to stock trading, but this old woman is saying very absurd things.