Support for Third U.S. Political Party Up to 63%
news.gallup.com
news.gallup.com
When you get to the actual ballot box, it frequently becomes a "the relatively sane person needs every vote they can get to defeat the lunatic" sort of decision.
Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
But it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.
The safeguards against lunacy must go well beyond the number of parties, and still might not actually work.
Yes but it was the previous duopolistic choice of incompetent-awful vs intentional-awful led us to lunatic territory.
"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere
- Ralph Nader and Al Gore
- Ross Perot got Bush I
- Third party candidates received around 6 million votes in 2016
First past the post voting allows only two parties: because the winner is whichever party has less competitors for it's ideological niche. It explicitly destroys any concept of a market place of ideas being possible in politics.
Do you have an example to back this up? Europe is largely multiparty and yet seems to have much more 'corporate unfriendly' consumer protections than we do today.
Fear is always more effective then hope in ensuring voters don't vote in their own interest.
It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high. It means we may have fewer "party no matter what" voters, and the politicians MAY have to actually pay attention to the people...
There are always lunatics; there'll be folks in NY who hold their nose and vote for a Democrat because the House is tight and they've heard of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. (Or for a Republican in Kansas, because they don't want AOC being in the majority. As someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread, one person's lunatic is another's hero.)
> It gives me a LITTLE hope that this third party support is so high.
It shouldn't. Look past the headline (to the first chart); polls have showed fairly consistent majority support for a third party for decades.
The reality is that politics is essentially bipartisan. The left/right divide is the core of politics and the only one that actually matters in the absence of regional independence movements. Therefore, what we see is that third parties usually struggle to differentiate themselves to voters.
This can be seen most clearly with the Lib Dems who are one of the main third parties in the UK. They tend to be used as a protest vote and few would be able to articulate what they actually believe. Arguably they believe nothing at all, as they have in the past reversed their position on core manifesto promises, fought against implementing referendum results (despite having "democrats" in the name) and so on. What do the Lib Dems actually stand for? What is the big difference between them and Labour or the Tories? It's unclear.
This doesn't mean you can't have different third parties. You can. The SNP is a clear example of a third party that grew from nothing to take over Scottish politics. But it seems that regional independence is one of the only things that is big enough to cause this, as typically the national level parties will not want to support a regional independence movement (would reduce their own power and take up a lot of time), but voting is regional.
Even there though, the SNP is basically just a clone of Labour plus that one additional policy. If Scotland were to become independent, you'd rapidly see the two party system re-establish itself there along left-wing and really-left-wing lines, because this is the only axis that matters.
In Europe where FPTP often isn't being used, you do see more parties, but this doesn't result in less partisan or more harmonious politics. If anything it seems to be slightly the opposite. Germany for example has major problems with people publicly debating whether the AfD should be banned, there are physical attacks on its members, and although PR is supposed to encourage collaboration and compromise none of the other parties are willing to work with it despite it being the second most popular party or even in some parts the first most popular party. The AfD is not particularly extreme though, and its policies aren't so different to the Republicans in many ways. This problem crops up in other European countries as well, it's not unique to Germany.
So a third party wouldn't fix anything in the USA. Nor would PR or more exotic voting schemes. People might occasionally use them as a protest vote, as they do already today, but there's no fundamental third ideology for a third party to express, and anyway who needs a new party when the two big ones are so internally democratic? Easier to take over one of them than make a new one.
One of these two subclauses has to be false, lol.
(It's the first one. The first one is false.)
The reason third parties exist in other democracies is because of whipping. In the UK, in Australia, in France, in Canada, in Germany, in Israel, the MPs are whipped.
What does that mean? That means that party representatives have to vote with their group, otherwise they run the very real risk of being evicted from that group. When was the last time that a Democrat lost their (D), have been evicted from the Democrats because they voted differently? Even now, no Democrat would get evicted from the party for voting for a Republican Speaker.
The US whips very differently, and so all the fuel of the third parties exists within the two big political families.
In a system in which parties stand for little, you don't develop third parties. But even in countries with tighter party discipline, like the UK, third parties struggle to justify their existence and stand out from the crowd.
Also, each side is voting for the person they think is more sane, so it's partially a perspective problem. There may be some people in the middle, but not enough to win a 3rd party because that 63% who support the idea of a 3rd party all envision something different.
Unless it means that those people view "their party" as being too moderate. On the left you have groups like the Green Party who view the Democrats as being too far right. On the right you have MAGAs who view Republicans as the radical left.
If we had Condorcet voting, we would have elected much more reasonable candidates a long time ago.
Honestly, I think any voting system with an algorithm more complicated than counting simple votes will just lead to more mistrust and further empower people who want to claim election fraud. They just scream "technical solution to a social problem."
I have a feeling there's probably a contradiction at the heart of democratic politics: it needs a broad consensus to be successful, but tends to remove the mechanisms for maintaining the needed consensus amongst the people, and decays to hostile factions which will eventually destroy it.
I don't think that's true. Candidates, even lunatics, adapt their strategy to whatever the voting system happens to be. If a lunatic can win against a sane person in a two-party contest, I have no doubt whatsoever that a lunatic can also win under Condorcet with many more candidates.
Condorcet methods could help if the problem was that the preferences of people are not being met. But that is not the problem, that has never been the problem. The problem is that people do not know how to optimize their own self-interest and genuinely prefer simple narratives that tell them what they want to hear, or what the media they listen to tells them to think.
Garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter what the voting system is.
Look, choosing a party requires you to figure out which economic policies best spur economic growth, which ones might make the climate crisis worse, what the long term consequences of increased immigration might be, and so on, and so forth. On your time. Through the distorting lens of media. Of course the average voter can't make heads or tails of this stuff. It's not their fault. Even if they could, they wouldn't have time because they work all day.
So the best strategy the voter has is not to understand the issues, but to delegate their choice to someone they trust who ostensibly knows the issues. That's media, scientists, influencers, church leaders, etc. Regardless of the voting system, the public opinion will be modulated by the landscape of influencers they trust. If that landscape is broken, the votes will go in the wrong direction regardless of how many choices there are, I'm afraid.
Third parties have been a thing in the US in times past but you probably need some distinct coalition of states to make one meaningful.
“Sane vs lunatic” may have been a media construction at some point, but it sure is real now.
The fact that most Americans don't seem keen/prioritized on implementing it, despite wide-scale disillusion at the two party system is mind-boggling to me.
Slavery is the original sin of the American Consitution - parties are the second sin.
How can parties be the second sin of the Constitution? The Constitution literally doesn't even envision their existence, to the point that the procedure for electing the president and vice president had to be changed to account for their existence.
I worry that a populace that can't understand "large urban counties take longer to count their many votes, leading to big vote swings hours after the polls change" and storms Congress over it will have even more challenges understanding the ranked choice setup, though.
Good enough that IMHO the benefits clearly outweigh the concerns. The beauty of the fragmentation of voting in the US, is that we can roll out different voting systems incrementally and be able to collect data on how they work without "betting the farm" on one election.
So while it can upset the first to the post strategies, thd electorate can be disappointed in the results.
I am very interested in the amount of negative sentiment to RCV in the zeitgeist and am trying to determine if it is coming from lived experience of issues with the voting system or from somewhere else....
You may disagree with that take and say it only happens sometimes. I think we can at least agree it's not settled that it results in better election cycles.
I found the discussion in the Deseret piece regarding how the result of the Alaska senatorial election seemed "unintuitive" to many voters to be very interesting! When I look at the numbers and results in that election is seems clear that the outcome is exactly what I would hope to see (and seemingly is a text-book case of RCV in action). But alas, when you deploy to production, things rarely go as planned and it is clear that I need to give more weight to the human element in all of this. Even if the results are statistically desirable, that does not mean that voters will actually feel good about the result of the election....
It works in a super intuitive way that leads to the least dissatisfaction among voters.
Interestingly though (but not surprisingly) there is a lot of anti rank choice media coverage of the process.
When I tell people my city does that, some respond with “oh that sounds terrible! I heard the news that system is so complicated and hard to run! It probably took you weeks to find out who won!?”
This disconnect between my great experience with the system and the general perception of the process much bigger than I expected.
Now we just have to ask… who benefits from pushing a bad narrative about rank choice voting
Any party that already has high likelihoods of winning the election will be hurt by RCV.
Your opposition to RCV should increase with your distance from the center. RCV reduces the chances of fringe candidates being successful. Traditional U.S. systems reduce the chances of centrists.
Most intelligent strategists prefer to lose 50% of elections than to lose 90% of elections.
No, it won't. RCV doesn’t hurt duopoly at all. It generally rewards the more centrist subfactions of whatever the two dominant factions would be without it, so if (in the USA) you views are best represented by a blend of the corporate capitalist neoliberal wing of the Democratic and the anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, RCV is a boon for you.
If your views are not well represented in the current system, they will be even less represented with winner-take-all elections under RCV. For that, you need multiwinner elections producing proportional-ish results, whether party list, STV (the multiwinner system of which RCV/IRV is the single-winner form), MMP, or some other system.
The people in power are not incentivized to do this. Thus they convince the masses that it's a bad thing.
1. ranked choice voting (to eliminate the spoiler effect, truly opening the way for a non-duopolistic political environment)
2. open, non-partisan primaries
3. independent redistricting commissions (to eliminate gerrymandering)
Even if people agree that they don't like the two parties, it doesn't mean that they agree on the same third party. Most likely, their last-ranked choice, but it's going to be named by the most people. The winner will probably be one of those two.
I'm all for it, especially if it makes people feel heard. Maybe somebody who made a strong showing can leverage that in future elections. Perhaps there will be a few candidates who can put on strong campaigns without a party support, and that will bolster confidence.
But I predict that the most likely outcome is that people say "It's rigged and there's no difference from the old way".
In practice, ranked-choice voting means instant runoff voting, where you basically throw out candidates who didn't get enough votes until you get someone who wins. In the US, this means that it's still going to be a choice between the Democrat and the Republican, but you'll get 10% or so of the population to feel comfortable voting for $THIRD_PARTY knowing they can still express their opinion in the Democrat-Republican race. It's political placebo, except if the results are even somewhat messy, you'll get bellyaching from people who do bad statistics to say they should have won (witness the recent Alaskan election decided in this manner).
There's another set of ranked-choice voting based on Condorcet methods, which run all two-way races simultaneously and picks the candidate who wins all of their races (with different variants for handling the case who no one can do this [1]). The downside of these methods is that they're more confusing and, if you thought that instant runoff produces unclear mandates, Condorcet methods are going to render those results even less clear.
Ultimately, the ills of American politics have very little to do with its use of the first-past-the-post voting system; switching to different systems are likely to produce the exact same results [2].
[1] The most intellectually honest, IMHO, is to just declare the race at a tie in this case. I imagine that politics would be better if we were more honest about very close results indicating ties rather than pretending that it's a decisive mandate for victory.
[2] Another statistic to remember is the vast majority of people will vote for an extremist on their side of the aisle over the moderate on the other side.
I would prefer a candidate who was the first choice of 30% of Party A voters and the second choice of 40% of Party B voters over a candidate who was the first choice of 65% of Party A voters and the second choice of 2% of Party B voters.
Admittedly, RCV doesn't guarantee this, but it seems much more promising. If you can get winners that 70% of voters can live with, that seems better than the current situation. And it would change strategies dramatically. I would expect fewer appeals to mobilize extremist bases.
I think it would also make voting more granular. People would focus on individual issues more. Their first choice might look the same as today, but for their second choice should they choose the guns-rights abortionst or the gun-control pro-lifer? That second choice now impacts the election result in a meaningful way.
It's when a Condorcet winner does not exist that Condorcet compliant methods get hard to explain.
There are alternatives to IRV, almost every single one of which is better. IRV is a bolt-on plug-n-play implementation to existing winner-take-all voting for lazy bureaucrats.
Looking into the details it seems the results can't be blamed on voter exhaustion, as the Democratic candidate would have won even if all exhausted votes in the second-to-last round would have gone to the remaining Republican candidate, so I'm open to the idea that this wasn't a failure of ranked choice voting, but rather a genuine shift in Alaskan politics. Still, it doesn't seem very likely. Alaska went for Donald Trump by a comfortable margin in the 2020 elections, and a Republican hasn't lost a statewide race there since 1972 - until now. But on the other hand, it's hard to look at the election results and see how the Republican candidate could have beat the Democrat candidate in a head-to-head first-past-the-post election.
So... I don't know. Maybe people just vote differently when forced to pick between two candidates than they do when ranking candidates on a ballot with multiple choices? Perhaps the 2024 election results will bring more clarity...
[1]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska%27s_at-large_congressio...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...
[4]: https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22GENR/US%20REP.pdf
In a hypothetical world, roughly evenly split on religion, where everyone would be pretty okay with secular tolerance, picking secular tolerance seems like the way to go. But if most people would somewhat prefer to try and force their particular religion on everyone if they can get away with it, secular tolerance will be everyone's second choice and will be discarded in the first round of voting... unless enough people recognize the dynamic and vote strategically rather than honestly, but that undermines the point of RCV.
I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself how much the real world resembles that hypothetical, but as I said it worries me.
In the next election there was an open seat for my Congress person. There were something like 5 progressive candidates, and one more conservative democrat. Of course, the progressive vote split and the conservative candidate won, even though he was probably the last choice among a majority of voters. I found that super ironic.
Until it becomes the a "both people are lunatics" sort of decision....
> Third parties aren't going to be a real thing in the US without a change to the way we count votes.
Exactly. Perhaps the single most important (feasible) improvement that could be made in US politics is broader adoption of Instant-Runoff Voting! It keeps things simple, maintains single-representation, but avoids the absurdity of first-past-the-post voting.
Australian way to count votes was specifically designed to avoid favoring a two-party system (basically, instead of selecting one candidate, you vote for multiple and give your preference order). Yet in effect Australia has a 2-party system, too.
Why is that, I don't know.
Big money, I suspect.
It is my depressing realization after wondering the same thing as you and discovering that these alternate voting systems actually don't help, in the end, with electing someone to a position of singular power. They seem to help in other situations, though.
The winner takes all system requires candidates to compete for a plurality of votes. This means major parties must accommodate a broad range of ideologies.
Multiparty democracies typically use a system in which representation is proportional to the number of votes received and those political parties can often get somewhere by catering to narrow interests.
And then yes, in traditional proportional systems you vote for a list of candidates rather than a single candidate, the lists are the ones getting the seats based on vote totals. The seats can be distributed based on a fixed or flexible lists model
If you have a state that now has 10 reps each party would make a list of 10 people, then if party A gets 40%, party B 35%, C 15% and D 10% you'd get 4 people from the list proposed by A, 3 (or 4) from the list for B, 2 (or 1) from C and 1 from D
In Holland parties have to form a coalition after the elections. This is a very complex and time-consuming process but I'm very glad we have it. It's not perfect but way better than winner takes all IMO.
It's more like polarisation between party supporters. The parties themselves become virtually indistinguishable. Choosing between Tories and Labour is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. They have very much the same agendas and are only different on minor issues (in the grand scheme of things) that are blown out of proportions.
In addition to that, politics becomes a 'zero-sum game'. Meaning a loss for one is automatically a win for the other. In other countries in Europe we don't really have this mechanism and it takes a lot of the sharp edge off politics. Because getting the other parties to fail is not automatically a win.
I think especially in the US this latter point is very clear right now, one party is always trying to undermine the other, even at the cost of the country's interests (which was the one thing they were supposed to care about!). Using the shutdown as leverage is a typical example.
I think any system that reduces politics to a zero-sum-game should be avoided as much as possible to reduce this very phenomenon. Because while the two parties in the US are fighting in the streets over internal issues, Russia and China don't have any internal political issues and can take full advantage of this on a geopolitical scale. That's the handy thing of being a "one party system", as awful as it is.
Not saying the EU countries are perfect. Coalition forming is an awfully complex process and sometimes it takes years (I think Belgium was without a government for more than a year recently). It also leads to inaction or slow response times to external events by having too many parties at the table. But it doesn't lead to this kind of extreme infighting and stalemates.
It's not inconceivable for a new coalition to form around a new ideology and have that replace the GOP.
I mean, you could argue that that's happened with Trump anyway; the way the system works, doing it internally to a party is probably easier than completely externally.
As tenuous as it may be, it’s stronger than anyone else’s!
The democratic party after the Civil War was was the political wing of the KKK, in a similar relationship of Sinn Fein to the IRA.
Hasn’t that already happened? Since 2016 there has been frequent reportage that the GOP has increasingly been taken over by populists, that the platform that the party proclaimed before (small government and a libertarian touch, some military hawkishness) has little appeal or momentum today when it comes to deciding elections. When the candidate for president who wanted to run under that party had enough charisma to be elected (or at least defeat all other primary challengers), ideology went out the window. And all without creating a third party.
True replacement would be an entirely new party, from the ground up eventually forming government.
Well, yes, several times. Like I said "in the history of the US..." - because it's happened before.
But what you describe here is shifting platform of the party itself, perhaps due to gerrymandered House districts shifting the rhetoric to include ever more extreme ideals.
You really need at least ranked voting and ideally multi-seat PR to get out of that, which is hard as it's against the interests of the two big parties.
That said, looking at the UK there does seem to be a renewed interest in moving away from FPTP in their Labour Party despite it being nominally against the parties interests, so maybe there's a way to get movement on that?
Parties have no standing at all within the United States Constitution. The fact that we are talking this way is reflective of the simple fact that the representative democracy (aka Republic) that the United States is has been corrupted by parties that work to their own interest, not the interest of the people.
IF you need any evidence of that, you can see it this week when Democrats voted party line with a few Republicans to remove a speaker for no other reason than it humiliated the republican party and the speaker.
FPTP systems are bad for delivering only two parties, but all systems cause parties of some scale.
That single member can “cross the aisle” without being instantly dismissed from their party and loosing all speaking rights, which is why we have two party. This gives the representative more ability to represent the interests of their district, by threatening to break ranks.
…apart from all others.
There are _lots_ of places in the US where one of the two major parties is a complete shambles and there are people running unopposed for races where a third party could actually come in and win elections.
Demonstrate success at the county level, work up to getting elected to the state house, demonstrate that you can govern effectively and so on.
It's a 20 or 30 year project, and it's not glamorous like running for president is, though.
It's actually much easier to do this a national level, and then drive it downwards into the states.
Also, getting elected to state houses requires a lot of non-monetary support for field work and independent candidates won't have the resources.
That depends on how the party primaries are arranged.
Current conditions seem to favor general elections with two extremists rather than a moderate who can win a plurality.
Many Westminster descendants are not this way, and never have been. Canada has multiple parties, new ones crop up and old ones die.
The current conservative party is a 20ish year old party, and a merger/takeover of the Reform, then Alliance, the Conservatove party absorbing the tattered remnants of the old party.
We have political alliances, coalition governements where more than one party holds power, minority governments, and typically at least 3 main parties, with a smattering of others around.
We typically have 5 or 6 parties sitting at one time.
And yes, to the youngsters in the room, even our 3rd main party has held power from time to time.
But most importantly, party names and controllers change.
That's on the federal level. On the provincial level, new party spring with abandon, and form governments too.
What I would suggest, is not pushing for something incredibly insane sounding to most US ears, like changing the entire voting system, but instead just push for that third party, something that sounds more tenable.
In other countries groups like the democratic socialists or the tea party would have to run as third parties because they could never get selected to run, but in America if you are in a fridge group it makes more sense to run in one of the two parties.
With each added Senate seat in subsequent years, the third party builds relevance by setting the Senate agenda. Given how evenly split the country is, just a few Senate seats have outsized influence. House is possible too, but with only 2 year terms, the value is harder to maintain and build upon.
And we need a National Popular Vote for President. No more ignoring solidly blue or solidly red states.
We should also force anyone who wants a nomination from one of the major parties (however many there are) for office in the Federal government to pledge to live only and entirely on their pension. They must completely divest of anything but Index Funds. No more paid lobbying retirement for politicians. It's killing this country.
Partisanship in America is a bug, not a feature.
Solutions that require forcing people to adhere to a specific ideological or political framework (or not to) tend towards authoritarianism. You can't stop people in a free society from acting in aggregate to further their own common interests.
The only solution I can see is if the parties themselves decided to change their rules, but they have no reason to. Things are only the way they are now because that is what wins votes and concentrates power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
But the Republicans will never pass it because it would hurt them.
If you live in a one-party state like West Virginia or Maryland, it might make sense to tactically switch to the dominant party. I've done that in my state.
In a perfect world, elections reform would be great: - adopt ranked-choice voting - increase access to the ballot box (motor voter auto-registration, early voting, etc) - adopt compulsory elections (probably would never happen in the States)
I left the Democratic Party a few years ago. My reasoning is that it makes it easier for special interests to game the system if everyone is caged into just one of our two major political parties. The DNC and RNC shamefully service special interests, not public interests. If you disagree, I would be happy to debate this all day.
I still do occasionally make donations to democrats who I think are exceptional and once to a republican candidate in my state who I thought was also exceptional, but I make sure that none of my contributions every again go to DNC (or RNC if I was not liberal).
EDIT: what I am suggesting is that it would be best for our representative democracy if everyone registered independent.
That said, every effort at a third party has started at the top, with the presidency, the only way to build a party is from the bottom up - the Forwardists are trying to do this - but its a many many year effort to do so.
Change doesn't require major structural moves. It just requires less apathy towards the "boring" aspects of politics where the true power lies.
IMO This isn't so much support for the 3 party system. It's the American public saying "Hey this is obviously broken so we need to do something.... anything".
Just like if you ask the average person "Hey what should we do about AI?". They'll say something like "Stop it immediately! I don't want that crap taking my job". We all know it's wayyyy more nuanced than that but the takeaway is people are uncomfortable with AI. Most people are too busy to be well read on everything.
What Americans are really saying here is that neither coalition is really working for them and they're looking for some other new coalitions to form. It's particularly acute at the moment with the Republican party where the fractures are fairly clear and have been forming for the last few decades. However, the Democratic party also has fissures and it may explain why it's turned into such a gerontocracy as the old guard seek to keep the the coalition together.
In either case, the minor parties of either major probably won't seek to break away unless they believe they can form a new coalition (major) party that will win at the polls.
What I think many Americans would hope, if really pressed, would be a center-right party (by American thinking of left-right politics) that ejects the more extreme right wing concerns and pulls enough of the center-left to win while also filtering out more classic left-wing politics. Where that center-left comes from? I would wager mostly various highly religious, but not necessarily evangelical, groups made heavily of recent or second generation minority immigrant groups who tend to be more conservative in thinking but pushed to align with the Democratic party because of all the race hating nonsense in the Republican party. Some of these groups have been test migrating to the Republican party over the last generation simply because the Democratic party isn't coherent in its ability to absorb multiple competing ethical and moral frameworks, but I would bet that those groups are generally unhappy being in the same room as all the anti-<insert religious ethnic group> people who don't like them and are looking for better aligned identity.
Like any great American political institution, such a party would continue to be decades behind the political thought in Europe, left of most of Asia without the long-term thinking, and be paradoxically highly inclusive of race and religion while intolerant of real social progress.
If there are any flash in the pan third parties, their platform will get absorbed by the big 2 and it’ll disappear.
A third party is fundamentally irrelevant in the design of our democracy. This poll should be 0% support.
Say we had to choose candidates like we choose employees, we should have: - individual tests for the employee (actual aptitude in things like strategy, diplomacy, math & statistics, science) - behavioral tests (how likely to lie/take risks) - etc.
Instead it all seems to boil down to statistics-backed popularity contests half-a-step up from elementary school class elections.
Until then, anytime spent endorsing voting for contributing to a third party is moot.
It seems like a "centrist" third party is the only type that would have a chance at winning anything. But nobody is stepping forward to create that party.
The moment someone started to get popular, both big parties would start;
1 - flinging whatever crap they could at them.
2 - try to steal any policy differentiation they tried to do that seemed popular.
3 - would crack down on their own loyalists.
4 - use all their existing leverage to sabotage them.
It’s the ‘of course I care about the environment!’ choice. It will be popular as long as it isn’t concrete and doesn’t require any real sacrifices.
If you had to guess why it's currently flagged, what's your hypothesis?
People on HN come here for tech news, not to discuss politics.
It's pointless: everyone in politics is either corrupt, or about to become corrupt. They give you an illusion of choice creating fake controversies and putting people against each others.
Then you vote and nothing changes.
Obama didn't achieve anything but warmongering. Trump didn't reduce spending.
They were both puppets put there to give different people a bit of hope that the systems is not rigged.
But it is. Nobody will save you. You're doomed to be forever slaves and give more than half of what you produce to the government.
Sure, country hopping to avoid taxes will work for a bit, but soon a new Global Tax will pray on all of you and soon after they'll come up with a Global Government BS in the name of peace, climate change or something else equally vapious.
So yeah, I don't need HN to think about this crap, I want to see the latest cool tech thingies.
Why, do you support the woke mind virus?
These polls are almost meaningless. Why? Because its city, county and state politics is where most (not all) party power resides, particularly on election day when "get out the vote" and election integrity is determined. Trump's election in 2016 stands out as a notable exception to this general rule, but his defeat in 2020 was very much a return to the rule. Also, US elections currently come down a few dozen or so counties in the US where grass roots party activities make the biggest difference.
Then, importantly, its from the State/County organizations that many political and judicial appointments are made by new administrations. A third party lacks the depth and roster of qualified applications for those roles. The problems this creates are well illustrated, again, by the Trump administration that struggled to fill positions.
None of this is intended to take sides pro or con a party or person. I'm just pointing out reality having worked in a city and statewide campaign, among other related experiences.
In order for a candidate to win, they must win two elections. The first, or primary, election requires them to win a vote within their private club or party. Currently, that means that you have to be radical within that party. You have to take what would be an extreme position in the general population in order to appeal to enough people within the party. It guarantees that all candidates that emerge from the primary will overrepresent the fringe.
So then you get to the general election where the only choices are polar. You see where even a pretty far right Liz Cheney fails the Trump test and isn't "Republican" enough to survive round one. Same thing happens with the Dems.
A third party could lead to disaster. If you get all the conservatives that can't stomach Trump to split away, you hand elections to the likes of Sanders. And not just occassionally. The conservatives would never win another election ever because they would split the vote every time. If you get the liberals that can't stomach Biden to split away, you hand elections to the likes of Trump. Forever.
I think you have to fix the process to solve the party problem. Tweak the process to push candidates back to the center instead of away from the center.
If that were true (of both parties), then President Sanders would be in his second term right now. The last two Democratic primaries were each taken by the most conservative candidate running.