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Comment by santoshalper | Hacker News Reader

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I’m not going to argue with your core point, but New York is a state where the Working Families Party successfully beat the centrist Republican-aligned Independent Democrat Conference in the state Senate. This led to the New York Court of Appeals overturning current electoral maps and opens the door for a Democrat-favorable map for 2024.

Conditions in NY are atypical and the success of the Working Families Party can’t be trivially duplicated but it’s one of the best examples of long term strategic third party activity we have in the U.S.

Third parties in the US fail usually because they are run the complete opposite of how minor parties operate in other countries.

Most third parties in the US (unlike WFP) tend to go for a strategy for shooting the moon and aiming at top spots immediately, which has never worked. Third parties in other countries generally have a go at wining local seats first and building their base from there.

They also focus on attacking their moderate fellows over their ideological opponents, instead of forming a coalition with moderates.

At least in NY (and probably true of state/local politics in general) this is not necessarily true. These third parties often will choose a D or R that align with their policy goals. It helps candidates in that their name is on the ballot more (either multiple rows or listing the parties that they are the nominee of)

That isn’t really a third party though that most people would think of; when people are saying this in the context of US elections they usually mean they want a third actual person on the general ballot.

The US lacks a third party like the UK’s Lib Dems or Greens, or Canada’s NDP. (The US has a Green party that is pretty farcical and doesn’t actually win elections.)

> That isn’t really a third party though that most people would think of; when people are saying this in the context of US elections they usually mean they want a third actual person on the general ballot.

There are usually significantly more than three names on a Presidential general election ballot. The US has a two-party system because it has an electoral system in which voting for any but the least offensive of the two major parties structurually is subiptimal in achieving ones preferences, not because there are only two options on the ballot.

For the presidential ballot this is true.

For the local school board or mayor, this is less true, because nearly all third parties do not field separate candidates in these races. It’s possible to win these races since the margin of victory is measured in the hundreds or single-digit thousands, but none of the third parties build up a base and instead shoot for the moon and inevitably lose.

> For the local school board or mayor, this is less true, because nearly all third parties do not field separate candidates in these races.

In mich of the country, school board (and in somewhat less, mayoral) elections are nonpartisan. Its true that some local races are poorly contested, but that's actually largely unrelated to party structure, and more related to an insufficiency of people interested in the job (this usually isn’t a problem for mayors and schoolboards.)

Where these races are partisan, minor parties frequently contest them, and even where they aren't, minor parties can be found organizing around them (though where they are formally nonpartisan, you may not notice this, since the endorsement of the third-party may only be actively highlighted to party members.)

> It’s possible to win these races since the margin of victory is measured in the hundreds or single-digit thousands

And third parties do win them. Virtually all of the third party elected officials in the US are exactly this kind of local official, with a smaller number of state officials.

it's a very small number; there have been 117 Green Party office holders, ever, across the entire United States, even though there are more than half a million elected positions in the US. And most of those people were not initially elected as Greens.

There has basically been no successful attempt to set up an ongoing party infrastructure and base, that actually wins elections. Pretty much all independent politicians in the US are one man shows.

New York's system is unique, though there are some other states where cross-endorsement is possible.

I left [swing] state-level politics after working for one party, and then the other, after becoming disgusted with internal partisan politics. This is a very unpopular thing to say, but on the inside they both seemed so similar and out of touch to me. Talking about voters with disdain and reminders about the importance of donors and special interests. I had to get out; my experience fundamentally changed my view of our system and changed some of my life goals.

There is also no legitimate Conservative Party in the us. Just chamber of commerce representatives like mitt Romney that is happy as long as taxes get cut and dod is funded and cedes all other social ground to democrats.

The US has, by the standard of the rest of the western world, two conservative parties. If you saw what most of the world considers a mildly left centrist, your brain would explode.

The US has no conservative party (in economics and culture) sans some guys streaming from their basement with greenscreen on kick and rumble (they got banned from twitch).

It's really the battle of who can win (then do the same thing for the billionaires) while virtue signaling to their respective "base" of commoners (both left and right). It's all establishment.

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