Healthcare Trigger Mechanism a Great Idea

[Mr Khan]

halogamer1989 said:

Kasz216 said:
But a third party has won the presidency before Halogamer.

A third party your very familiar with. Well they aren't a third party anymore.


Bull Moose almost pulled it off too... and should have if they didn't get screwed by backdoor politics.

Teddy Roosevelt was one of a kind though. An extreme moderate so to speak. He was a moderate but he wasn't middle of the road in the way he acted unlike current passive moderates.

Whigs?  They were were the major party against the Jacksonian Dems in the 2nd Party System.  For Bull-Moose Teddy got 88 electoral votes to Wilson's 435 and Taft's 8.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1912

Teddy was an uber progressive.  He would run as a reformist, pro-welfare Democrat if he were alive today.

(puts on Academia hat)

 

The fun of it is the fact that it has been scientifically proven that countries with our system of elections will always default to a two-party system, unless there are regional irregularities (Canada has 4 major parties i believe, one of which is purely regionalist). Because we have no provision for runoffs, and our elections are run by plurality, not by majority, a third party will never ever be viable in the long run, simply because a third party would primarily leech votes from one of the big two, and fears about the other of the big two winning will force the majority of voters to go for the rational choice.

Like with the Libertarians, or the Greens, or the Communists. The average Libertarian will just vote Republican, because he would rather have a Republican in office than a democrat, and if enough Libertarians voted for the actual Libertarian candidate, that would just sap votes from the Republican base and allow the Democrat to win. Ditto for Greens or Commies in the case of Democrats. The better of the rational choices gets voted for, not the voters ideal candidate (else i would vote for something a little more radically left-wing, if there was a point to it)

 

It's called Duverger's law, and is one of the few absolute laws in political science.

EDIT: Forgot to add that that doesn't mean it's impossible for a third party to gain ground in the long run, but it has to kill one of the big two in order to do it. As the new party rises, the older will have to fail. If they can't kill the old party, their days are numbered, as with the Progressives in the example Halogamer mentioned