| Shadow1980 said: *sigh* Apparently my login cookie expired and I got automatically logged out while composing my reply. I don't feel like typing the whole thing out again and can't remember it verbatim, so I'm gonna try to shorten it a bit. So, to reply to your points one by one: 1. My point wasn't about a party gaining absolute majorities (seriously, just Ctrl+F for "majority" and you'll see that). My point was about the outcome of elections. I don't care about any given party gaining a majority in the House. I do care about the actual representation being as proportional to the vote percentages as possible. FPTP produces results that are often incredibly unrepresentative, especially when there are more than two major parties. 2. Vote splitting is still a thing that exists, even in Canada. The spoiler effect is essentially a subset of vote splitting. And see again this link I provided. I put those links in my post for a reason: to be read/watched. 3. You could argue that various progressive & socialist movements, running candidates like Teddy Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Eugene Debs under various third-party banners, have accomplished similar things in America. Those parties never lasted, though. They also predated modern partisan politics as we know them (i.e., "right-wing Republicans, center-to-center-left Democrats). A modern attempt at forming a major left-wing party would only serve to cost the Democrats elections. It seems to me that the goal of such a movement is to basically pressure the Dems with the threat of "Well, maybe if you don't want the Republicans to keep winning, give in to our demands and we'll go away." To me, it's better to continue to try to move the Dems leftward from within, not from without, which is working. Maybe not as fast as we'd like, but it progress is being made. 4. The Southern Democrats were a faction within the Democrats, not a separate party in their own right (aside from the time in 1948 some of them split to run Strom Thurmond against Truman under the "Dixiecrat" banner; after the election they re-merged back into the Democratic Party). Conservative southern Democrats were Democrats. When the national Democratic Party pivoted left on civil rights issues, the conservative southern faction didn't split to form their own party. They just gradually moved over tot the GOP. And they weren't the only faction. The Republicans used to have a liberal faction of "Rockefeller Republicans" primarily in northern states. They were still Republicans. Factions within a party do not a new party make, and while the parties of today are much more homogenized ideologically, this wasn't always the case. As for the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, they ceased to exist in 1944 when they merged into the Minnesota Democratic Party. The Minnesota DFL Party may have retained the old Farmer-Labor name in their title, but they are officially a state branch/affiliate of the national Democratic Party. For over 70 years, long before partisan politics had reached its current highly-polarized form, there has not been a major state-/regional-level third-party fielding candidates at the national level. In other words, there is no U.S. equivalent of the SNP or BQ. 5. While the presidential election is technically not a single nationwide election, we are still voting for a single person who represents the entire nation, just as governors represent an entire state. That's obviously quite distinct from a deliberative body like Congress. As there can be only one President, there can be only one winner. FPTP rules suck just as much for an election like that as it does for House elections. Most democracies with an executive president don't use FPTP rules (and we're the only one with an Electoral College, for that matter). They use a two-round system, which is a lot better (though I'd still prefer ranked-choice as it obviates the need for a second election). TL;DR: The entire point I've been trying to make is that our current electoral rules suck, and are not conducive to the existence of third parties. Canada & the UK demonstrate how unrepresentative things can get under FPTP rules, plus we have the experience of spoiler candidates here in the U.S. We need new rules, rules preferably utilizing ranked-choice voting or otherwise getting rid of FPTP. |
1. Your point was that elections where a party holds or forms a coalition that constitutes a majority happens far less commonly in Canada and the U.K. My point was that while that might be true, the actual policy positions of those parties reflect majority popular opinion more than in the U.S due to the competitiveness of elections. I never disputed that FPTP is a bad electoral system nor that it leads to less representative results than others systems. What I disputed is that it means one shouldn't vote for third parties at all. Particularly in regions where the third party isn't a third party but a first or second party.
2. Sure, vote splitting is a thing in Canada, but my point was that in the scenario I provided it is the Liberal party that is splitting the vote, not the NDP. For whatever reason in those districts, the NDP syncs better with the population and gets more of the vote than the Liberal party. It is the more competitive party, and therefore if any party should get out of that district (which Canadians have realized and is why they coordinate to make it the case) it is the Liberal Party. Likewise in any district where the Liberal Party is more competitive the NDP should get out of the district. There is no reason why this couldn't happen in the U.S. I already know how this works. I've watched CGP Grey's videos multiple times, I know the difference between different types of proportional systems like party-list vs. STV, I've researched this topic thoroughly. I also know that Duverger's Law breaks down when it the two major parties at the national level aren't the two major parties in a region.
3. This is probably where we disagree the most. We're already seeing hints that Biden's anemic public option, for example, is going to be ditched. He's backtracked on Medicare For People over 55 (a Clinton policy) to Medicare for People over 60. Pelosi has put her support behind the silver-spooned Kennedy kid for his role as a fundraiser rather than progressive Ed Markey who made sure unemployed people got $600 extra per week during this crisis, in the coming Massachusetts Senate Race. The Democratic Party has consistently been trying to primary the squad, albeit failing, but nevertheless trying. Any progress that is being made in the Democratic Party right now is despite massive efforts to stymie it, hinder it, and slow it down. And honestly with climate change and growing fascist movements borne from capitalism and wealth-inequality there really isn't time to spare. I think it is fine that people are pressuring from within the party, but just as existed in the progressive era and during the Great Depression there has to be pressure outside of it too. The convention last week was filled with Republicans telling other Republicans that the Democratic Party isn't moving left and they don't have to worry. Nobody solidly on the left-wing were invited, AoC was there because Sanders asked her to be there to fulfill the single purpose of nominating him. There needs to be an influential and significant group that tells Democrats that they need to move to the left or stay on the left or otherwise people will choose something else. There also needs to be direct action and a revival of the labor movement, but all of this needs to happen at once. Not any single thing.
4. The Democrats split (and reunited) multiple times in history, not just in the 1950's, but also in the 1860's (and of course before then as the two-party system was constructed in the 1830's.) Here is the 1860 election map.
And you missed my point about the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. It was so successful in its region that it was able to become the dominant party in Minnesota to the point that the local Democratic Party (which became a third party) merged with it, not the other-way around. There is no reason that a concentration of populists couldn't do the same thing today.
5. I don't disagree that the current election rules suck. I disagree that that means there is no point in voting for third parties (in so much as one does so strategically -- vote for them in districts where Republicans will be the third party, i.e they get <= 30% of the vote on a regular basis.)
