It certainly does matter who is in the House of Representatives, especially in your 100% scenario where any presidential veto could be overridden. Presidents aren't autocrats. They need to work with congress to get what they want done. 

And again, state politics and local politics are probably much more important when it comes to most public policy than national politics. Most things that affect an American's day to day life are determined at these levels of political action, including how people vote for president. 

I sup[ort this and I support the primarying ans removing of neocons and neolibs from the democrats and joint that party. Hell if you can do that to the GOP, more power to you. The left and frankly the right which cares for workers needs a multi-pronged approach. Not just doing one thing but many many things all at once and to overwhelm the establishment so they never see it coming. It will also scare them and force them to listen to the people otherwise you can be primaried or you can have your election spoiled by a third party. The Corporatists need to be shaking in their boots and be afraid of losing all their power because they should lose their power. Maybe the DNC won't ignore the left next convention or try to screw over someone like Bernie. I hope though that the democrats and republicans her broken up into nothingness and new parties emerge and new systems for voting instead of the electoral college are established which support multi parties and also money is taken out of politics. Ultimately though I hope Capitalism falls Al around the world and is replaced with a better system for the people because Capitalism sucks

You missed the point, I just wanted to point out at the disconnect between Congress and the President, which doesn't exist in other countries with FPTP elections, and how those are divided up into local elections instead of statewide like in the US, which makes FPTP in the US so shitty and lopsided for third parties in general.

I understood your point fine, I just didn't consider it to be a relevant distinction. You missed my point. The nationalization of politics and the tendency to be presidential-centric is a recent phenomenon which could be made contemporary to our period. Historically the saying "All politics is local" held true in the U.S. In that context, where you treat the different elections as essentially separate things, it doesn't matter that the president is separate from Congress, you can still vote third party for a congressperson and then for one of the two main candidates for president. Hell, before state laws abolished it in many states (all except eight, today) there was something call electoral fusion which acted as an incentive for voting third party locally, for HoR, or Senate. 

Oh, I got your point, too, don't worry. I just think your thinking of the weight of the presidency in today's politics is way outdated and thus don't valuate the presidency or even governorship enough compared to local elections.

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.)  

I was fine with the first sentence and wasn't going to reply, but reading the rest of your post made me want to clarify two things, if not for you, for anybody else reading: 

1. I already agreed that "Our rules suck." That you seem to have taken from the post I wrote (which it seems you might not have read?) that I was saying they don't suck is truly amazing considering that I said, "I don't disagree that the current election rules suck."

2. I never "presume[d] to tell [you] what the intent of [your] posts are." Where the hell did that come from? 

So while I am fine "to agree to disagree" I don't think you even understand what we are disagreeing about in the first place. It certainly isn't "that the rules suck" which we do indeed have agreement on. 

Misunderstanding your position and "presuming your intent" are two very different things. I might have done the first, but I certainly didn't do the latter. Anyway, when you said this, 

"Elections in the UK and Canada are a horrible mess because of the existence of more than two major parties. They make our elections look neat and tidy by comparison, and ours are already unrepresentative enough. FPTP rules are not the norm for lower house elections in most of the world, and it's easy to see why."

What exactly did you mean? For example, when you say "ours are already unrepresentative enough" and you precede that by "they make our elections look neat and tidy by comparison" does it not follow that you think Canada's and Britain's elections are more unrepresentative than the American elections? And since all of that was preceded by your concern that the party in charge ruled with a minority government that had a plurality, I (maybe wrongly) gathered that you were suggesting that the American legislature is more representative because majorities (or larger pluralities, near majorities) control it. Hence my response about how only looking at the party representation and not the representation of policy positions in the legislature as a whole is what I'd consider the wrong way to measure how representative a legislature is. I'd argue that if 80% of people support something like Medicare For All, 80% of a legislature (or as close as possible to that) should support Medicare For All. Likewise, with any other policy. 


I wasn't defending the rules. I was defending voting third party in certain circumstances, given that the rules are what they are and aren't likely to change soon enough for the 2022 and 2024 elections. If I had my way we'd switch to a Mixed-Member Proportional system, like what exists in Germany. Where did I ever defend first past the post? 

I accept the fact that Canada and the U.K have less representative elections than Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, etc. But I think in order to measure representation one shouldn't just look at party representation, but also how often popular policies get enacted into law. For example, there is a well-known study that has been circulating the internet for years now about how the U.S is an oligarchy because there is such a low correlation between public policy preferences and the laws that are passed, while there is a high correlation between elite policy preference and the laws that are passed. I'd argue that even if the parties represented public preference (given the limited choices offered) perfectly (Democrats get the same proportion of seats to their vote, Republicans ...) , if this still persisted, the U.S would still not have a representative democracy, because the parties that exist are not representing the population in their platforms and actions. My argument is that by having more parties Canadian and U.K legislatures better represent their constituents in this sense because it forces the parties to conform to popular opinion in order to win. In other-words, "safe districts" are fewer because there is always some sort of competitor, and because safe-districts are fewer the public has more influence over elections. So while the U.K and Canada are less representative than Germany, Ireland, and New Zealand, they are more representative than the U.S -- and that is because in part they have more parties and therefore more competitive elections. 

Your first point is precisely what I've been saying. There are roughly 90 House of Representative seats where Republicans get 30% or fewer votes in a regular election. This means that unless there is an exceptionally strong Republican national atmosphere, the top two parties (assuming there are three) in these districts won't have a Republican. There is no reason why these seats should remain safe. A party to the left should run against Democrats in so much as they fill such seats, which should have left-wing representatives because the populations are left-wing, with centrist and center-right candidates. That is where the People's Party should start and focus until there is electoral reform. Even if we assume that these two parties only got 35% of the vote respectively (meaning their votes split down the middle) Republicans can't win, because they'd only have at max 30% of the vote and therefore would be a third party. Over a few elections the center party (likely Democrats) would likely split in two with the People's party getting a majority of Democratic votes and the moderate portion of the former Democratic Party splitting and moderating the Republicans who run. That'd mean that in these districts the whole political scene would have shifted leftward. Not only would there be a viable and strong left-wing dominant party in the district, but there would also be a more moderated Republican party to represent centrist and center-right voters. 

The point of voting for a left-wing third party isn't to "punish" Democratic primary voters (although I'd ask why should left-wing independents and non-Democrats care about Democratic primaries that we can't even participate in without becoming Democrats?) but to get better representation. Democratic primaries aren't perfectly small "d" democratic processes. They are skewed by money, establishment connections, etc. Again, I bring up the scenario of Pelosi now pushing Kennedy rather than the progressive incumbent Ed Markey because Kennedy was able to bring donors in to support Democrats. Massachusetts is progressive enough that Markey should be in his own party to the left of establishment Democrats, and if that means the sort of moderate Republicans that exist in Massachusetts sometimes win state-wide elections (as they already do now) that's okay. The goal should be to shift all of American politics leftward so that the whole ecosystem of politics are no longer skewed so far right to the point of being unrepresentative. 

Sanders is an Independent, and while he might understand that no third party is going to win the presidency, he still runs for Senate as an Independent. So I think he is quite in line with a position (I think you and I see close to) about running third party and independent candidates in highly progressive districts/states. If you lived in Vermont and a Democrat was running against Sanders -- Independent that he is, would you vote down the ticket Democratic, even if you agreed with Sanders more? What if Sanders started a political party called the Vermont People's Party and campaigned for people to vote for this party in House of Representative, Senate, and Gubernatorial elections, but Democratic in presidential elections? 

Yes, I think we both were talking past each-other a little. A few posts ago I shared a video about how we could shift to Ranked-Choice (or any other non-plurality) voting system without doing so through the parties via citizen's initiative and referenda. I support electoral reform, but I also think that within certain districts and regions it makes sense to vote for a non-Democratic, non-Republican option, because those districts/regions are essentially one-party districts/regions as it is. 

I like STV, and think it works great in Ireland. My preference for MMP mostly resides in the fact that Germany has quite a broad Overton Window and part of that is because of how it explicitly instantiates parties in to the system. Party-list would also do this, but I don't think Americans would tolerate party-list systems as there is still some connection to districts and home-rule. So a mixed-system seems like a decent compromise. 

But really, I'd imagine that committing to non-plurality voting on a state-by-state basis, with each state choosing its own system would make it much harder for any organized coalition to game the system in a systematic manner. If one-fourths of the states have single-membered ranked-choice voting, another quarter have MMP, another STV, etc it is going to be hard to create a national coalition to game the system. Similar to how while it is theoretically possible to gerrymander with an MMP system, functionally it is harder to do when there are three to seven parties determining the map because nobody has an actual majority. 


Honestly, I think the only area we disagree is in whether or not the Democratic Party is moving leftward. If you asked me last year, I would've agreed, but everything that has happened in the last year has shown an attempt to "triangulate" to the right. 

I think we do need a serious third-party in America with a lot of momentum. I don't want us having over a dozen powerful parties all at each other's throats. But we could use 3-5 parties in state and federal legislatures. I hope this movement goes somewhere.