this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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This is what you get when you have such a polarised electoral system. People treat the parties like sport teams and support them no matter what. So they vote against their own interests because they believe they should never vote for the other side.
1/3 of people dont even vote in the US because there is no real choice.
Its amazing how often you see people aggressively defending the democrats purely on the basis that they're not the republicans. Even criticising the dems is framed as being pro Republican which is crazy. Both parties are shit, both have sewn up the US electoral system between them and keep everyone else out at all levels.
And during elections that opinion gets shut down and people become complicit with the system. "Voting for a 3rd party is a wasted vote" etc.
The idea that voters should be registered as democrat PR Republican is also crazy - it's like supporting a party is part of someone identity which is weird.
The only way out is wholesale reform of the system and I don't see either party offering that. A 3rd party could try and build from the bottom up and dismantle the two parties powerbase but it doesn't seem to be happening.
So maybe it'll be revolution when a party pushes people too far? Though Americans seem willing to tolerate an awful lot of shit without doing anything at all.
Not really. The FPTP system makes that incredibly difficult. You can't get votes without taking some amount away from the closest party.
So existing parties are encouraged to shut down and absorb new parties. And new parties will struggle to get a majority of the old party, let alone a majority of the entire election.
We need a system that doesn't have these nonstarter problems, and that's star + approval voting.
There are several countries that have FPTP voting, but they're not as entrenched at everywhere into two parties the way the US is. The UK, for example, has several regions where one of the two major parties is mostly fighting against a regional party, and the other major party has little to no voting base there.
Not only that, but several southern states have used instant runoff voting since the end of Reconstruction (or not long after). If you look at the makeup of their legislatures over the past 100+ years, you'll see that they are just as filled with Democrats and Republicans as everywhere else.
Point is, FPTP is not the only thing at play.
Sure, that's because there are other factors at play. But FPTP is one of the biggest factors, and in other countries with FPTP it is always the case where there are two dominant parties. Your own example, the UK, has that problem with the conservative & labour parties being the biggest. They always dominate the seats in parliament.
Sure, but a part of why FPTP is so bad is because it gets worse the bigger the election. A small regional election may only have two candidates to begin with, which means any system of voting is esentially equal.
National elections are almost guaranteed to have at least 3 candidates running for a seat, often 4 or 5 if its a seat like the presidency. And that's where you see third parties suffering most.
The fewer the seats there are, and the more national the election is, the worse FPTP gets.
That's because the two parties are so entrenched everywhere else. It's in their interest to dominate and push out 3rd parties in those elections as well.
Agreed, though it is clearly one of the biggest factors in 3rd parties failing. We need reprentational government, and this ain't it.
If you're not conviced by the last . . . eight weeks . . . that that's absolutely not true, I don't know what to tell you. If you're under 24 then that's because the adulting hasn't kicked in full-time, but other than that, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly. People who genuinely say there is no difference are either so privileged that they genuinely feel no difference, or are too young to experience the differences.
This being said I suspect that a good amount of people who say there is no difference are accelerationist bad actors who just have no empathy.