Keeps the illusion alive.
I believe Shiva is the guy who spent years insisting he invented email as a high schooler and that pretty much the entire online world owes him patent fees. I’m one of many old enough to have used email before this patent troll “invented” it
A combination of first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems for nearly all elections, coupled with the Electoral College for the presidency.
First-past-the-post is a system wherein only the plurality candidate wins. Here is an example:
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For a given seat, be it a president, senator, representative, or local office, assume Party A wins 40%, Party B wins 30%, Party C wins 20% and Party D wins 10%.
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Despite a majority of voters preferring someone other than Party A, Party A wins and everyone else loses. This is first-past-the-post voting, and with no other considerations given to the other votes, makes it a winner-take-all system.
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The majority aren’t happy with this, but the other parties continue running their candidates and continue losing because Party A wins the greatest portion of votes each time.
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Because the other parties can’t even win any power, there’s no “coalition” or “alliance” that can be made to shut out Party A.
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Party B decides to take advantage of everyone’s dissatisfaction. They adjust some of their policies to be more favorable to Parties C and D to attract some of their voters. This is the closest thing to a “coalition” that the first-past-the-post system can achieve.
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During the next election, Party A wins 40%, party B wins 42%, Party C wins 12%, and Party D wins 6%. Party B assumes office, starts fulfilling their agenda, a lot of their voters aren’t completely happy, but at least Party A isn’t in power.
This illustrates how only 2 prevailing parties come to be, because it is not possible to win an election in the US unless you obtain the most votes.
For the presidential election, the electoral college is a winner-take-all system determined by the limited pool of national electors.
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Like all other offices, the presidential election is still first-past-the-post. Only the candidate who wins the most votes wins the election, everyone else wins nothing.
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For the presidential election, the only votes that matter are the electoral votes. Each US state is assigned a certain portion of electors which is based on population but is often very disproportionate in practice (due to a capped elector total nationally, and minimum elector thresholds for less-populous states).
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Each elector is 1 vote for the president, and the electors are supposed to vote based on how the citizens of that state voted. This is the distinction between the electoral vote and the popular vote.
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With limited exception, this is also a winner-take-all system, meaning all the electors for a given state must also vote in line with one another. If a state has 10 votes and the election is 51% Party A and 49% Party B, all 10 electors must vote for Party A even though it’s almost a clean split down the middle for the popular vote.
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This results in cases where even if a majority of voters nationally prefer Party B, Party A’s candidate could still win because they won more electors.
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Accepting the system is unfair but being unable/unwilling to change it, the two prevailing parties try to game the system any way they can to swing things in their favor. They identify a handful of states where leads are very narrow and focus all their attention there. These are swing states.
Why do people hate third parties/why do they never win?
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For the reasons illustrated above, a third-party can never win any significant amount of power under the current system.
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When a race is even remotely close, small factors like people who choose to vote third-party instead of supporting one of the other two parties can turn the tide in a swing state, and thereby turn the tide nationally.
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There is a trend of third parties getting financial/promotional support from political groups that are actually opposed to their policies, but are using the third party to attract votes away from their main competition for a given seat. This is called the spoiler effect.
This outlines how, under the current political structure of the US, there can never be a successful third party in government outside of local grassroots elections, and why there is so much hostility towards third parties. Third parties aren’t there to win, they are propped up by larger political interests who use them to take votes from their competition.
This is why you may often see “A vote for a third-party (e.g. Jill Stein) is a vote for Trump” during this election, because the Green Party is being primarily supported by right-wing interest groups this election despite being one of the more “leftist” options on paper.
The only thing I would add is that with the electoral system, it’s not the candidate with the most electoral votes that win, it’s the candidate who gets half+1 votes (270 or more currently)
If candidate A wins 250 votes, candidate B wins 200 votes and candidate C wins 88 votes, candidate A does not win. If there is no winner, the house of representatives votes for president, each state getting one vote.
Another reason why third party presidential candidates are never serious contenders.
can we just set up a bot that does nothing but reply with these two comments to every “why no 3rd parties bro” question. We’ll turn it on three months before every US election and let it travel around lemmy servers. then turn if off until this whole cycle repeats.
Wait, why aren’t you fixing the voting system? Yall clearly understand it’s faults. Don’t you believe in democracy?
“You dont get to vote how you want, and you will be reminded every election.”
Clown country.
because the system is working as designed and it’s incentives keep a lot of people favoring it. but the alternative fast solutions everyone loves to wax philosphical about. well that movie always ends with this really weird wide angle shot of a field. theres this big mound of fresh dirt people are celebrating the victory around. but all our favorite anarchist charaters are missing and nobody can tell me why they got written out at the last minute.
Don’t forget a little note saying "Think this is stupid? Vote for Ranked-Choice Voting!’
You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.
You said to not vote third party, so you can’t vote for rcv.
Not only did they literally not say that… actually no, let’s just pause on this. This is so confused it’s actually kind of amazing. Explaining how first past the post works is not saying don’t vote third party. You could still like a third party the most independent of electoral concerns. And explaining the strategic reasoning for choosing one of the two major parties isn’t the same as saying you “should” vote for them in a moral sense.
Voting to enact a ranked choice voting system isn’t the same as voting for a third part. You could want rank choice voting even if you favored one of the two major parties but don’t want them to lose narrow elections when they might be the winning coalition. You could hate the third party and still want rank choice voting. You can both support a third party and support rank choice voting and understand that they are two entirely separate things.
And I suppose the cherry on top is you referred to them as “you” like it was a single person in a comment chain where it’s three comments by three different people.
Truly a magnificent multi-layered piece of confusion, chefs kiss, five stars, two thumbs up, etc etc.
Usually RCV is an initiative or referendum depending on how your state does it. In mine, it’s just a separate issue on the back that we have to vote for, alongside things like “should we institute a tax for schools” or “should we approve building a new park”.
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The existence of other candidates is not the same thing as any of them having the slimmest chance in hell of winning, and the way our cursed voting system works, they’re going to end up drawing votes away from the “major” candidate that most closely aligns with them. As a result, the “major” candidate they most oppose has one less vote they need to overcome. That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen, a 3rd party vote is just one more vote your most opposed candidate doesn’t need to beat.
And no, 3rd parties are not going to overshadow the major parties. It’s just not going to happen. Look at the absolute dogshit circus that is Trump, look at how many lifelong Republicans have vowed to never vote for him, how he’s absolutely obliterated any little shred of legitimacy the GOP had as a governing party. Now recognize that with that utterly weakened, vulnerable position, that best chance ever, no 3rd party has managed to even come close to unseating them as one of the inevitable 2 contenders. If it hasn’t happened now, it won’t happen ever, not with FPTP voting.
That means that until and unless a 3rd party candidate manages to completely overshadow one of the major political parties, which is effectively never going to happen,
It could happen sometimes, although it’s admittedly rare. Maine has an independent senator, Nebraska has an independent senator who’s running a strikingly close race against the Republican. In Alaska a couple of years ago the same thing happened although the independent didn’t win. I think Jesse Ventura was an independent in Minnesota. But they are one-off cases and not a systematically viable across the whole system.
Alaska has Ranked Choice voting.
Because legally there are more choices, but really, there are only two.
The neat part is that in most states, there isn’t a choice at all!
You have other choices, yes, but it’s always going to be either the Democrat or the Republican that wins.
Like here in the UK, smaller parties get media coverage more so than in the US, but it’s still always going to be either Labour or the Conservatives that are forming a government, so they get the most coverage.
We like to pretend it’s a democracy.
because thats the lived reality of how the us political system works right now. the actual options may not be great. telling my gay friends their marriage may need to stop existing all together for little bit, so I can pretend I took a stand against the system with a socialist party vote is some childish nonsense. yes we need systemic change. thats a conversation with receptive people who need to be in positions to do something in the first place. its that or 3rd parties take themselves seriously and focus locally. in my area there a man dress as a fucking pirate every cycle for the socialist party. its him or a democrat, those are the options on the left. we can play make believe hypotheticals or start having actual discussions about this shit next month. this is not that moment, that moment was 3 years ago but it required effort. this is act with empathy or throw a temper tantrum time.
So people on the internet can get mad that you didn’t vote how they wanted instead of getting mad at you for not voting.
It’s not terribly difficult to get on the ballot. But each state has their own requirement so the third party candidates you see may not be on every ballot nation wide.
It’s not just the media that promotes the two candidates. It’s the billionaires and corporations who invest the most money in promoting someone they find favorable to their interests. Given the bankroll surrounding these two parties, the media really don’t have much choice but to reflect their advertising efforts.
In the US, we have what’s called first past the post elections. That essentially means the first person the get the most votes wins. In this case, it’s electoral votes, not individual votes.
Had the US had something like ranked choice voting or star voting in general elections, third party candidates would be given much more attention.
Given the voting system we have, we mostly vote in a manner that prevents the election of the most popular candidate we don’t like.
The news media are for-profit. They are selling you entertainment masquerading as information. In this endeavor, they focus on two major things:
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Ratings, really just how they can make money through ad revenue.
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Branding and access. Every news media outlet projects an “angle” or “style” meant to be appealing to a subset of the “market”.
What they are covering is party duopoly horse race politics. Others have said that one of the two parties winning is a foregone conclusion, but they have not considered their own participation in this “inevitability”, nor how the media does its part to ensure it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, really just a means of control and self-disempowerment that is only maintained by political miseducation. And this is before we get to the misconception that political power and engagement is simply how you vote.
The horse race politics aspect serves both of news media’s main interests. It gets ratings from the couch-dwelling partisans who get to feel like they are watching a battle between their good side and the other evil side. And often from a brand that confirms that they are the good side of good people. To do this most effectively they need access, they need entertaining figures representing the party duopoly. When they spend time on third parties they either slot it into this framework so that representatives of the duopoly can share their PR strategy against them or they are very short pieces for color (this is rare).
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Honest Answer: Legal requirements.
Local offices have more competition.
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Do Americans not understand the concept of a political alliance
We do, that’s just now how our system works…?
To add, our two major parties tend to adopt (to varying degrees of commitment) popular movements so they’re effectively already coalitions.
For example, Republicans tend to have Christian evangelicals and business interests.
For example, Republicans tend to have Christian evangelicals and business interests.
Yeah.
But at least the Christian evangelicals’ shareholders keep them so accountable to their core values that the desires of the mostly unorganized pastors leading the business owners have no meaningful say in the outcomes. (This is Sarcasm)
Sometimes a “3rd party” candidate will drop out of the race and endorse one oh the “big two” (see RFK Jr. for example) or they will remain in the race and “secretly” act as a “spoiler” to siphon votes away from their ally’s opponent.
There’s no “form a stable government” step in the US. A party with 30% of the vote can take the whole thing. The US government is already stable, it is owned by the capitalists and staffed by bureaucrats and Dem/GOP politicians. They compete to haggle over which ruling class strategy for profit maximization is best.
You are correct that there is a bargaining chip aspect, though. But that is a level of electoral calculus far beyond people that think political power is a trolley problem based on a meme.
