Everyone in the major parties, and everyone off of the axis between them, likes to see themselves as the center of the political spectrum, but that's actually a pretty empty place, not a crowded one.
This is often mis-represented as a "third party". There is no third party. There are nineteeth, twentieth, twenty-first, etc. parties. Technically some party must be "third" but it's so far behind the two major ones that it doesn't matter.
Elections only have one winner. You can have as many losers as you want, but in the end you must assemble a large enough coalition to be the single largest vote-getter. "None of the above" is not such a coalition.
It's completely irrelevant to the question.
Most people just vote in the general election where this isn't necessary. The reason the Democrats or Republican might want voters to register for their party primary is to avoid the other party getting their weakest primary candidate the win so that they can beat them in the actual election.
Also keep in mind that there is no federal election, so when you hear people talk about "the popular vote" it's a misnomer. There isn't actually a national popular vote. All elections are run by individual states, and in fact even national offices like President can have different candidates on the ballot in different states, depending on what happened earlier in the election season during the party primaries.
This is quite similar to Canada, in that the party members pick candidates and vote for the leader. However, once the slate is tabled for each riding, it's purely a case of confirming you're registered on the list in the riding.
EDIT: I had to double check this before commenting, but in some states you don't even register with a party as far as the state is concerned (Georgia, for example, it's been 12 years and I'd forgotten). Though they still have the party primaries.
> It seems self-evident that the Republican Party — more a celebrity fan club than a political organization at this point — would, if left to its own devices, destroy the foundation of the republic.
This does a tremendous dis-service to the Republicans (including Mike Pence!) who refused to go along with Trump's lies and machinations. There were far too few of them, but they were there, and it really mattered that they were there.
Though I guess if you take the party as a whole, the statement may be accurate, or at least may have been so a year ago.
But I thought this was an interesting insight:
> In their zeal to beat back Trumpism, the loudest Democratic groups have transformed into its Bizarro World imitators.
There is some symmetry there that I hadn't noticed.
Who do you think would really win the Republican nomination? Charlie Baker or DeSantis?
McCain sings bomb bomb Iran. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7s5pT3Rris
Moderate Republicans (and Conservative Dems)[0] have been largely dead since the long post-WWII realignment settled out in the mid-1990s.
[0] Yes, this is asymmetrical; that's how systematic overrepresentation to one side of the spectrum combined with the incentive to nearly-balanced parties under the electoral system we have shakes out.
With a 3rd party, cooperation becomes just as important (if not more so) than conflict.
The # of viable parties is a symptom of features of the electoral system that also have effects like that, not the cause.
And electoral systems that support multiple viable parties don't so much force cooperation in most cases (though they may make the need for multiparty coalitions) as promote positive competition (based on advocating policy ideas) over negative competition (based on tearing down the main opponent) because elections aren't zero sum and tearing down your main opponent can instead serve another opponent rather than yourself.
Local offices like a city council are often not done by party affiliation. Local voting can have some influence.
I guess our marginal seats were the equivalent of US "swing states"?
https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/research-papers/document/00P...
Except for Epsom, Tauranga, and Coromandel which have continued their outsized influence most elections since.
[1] https://michaelhobbes.substack.com/p/moral-panic-journalism?...
"This is about the point where some (most likely some in my own business) will scream: 'Both sidesism!' That’s the now-cliche argument that any criticism of Democrats whatsoever must be some kind of journalistic reflex to equate the parties, when clearly one is worse than the other."
"One is worse than the other. But that doesn’t mean we have to feel jazzed about supporting a party that would grade our worthiness as people on a sliding scale of identity. It doesn’t change the fact that the broad center of the American electorate — traditional conservatives and liberals both — no longer has a political home."
The era where bipartisanship was more common during the last three or so decades of the long post-WWII (through mid-1990s) realignment wasn't because of a stronger center, it was because a very similar distribution of viewpoints as today was distributed between parties who weren't clearly aligned against each other on the main axis between the major factions; so you had the same recognizable liberal and conservative factions, with “liberal Republicans” and “conservative Democrats” being substantial factions. Historically and structurally this is an aberrant situation, the parties tend to align against each other on the major ideological axis of divisions in the countries. But things got shook up by the New Deal (and later public welfare programs) and then a series of Civil Rights measures that didn't quite fit the existing partisan alignment, and they came hard and fast enough that it took an unusually long time for the new alignment to shake out...
Now, there is a broad disenfranchised group, but it's not mainly the “center”, it's a diverse group of people whose views fall in a variety of places not near the axis between the major parties; in a system which supported more viable parties having a meaningful role in the political systems, they’d be served by their own parties; as it is now they are either protest voting or voting with whichever major party seems least bad at the moment and not liking it much, and in many cases being hyper-targeted by propaganda from the other major parties side not aiming to engage their interest, but to alienate them from the major party closer to their interests (or electoral politics generally) as part of the zero-sum nature of the two-party system.
That is equating them. He is presenting the chief arguments why neither faction represents him, both leading to the same conclusion.
Both parties share sweeping agreement on nearly every single economic bill that passes. If you ever start thinking they might disagree about something, don’t worry because it will never pass, because they don’t disagree.
The record is painfully clear. You only have one choice on economic policy.
I know this is a systemic issue of the chosen representative models — but the outrage it would produce in Europe if the person with a fewer number of absolute votes would win would be absolutely of the charts. In the US it is more like a "unfortunate, but what can you do" type of reaction.
Looking at the current state of the US democracy worrying about the parties visions of "americanism" seems downright naive given that one of the parties seems to be in the process of trying to get rid of the democratic vote altogether.
As an Austrian living in Germany I can't help but thinking of the Weimar Republic before the Nazis came to power. Stories about people bashing the social democrats back then, with the Nazis rising on the horizon. Nazis setting fire to the Reichstag and blaming it on the communists. I said that Trump was a fascist back when he was elected and most US commenters would tell me I was paranoid, delusional etc. I told them that I was not sure if this guy would go peacefully if he lost the next election and I was right on the money. The problem right now is that Trump is not the only fascist in the republican party. Of course there is also true believers in democratic principles in the GOP, but they seem to be in the minority.
Given those thoughts I wonder whether the US has the freedom right now to complain about the vision of the one party that still stands for democratic principles not aligning a 100% with their own ideas. Personally I'd rather vote for a 1000 regulations I absolutely hate, implemented by people I absolutely despise than voting for someone who could potentially get rid of me being able to vote in the future.
Once you lose the right to vote, you won't have the possibility to alter that choice anymore. I always perceived US citizens as people who valued democracy above petty party politics, bit I am not sure about that now.
Anybody who could not tell what the effect of picking or not picking Trump in 2016 would be should question their moral compass or mental acuity. It was pathetically obvious how social/moral matters would be handled with each option.
