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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Can you elaborate? Do you think it’s pointless if more red voters go for third party?
The only good argument I’ve seen against voting third party comes down to: dem voters are more likely to vote third party so more voting third party means more red votes.
Like wouldn’t it be a good thing in your eyes if existing red voters voted third party?
You are demonstrating my point why it's counter productive: you're less likely to get something resembling what you want, and more likely to get something almost exactly the opposite of what you want.
To elaborate, the issue is our FPTP voting system. With rational actors, it's going to tend towards a two party system. The simple example is that if you have a progressive candidate and a liberal candidate, who both pull 30% of the vote, and some far right wing candidate that pulls the remaining 40%. . . every time the right wing candidate is going to win, and the liberals/progressives, who would be mostly happy with the other candidate left wing candidate, are going to end up with the exact opposite of what they want. So these two groups act rationally and coalesce around a single candidate, so now they get 60% of the vote and win every time, while not getting everything they may want.
So even if a third party does win at some point, which has happened in the past, it will quickly return right back to a two party system . . .usually because the third party won and the people whose vote was split realize that it was a terrible strategy.
So sure, if it was right wingers splitting the vote, I would be more likely to get what I want and that would be fantastic. But despite being dumbasses that will vote for Trump, they are still rational enough to realize that not coalescing around a single candidate would be a disaster for them, so they also have a single candidate.
And now that the parties are entrenched, there is no way that the people who have worked up through this system are going to relinquish the control they have. It has to come from the bottom up, or via some (likely violent) revolution. The latter would be more miserable for everyone, so if people really care about not having a two party system, they should be getting involved in local politics and getting it to switch the voting system first, and having that filter up. It's not easy or fast, but it's way better than the alternative.