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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Showerthoughts
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People are always saying this, but is there actually evidence that it's true? The Libertarian Party regularly gets more votes than the Greens, so if anything it seems like the opposite is true. Ross Perot got the most votes of any third party candidate in history, and in both the elections he ran in, Bill Clinton won. In 2016, Trump refused to rule out the possibility of a third party run if he didn't get the nomination, and it appeared to be a serious possibility.
So is this claim just based on vibes or what?
It's been a long time since Ross Perot.
I'm basing it on trends. We saw with RFK being offered whatever he wanted as soon as it looked like he was going to take more votes from Trump than Harris. He dropped out and backed Trump. While not all of his supporters might not automatically go vote for Trump (just as not all Libertarians won't pick R for their second choice) it probably helped.
The Libertarians got what? 1/3 of the votes in 2020 than they did in 2016? Seems like they're on the decline to me.
We're seeing more of a push by various internet influencers (who knows who's paying them, LOL) to push people on the left towards voting third party. And maybe I've spent too much time on lemmy, but it seems to be working. People want to vote for Cornel West or Jill Stein.
It's probably exhausting for campaign workers to have to constantly explain they shouldn't vote third party as it might result in Trump getting in. It would be far easier to say "sure I kinda like [Third Party Candidate] too, but I like [Democratic Candidate] more because blah blah blah, but the most important thing is you go out and vote!" and be fairly confident that vote will cascade down to their candidate. The whole "don't vote third party" schtick that's going on now may just result in that person not voting at all.
A lot of emphasis now is in getting turnout. If a third party candidate can energize some turnout whose votes will cascade down to the Dem candidate, that means the third parties are helping them instead of hurting them. And what people think now about how voting third party will push the Dems more towards that position would actually be true. Right now it's not true but the internet is teaching them otherwise.
It sounds like you're basing it entirely off personal experience. But your personal experience probably doesn't give you a representative cross section of Americans.
The Greens also got 1/3 of the votes in 2020 as 2016, both times being about 1/3 of the Libertarian party.
There's also, like, some pretty big rifts in the right, between the old school establishment and the MAGA crowd. There was tons of infighting over the speaker and whatnot. Trump himself was obviously controversial, and I mentioned the threat of him running third party. If Republican voters would just line up to vote for anybody, the establishment would've never allowed things to splinter to the degree they have, they'd kick people out of the party and the voters would go for whoever they offered instead. I don't see how any of that is explainable if what you're saying is true.
I feel like part of that narrative is just seeing the right run shitty candidates and seeing right wingers vote for them, but that's because the voters have different values and preferences. They still care quite a bit about the things they do care about, and break rank when they don't get their way, and much more so than people in the left do from the numbers I'm seeing.
Neither does yours. The fact is that there are Democrats pushing legislation pushing to move towards Ranked Choice Voting. It's only your personal experience that leads you to believe that it's all for show.
Yeah but they didn't form a new party did they? And I don't think the Dems want to be dependent on the GOP running another unpopular candidate in 2028. They have campaign workers that actually talk to a lot of voters so they'd know better than either of us about the cross section of Americans.
Most people don't know about legislation that has passed, forget about proposed legislation being a thing that will influence voters. So why would they bother proposing legislation they don't really want in an effort to bamboozle people who don't even know about it?
Of course. That's why I cited a bunch of actual evidence and examples that aren't dependent on my personal experience.
Is it? I don't recall bringing up my personal experience in that matter at all, or bringing up that matter in the first place. Nothing about my personal experience seems relevant to that question, it's not as if I have firsthand experience with politicians in Washington that I'm using to determine whether they're trustworthy or not.
Now this is just silly. Are you suggesting that performative legislation never happens? It happens all the time, especially during election seasons. Just because not every person hears about ever minutiea doesn't mean that nobody ever hears about anything or that it can't influence voters. You're literally using it right now to try to influence people.
We can talk about whether this particular example is performative or not, but to rule out the entire concept of performative legislation categorically is ridiculous.