Chapotraphouse

If Trump does run for a 3rd term and it's treated as a legitimate election, then he's already won.

if trump won in 2020 like his supports claim this is already his 3rd term

i think he'll die before 2028.

He and his goons have repeatedly said he plans to "run for a third term" even though that's not a thing, what they actually mean is he intends to be president for the rest of his life no matter what people put in the ballot boxes and no matter whether that life ends in 2027 or 2197.

I think if he was 20 years younger, absolutely.

I expect him to at least be bed ridden by 2028, if he even lives that long.

I think he absolutely would, if he was 5 or 10 years younger.

if he runs for a third term he's already broken with the norms of liberal democracy in this country to such a great extent that rigging the election for him to win would be a given, an afterthought. he's not gonna take that step if there's any risk of losing involved

probably a moot point though given his rapidly declining health

Maybe Dems will hand it to them with the caveat that certain districts with an average household income above $125,000 in locations within 20 miles of the city center of all cities starting with the letter R get to have a symbolic, non-binding election every 2 years, thus keeping liberal democracy alive? I bet you’d feel really silly if that happened.

i think normalizing third parties should be the primary short-term goal of electoralism. there just isn't anything else for "left-wing" electoralism to do when the first party is designed around sabotaging, co-opting, and destroying left-wing movements.

Well under Democracy with American Characteristics, political parties are private corporations. Participation in the presidential debates is also run by a private corporation, who declared early on

After studying the election process in 1985, the bipartisan National Commission on Elections recommended "[t]urning over the sponsorship of presidential debates to the two major parties".[3] The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to "take control of the presidential debates".[3] The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf.[3] At a 1987 press conference announcing the commission's creation, Fahrenkopf said that the commission was not likely to include third-party candidates in debates, and Kirk said he personally believed they should be excluded from the debates.[3]

The heads of the CPD are usually ex-leaders of the two corporations that make up the Democratic and Republican parties, and when those corporations want to bypass the CPD, they just negotiate with different corporations.

In May 2024, the Biden and Trump campaigns struck a deal to circumvent the CPD and participate in two debates (on CNN on June 27 and ABC on September 10), breaking a longstanding tradition of debates organized under the auspices of the CPD,[10] throwing the future of the CPD into doubt.

Is attempting to normalize third parties worth losing congressional seats?

Yes. Absolutely.

It's not going to happen though, because none of these people are socialists.

As i said, power hungry poops, the power comes first and above all, and thus indicates the person is cooptable and not a threat, in a larger sense. Your either immediately quit or become pelocia, or willing to be such a nuisance to be 1term representative, or you get starry eyed about proximity to power as to take pictures with genocide joe. You don’t have any power, but you think you do, and do this work for 30 years