Americans are deeply frustrated with politics. They see the country heading in the wrong direction. They are regularly forced to choose between two candidates they don’t particularly like. Between 40 and 50 percent of the country identifies not as Democrat or Republican but as independent.
Here is what it takes to get on the ballot in Pennsylvania. Read through that, noting the difference between candidates for “political parties” and “minor political parties.” Imagine you are thinking about putting forth a challenge to an incumbent state officeholder but don’t want to run as a Democrat or a Republican. What are the odds that you get tripped up by the rules?
The problem, of course, is that Americans have strong views about specific things on which they are often not going to be willing to compromise. The Forward essay criticizes the far left for wanting to get rid of guns and the far right for wanting to get rid of gun laws. But that’s not where the parties are, because the parties are responsive to the coalitions they’ve built. If you simply take some independents and sit them down — much less partisans! — you’re going to very quickly find a lot of important issues on which there is not a reachable consensus. Then what?
This is an older article, but it’s relevant to what’s going on right now. My analysis follows in this comment:
Third Parties don’t work in the USA. Quite simply, it goes back to my whole ‘100 kid SGA election’ example. Even if Bookish Girl was 100% legit and was really running to keep Nerd Boy from winning because he’s actually a bad guy, he’d be a spoiler to her if she was the one with 48 votes behind her name and bookish nerd boy had 3 voting for him. But the example of being picked by Cheerleader to siphon away 3 votes from Nerd Boy so Cheerleader could win is exactly how Jill Stein and the Green Party are working. It was exactly how (RFK) Junior was running, until it became clear he was going to attract more votes from Trump than Harris, and what is he doing? Getting out of the race so he doesn’t get Harrs elected!
Third parties have the problem of not forming a broad consensus. Americans are stuck in their ways, and like their parties. Even the liberals are conservative in the notion of ‘going with what just works.’ Forming a broad consensus is necessary to win in the model of government we have, which is why we’ve had two major parties since right after our founding.
There is a real faction of ‘ratfuckers’ who are here to split our vote and disrupt our election. Their goal is the conversion of the USA into a Fascist state, and they will use every tool in the box to fuck us out of our votes and fuck us into the Fascist state they want, and Third Parties are one of those tools.
If you want real change to the USA, you’ve got to do what Trumpets did – take over the other major party in America, build a coalition by growing beyond your single issue, and slowly but surely turn the party into the vehicle for your ideals. If you can’t convince more than a fringe party that your ideas are good and worth running on, you won’t win in America, or, frankly, anywhere else.
Well put. I’ll also add that in left-leaning communities there’s almost always more attention being paid to dark money flowing into our elections from groups like AIPAC than there is being paid to dark money flowing into our elections via third parties. Dark money is certainly a corrupting influence if it gets injected directly into the campaign process for one of the two major parties, but it’s equally troublesome that third parties are frequently (if not always) funded from the ground up by an opposing party specifically for the purpose of ratfucking an election. Whether or not third parties are in on the game or simply willingly ignorant stooges, their effect is always the same. And the fact that they’re essentially invisible except during presidential election cycles provides a strong bit of evidence for the latter.