The general election will continue to be a strategic vote against the party you don’t want to win until voters come out en masse in the primaries. And those better candidates will have to actually be running in the primaries.
Not just the primaries; it’s going to take a tea party style insurgency into the DNC in order to exact the actual changes that we are looking for. The long play is getting involved in your state level Democratic party apparatus and pushing for better representation of progressive policies in the party platform, and pushing people of progressive persuasions into the DNC. <— Much inadvertent alliteration.
Yes. I mean the thing that won’t happen until we overwhelmingly vote in the major parties primaries to put in representatives who will legislate those changes at the state level. Because 3rd party candidates aren’t winning with the current system, so we have to change the two major parties from within, through their primaries.
No 3rd party has won a single electoral vote since Wallace in '68. He won 46. You have to go to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to top that with 88 (the most ever). It’s either taking over the parties from the local level up through their primaries or it will take the full collapse of our government with a new constitutional convention, and that probably won’t go well.
Well it can’t if we don’t try. For the 2024 primaries in Texas we had 17.9M registered voters, 3.2M primary ballots cast, and only 900k of them were Democratic. So I get why people think it isn’t going to work. But I think anyone expecting a “don’t vote and let it burn down” situation to result in an immediate improvement rather than things getting insanely worse are deluding themselves to everyone’s detriment.
We actually saw this happen in 2020 in the Democratic Party. And establishment Democrats played the game to force Bernie out. We’re hearing from people that Biden wasn’t the best person to beat Trump, he was the best person to beat Bernie. That’s why they rallied around him and pulled the bullshit with Warren before Super Tuesday.
Yes, that was at the top. The president can’t unilaterally change state-owned voting laws. Bernie did succeed in getting more progressive candidates into the Democratic party primaries down ballot in 2018 and beyond. That pressure needs to be maintained all the way down to the state legislatures and city/county offices. We have to flip the states locally to get election reform at the state level in order to make 3rd party options viable at the national level. Focusing on the presidential race to shame Democrats into electoral reform is just an exercise in self-owning loss to the Republicans.
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The general election will continue to be a strategic vote against the party you don’t want to win until voters come out en masse in the primaries. And those better candidates will have to actually be running in the primaries.
Not just the primaries; it’s going to take a tea party style insurgency into the DNC in order to exact the actual changes that we are looking for. The long play is getting involved in your state level Democratic party apparatus and pushing for better representation of progressive policies in the party platform, and pushing people of progressive persuasions into the DNC. <— Much inadvertent alliteration.
You mean not until the entire voting system is overhauled and the first pass the fence post system is abandoned.
Yes. I mean the thing that won’t happen until we overwhelmingly vote in the major parties primaries to put in representatives who will legislate those changes at the state level. Because 3rd party candidates aren’t winning with the current system, so we have to change the two major parties from within, through their primaries.
I don’t see that happening unless we were voting with rifles and guillotines.
No 3rd party has won a single electoral vote since Wallace in '68. He won 46. You have to go to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to top that with 88 (the most ever). It’s either taking over the parties from the local level up through their primaries or it will take the full collapse of our government with a new constitutional convention, and that probably won’t go well.
Like I said, rifles or guillotines. I don’t see it reasonably happening through voting in our current system.
Well it can’t if we don’t try. For the 2024 primaries in Texas we had 17.9M registered voters, 3.2M primary ballots cast, and only 900k of them were Democratic. So I get why people think it isn’t going to work. But I think anyone expecting a “don’t vote and let it burn down” situation to result in an immediate improvement rather than things getting insanely worse are deluding themselves to everyone’s detriment.
I’m definitely not in the don’t vote camp. I just think I have reasonable expectations of what my vote can accomplish, and it’s not much.
Definitely a lot of well earned cynicism about the process.
We actually saw this happen in 2020 in the Democratic Party. And establishment Democrats played the game to force Bernie out. We’re hearing from people that Biden wasn’t the best person to beat Trump, he was the best person to beat Bernie. That’s why they rallied around him and pulled the bullshit with Warren before Super Tuesday.
Yes, that was at the top. The president can’t unilaterally change state-owned voting laws. Bernie did succeed in getting more progressive candidates into the Democratic party primaries down ballot in 2018 and beyond. That pressure needs to be maintained all the way down to the state legislatures and city/county offices. We have to flip the states locally to get election reform at the state level in order to make 3rd party options viable at the national level. Focusing on the presidential race to shame Democrats into electoral reform is just an exercise in self-owning loss to the Republicans.