2020 US Election (Part One)

[IglooDame]

The US had more than two organized parties in the past, so it can happen again.
I think it should, cause at least that way you can have people voting for what they like, not for some brands which are bought and paid for by big company interests (pharma, wall street etc)

And how soon do you think it'd be before those big money interests buy the newly organized parties?

And how long before the political folks from the old parties take over effective control of the new parties?

I'm no more of a fan of the two-party system in the US than anyone else - in fact far less so, as a big-L Libertarian - but we as a country can't even seem to punish Trump for neutralizing the Federal Election Commission, which itself is by law composed of only Republicans and Democrats. Literally the only thing Reps and Dems agree on consistently is that third parties cannot be allowed to gain traction, and indeed any third-party candidate coming close to an existing Rep or Dem in an election is vilified because the more popular they are, the more likely they are to hand the seat to the Rep or Dem farther away from their position.

I've put a lot of thought into this, myself, and the only way to do it is with a wildly popular (independent of existing politics, that is) third-party middle-of-the-road candidate with two meh-but-not-horrible R/D candidates that maintains a really solid presidential administration enough to start getting senators, congresscritters, and governors elected under the same label in the next couple elections. If Perot had been sane he might have had a shot.

 

[Patine]

And how soon do you think it'd be before those big money interests buy the newly organized parties?

And how long before the political folks from the old parties take over effective control of the new parties?

I'm no more of a fan of the two-party system in the US than anyone else - in fact far less so, as a big-L Libertarian - but we as a country can't even seem to punish Trump for neutralizing the Federal Election Commission, which itself is by law composed of only Republicans and Democrats. Literally the only thing Reps and Dems agree on consistently is that third parties cannot be allowed to gain traction, and indeed any third-party candidate coming close to an existing Rep or Dem in an election is vilified because the more popular they are, the more likely they are to hand the seat to the Rep or Dem farther away from their position.

I've put a lot of thought into this, myself, and the only way to do it is with a wildly popular (independent of existing politics, that is) third-party middle-of-the-road candidate with two meh-but-not-horrible R/D candidates that maintains a really solid presidential administration enough to start getting senators, congresscritters, and governors elected under the same label in the next couple elections. If Perot had been sane he might have had a shot.

Basically, that's part of a new Constitutional Convention. For instance, the grossly corrupt malinterpretation and malign twisting of phrase that unlimited campaign donations and lobbying - almost tantamount to bribery - was judged by the Supreme Court to be tantamount to freedom of speech, could be firmly clarified. And the Electoral College, one of the biggest vehicles of Duopoly, could be abolished, or at least highly reformed in how it works. And electoral agencies could be stated to be NON-partisan, not Bipartisan, by specific wording. And the wording against gerrymandering could be made much clearer. Etc. Plus, I have no doubt the bitter losers would infiltrate the new parties - every candidate for President in the Russian 2012 election, exception the oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, had formerly had a history with the CPSU, and all the party leaders in the first post-war West German Bundestag election in 1949 were all part of the pre-1933 Weimar Republic parties and government, and even a few Nazis under alias were running - but they would have to contend with new political realities, including the very real danger of not just theirs, but their party's, political fate being an extistential matter of concern - something they're not used, and might change the way they do politics.

 

[amadeus]

If Perot had been sane he might have had a shot.

Hey! I liked Perot.

 

[Patine]

Hey! I liked Perot.

I like Perot too. His flaws was that he mistakenly thought a government could actually be run like a business, and his half-hour-long, late-night campaign commercials were not overly boring infomercials. But he definitely had some good points, and his private ownership of a network of cable channels is what allowed him to circumvent the standard Duopoly lockdown on media coverage.

 

[Commodore]

The US had more than two organized parties in the past, so it can happen again

Not really. It's always been two major parties with a smattering of smaller parties that never have any real chance of winning anything. The only difference in the past is who those two major parties used to be.

 

[Patine]

Not really. It's always been two major parties with a smattering of smaller parties that never have any real chance of winning anything. The only difference in the past is who those two major parties used to be. In the very beginning it was the Federalists and the Whigs.

Time to reread your history books. It was originally the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Those evolved, after the end of the First Party System with "Corrupt Bargain," election 1824, into the Democrats and the party briefly called the National Republicans, but then expanded and renamed the Whigs in 1833. The Northern Whigs, the Northern American (or Know-Nothing) Party, and the Free-Soil Party merged in 1854 to form the Republican Party and were joined after (well, technically during) the Civil War by the Southern Unionists. Shame!

 

[amadeus]

I like Perot too. His flaws was that he mistakenly thought a government could actually be run like a business, and his half-hour-long, late-night campaign commercials were not overly boring infomercials. But he definitely had some good points, and his private ownership of a network of cable channels is what allowed him to circumvent the standard Duopoly lockdown on media coverage.

I thought Ross Perot made his money in computers? I don’t remember him owning any TV stations.

 

[Patine]

I thought Ross Perot made his money in computers? I don’t remember him owning any TV stations.

I think the cable networks were subsidiaries of his main interests, not his main endeavours. This tends to be the case with many billionaires. Or have you not noticed?

 

[amadeus]

You might be thinking of Ted Turner, another eccentric billionaire from the south!

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Nope, it's not. Obama won, and what does the youth movement think of him? Disappointment because he turned out not to be the messiah that would overturn the world that they were looking for. He managed to play to the youth enough and unify the party, and that was a great thing, but that's a rare thing...and the truth is that if he hadn't been able to unify the party he'd still have won...as long as he abandoned the youth movement. But if he had played the messianic leader that never compromises and follows the demands of the naive instead of directing them, he would have lost. Because the numbers don't lie...the youth vote by itself doesn't elect anyone.

Nobody is saying it's the youth vote alone, or that every politician has to just do whatever the youth want. If Biden has a majority or plurality, he has a majority or plurality. But unlike previous years where the base of, say, the last two candidates has had some pretty weird cross-cuts or overlaps, with Bernie and Biden the single most powerful denominator is age. There are other things; Sanders does extremely well with the Latinx vote, Biden does extremely well with older black and white voters, but literally right there it's a vestige of the age gap in the two candidates, as Latinx (and Asian-American) voters are much younger.

If the entire strategy is a sort of "they'll come around" you are absolutely setting yourself up for electoral failure. Complacency is dead politics. It's what got us Trump in 2016, Republicans all over congress and the state level during the Obamas years, and what might end up costing Republicans states like Arizona and Texas. And if the idea is that eventually "the youth" who are just years away from being "all the voters essentially" will come around to a party that has done nothing about the very first time in modern American history that the following generation will be worse off than their parents, and a stifling amount of college debt and the vast and nearly unending challenge of global warming, well, the Dems are setting themselves up for lots and lots of disappointment. The fastest growing immigrant groups in this country are extremely young, and the 30 years olds of today are, quite literally, the 50 year olds of just a couple presidents away. Biden owes it to at least the future of the party; the Spanish, Hmong, Chinese speaking part of it that has trillions of dollars in debt, to reach out, just like Bernie needs to try to reach out to older black voters better. Instead, Biden has talked down to youth and immigrant people at his town halls. Cool dude.

 

[Gori the Grey]

A parable.

The letters of the alphabet were deciding where to all dine. A through M said "wherever the rest of you want is fine by us." N, O, P and Q fervently wanted to eat at the Maison de Poison. R and S always go along with what N-Q want to do. X, Y and Z wanted that great new steak house, but T, U, V and W felt most comfortable at the restaurant that served leftover cabbage. Y and Z said, "I don't like leftover cabbage. And it's worse than that I don't like it, it gives me diarrhea. No way I'm voting for leftover cabbage." Everyone dined at Maison de Poison.

 

[Lexicus]

also just found this...

https://twitter.com/thedailyangle/status/1235760412735541248

Thought about how to word exactly what happens here about five different ways, but all of them fall short of the absolute goddamn audacity.

White woman with a business degree extremely-condescendingly gaslights a black woman with a history degree about MLK's own words, which are written in print and exceedingly unambiguous, and then continuously tries to talk over her response for like 30 seconds. Turner did not interrupt Rosen. Rosen did not let Turner get a goddamn word in edgewise.

But the media isn't biased.

One thing that's certain is that all the blue checks who lament the white maleness of the Bernie Bros won't even comment on something like this. Because the function of "identity politics" as practiced by the mainstream of the Democratic party has nothing to do with liberation from racism or sexism.

 

[Lexicus]

The problem is, though, that his strategy was that young people would vote.

My point is he's done everything that could be reasonably expected to turn them out. It's not that they're turning out because they're not satisfied by him, it's that apparently they won't turn out for anything.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Bernie being asked about black voters on MSNBC the other night was good, he does need to talk about that and do better on his part. But Biden has literally never been asked about what he's doing to win Latinx voters and probably never will, even though he does very poorly with them compared to Bernie.

 

[amadeus]

Speaking of which, why is Sanders seen as being relatively weak with black voters? I can’t think of anything in his platform that makes him appear so unpalatable.

 

[onejayhawk]

Sliming Bernie again took all the fun out of the race.

The new Democratic party.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Ah yes, the insanity of not wanting to go broke after receiving medical care, onejayhawk's here with the amazing takes

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Sliming Bernie again took all the fun out of the race.

Notice that the first thing a Trumpist wants to do is spread lies that divide the Democrats.

 

[Gori the Grey]

further divide

 

[Kyriakos]

It's pretty simple, if Biden is the nomination, he has a small chance to win and only in the case he gets a plurality of delegates in the first round of primaries.
If he doesn't have a plurality, and still ends up being the candidate, he has already lost the election.

So atm it is looking like four more years of the orange baboon.