Originally published at: It's official: Andrew Yang launches third party with both Democrats and Republicans | Boing Boing
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Yeah, fuck this guy. All this is going to do is spoil elections in Republicans’ favor.
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We must move forward, not backward! Upward, not forward! And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
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A third party at a juncture where democracy stands in the balance? What could go wrong?
Really bad idea right now.
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Right on! Ralph Nader had the same idea in 2000. Had he not split the Dem vote, Bush wouldn’t have been able to do his shenanigans in Florida.
(Some argue Nader didn’t cost Gore the election–which would have been true if the rest of the system worked as it should. Ha!).
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My immediate reaction was to look and which side they were going to be a spoiler for. Given that it seems made up of disaffected republicans, it may be a spoiler in the Dems favor, which might help them eke out a win despite the usual GOP lock on gamesmanship via gerrymandering and etc.
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It’s a duopoly system and the only way a new party can break in is to somehow supplant one of the incumbent parties. If they’re looking to replace or take over the death-cult Republican party, good luck to them. If they want to replace the already centrist Dems with something more right-Libertarian than they can take a hike. If they think they’ll operate as a viable third party without first implementing some form of preference voting instead of FPTP, they’re living a fantasy (and in these times, a dangerous one).
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I’d rather have the Pirate Party or a green party
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Another right leaning idiot pretending “partisanship” is the problem. He’ll enjoy Bill Maher’s endorsement and not much else.
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The first and most important policy they need is change how elections work. To eliminate the current “most” process and replace it with one that guarantees 50%+ support for the winner all in a single election day/single voting event.
Without that, all a third option with enough support does is guarantee the winner will likely have less than 50% support because of a split vote.
They’re not serious people if they’re not doing that.
That it wasn’t done earlier is it’s own problem. But, it has to be done now if we ever want more than two parties.
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One would hope that small-c conservatives alarmed with the GOP’s increasing extremism and Trump’s general awfulness would outnumber… what, aging liberals who think Biden is too progressive? But then again, one has been unpleasantly surprised by the state of American politics before. I’m sure Fox News is already busy portraying this new party as “socialist”.
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So basically it will be the GOP circa 1980.
And instead of a true centrist party we get a passive-aggressive right-wing party pretending to be centrist, a proudly violent right wing party, and a centrist party that makes occasional milquetoast concessions to progressive ideas.
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It’s got a bad name, mainly because some dubious ('musk’y) tech billionaires have contributed to it, but one solution to The Nader Effect (that being a third party allows the worst choice to win) is “approval voting” (sometimes called “plurality voting”) where you can vote for as many of the options as you like. (so vote for Nader and Gore, for example). i’d prefer adding even more information and going with “rank choice” voiting, but that somehow confuses or scares people (particularly around its later stages). …ah well, it isn’t going to happen on the national level, but it would lessen the horror of multiple parties handing the result to the lizard men.
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How is that better than Ranked Choice Voting? That’s a system that’s already been successfully implemented in a number of places.
If this new party only ran candidates in areas where Ranked Choice Voting is a thing then they probably wouldn’t be doing much harm. Of course, like all new political parties, they’re probably going straight for the Presidency even though they’ve got zero chance and can only act as a spoiler in that race.
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Why would they do that? The extremists are giving them what they want:
Tax breaks on the backs of working people
Removal of accountability for anyone with money
Overt bigotry becoming public policy favoring them
Plenty of opportunities to profit off corruption
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Oooh, are they going to run candidates in state and local elections? No? Just president? Then they’re just like all the other “centrist” third parties – just trying to split the Democratic vote.
Andrew Yang is a hard right Republican with a single-digit IQ, and I hope he gets stomped on by dinosaurs.
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About the best thing I can say about this is that you can’t blame the left wing for this, or at least you can’t without looking like a total idiot.
It’s centre-right ideological purity.
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I’m convinced that what most places (including the US) need is some form of ranked-choice voting, to protect against the “tyranny of the minority” that threatens to govern when the vote is split by two or more parties on the “other side.”
I’m thinking specifically of the Conservatives in Canada, who are still in a position where they could conceivably form majority governments in a FPTP election, despite the combined support for the Liberals and (further to the left) NDP never running less than about 60% of the vote.
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Ludicrous. A party to unite two sides whose values and interpretation of reality itself are polar opposites is just a waste of time. There’s no common ground here.
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