I think you’re correct, but I can understand sometimes thinking that there is a gap between what party bureaucracy and party true-believers want and what voters want, and thinking a new party is the way to get around that.
Why on earth does this guy to think that he deserves to be elected for the top job in the land without having a single elected office to his name - not even his local school board. Pretty freaking arrogant if you ask me.
We have an “Independent” running for governor out here. She’s a former center-right Democrat who is funded entirely by Republican mega-donors and PACs. Talk about your stalking horses!
One of the core platforms of the Forward Party is to get Ranked Choice Voting implemented everywhere. It’s already in use in a lot of municipalities and some states. RCV avoids the ‘spoiler’ effect of 3rd party candidates, and allows people to vote for the best candidate, yet still pick the ‘lesser of two evils’ in their 2nd and 3rd choices.
I will be registering as a Forward Party member when possible. I will vote for the best candidate, regardless of party, in California open primaries. If RCV does not come to the general election, I will vote for the least bad candidate that has a chance of winning, likely a Democrat. But if RCV does come to the general election, I will vote for the best candidate, which is not likely going to be a Democrat.
I’m assuming only the “parliament type model” will never happen, not the Ranked Choice Part. Changing to a parliament type model would take huge hurdles to accomplish. Changing to Ranked Choice only involves large (or maybe medium) hurdles to accomplish. Since, as noted, it’s been done in a few states.
There are states that already have mandatory run off elections held if the winner doesn’t have 50%. They schedule them a few weeks/months later as voter suppression since its harder to vote on multiple days. Someone needs to be out there asking for change with a campaign of saving money by going to Ranked Choice. Since those second elections also cost a ton of money to run. That would put the republicans in the position of advocating spending more/wasting money on extra costs instead of being fiscally responsible by switching to Ranked Choice to save on costs.
Republicans:
Pro Spending Money
Pro Government in your every Decision
Anti Business (at least for any business that doesn’t enrich them directly)
Those are all true today, but somehow they still get to call themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, small government and business. Nobody ever calls them on it.
The only way for this to work would be if the USA used something like the Australian preferential ballot. Otherwise this “Forward Party” will be just another quixotic and futile exercise like Ralph Nader’s or Ross Perot’s efforts.
The problem with Yang (and I’m guessing many of the failed candidates who’ve joined him in this) is that he doesn’t actually understand what government does or how it works. So he thinks it’s easy and proposes overly-simplified solutions for difficult problems. Public policy is a specialized field that does actually require experience to do right.
We’ve just seen what happens when government is attempted by inexperienced outsiders: disaster. Even the things that 45 and his administration attempted that weren’t evil and self-serving failed in catastrophic ways and caused harm because they didn’t understand the process and parameters they were navigating. Even if Yang’s team managed to be less evil, they would still break things while fumbling around an unfamiliar system and discipline - and when you break things in government, you’re breaking people.
But 30% of US voters think that Joe Biden is far-left, and self identifying centrists have taken a hard right turn in the last decade, so maybe meaningless definitions are the future.
Your definition does not rule out mine, since your definition FAILS TO NOTE ACTUAL CENTRIST VIEWS. Without defining which views are “leftist” and which are “conservative”, you have not actually shown my point to be incorrect.
My point remains: these are popular, widely supported policies. Not far left, but very mainstream. They are, therefore, inherently centrist, and failing to shift to them immediately says our political system is deeply conservative. Branding them as “leftist” is, in fact, propaganda designed to shift our country’s policies further and further right while ignoring what the majority of the people actually want.
EDIT: And I freely admit my definition doesn’t jibe precisely with what is “known.” But the known definitions are pretty bullshit since centrist views have been shifting right for decades. Can’t be a centrist if you’re basically a conservative, that’s my point.
It very much depends on how they brand it, though. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Yang is being put front and center, and that they’re pretending to be a centrist party. They’re hoping for low-information independent and Democratic voters, clearly, not the kind of disaffected former Republicans that will be making the policy.
As a naive 18 year old, registering to vote here in the US, I registered Green, excited by what the Greens has started doing in Europe… it took a while for me to realize they were nothing more than a spoiler party being pushed along by Russians/Republicans to siphon off Democratic votes, and that they’d never be anything else, as long as the current voting system exists. But yeah, I’d love to have an actual Green party with real power.
Yep!
Or more like: a center-right party (the Democrats), most likely a pretty far-right party pretending to be centrist (this bullshit), and an outright fascist party (the Republicans). Even the centrists seem like a mostly-ignored wing of the Democratic party (much less the center-left wing of the party).
American politics is so weirdly right-wing compared to other developed nations - not just because of the culture (and how the Overton window has been pushed right), but because both parties are more right-wing than the specific positions a majority of the population hold…
You didn’t give any definition other than support for a policy if 50%+1 of voters support it. By that definition Brexit is centrist, as are the ERG and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Centrism is not a popularity contest, otherwise you end up with all sorts of awful shit being centrism just because a majority supports it.
My point is that 50%+1 is not centrism, but as you want a definition for left and right lets start with this.