What’s best for people requires taking sides on divisive issues. Pretending otherwise is childish. To choose a couple “divisive issues” is abortion a medical procedures whose availability is fundamental to bodily autonomy, or is it the mass murder of babies? Any practical vote on legislation in healthcare requires having a thought on that matter. Is raising taxes on billionaires a necessary act to mitigate tremendous imbalances of power in our society, or a destructive action that will destroy innovation. You can do the same thing with guns, healthcare, paid maternity leave, and yes even different ranked choice voting schemes. You need an actual opinion if you are going to legislate because as a large polity, we disagree. And to top that off, the individual representatives within a party frequently differ from the platform on a huge number of issues, so the Forward Party just gives you a bunch of people who won’t say what they believe in,
The core principles are garbage, because they don’t say anything. You could easily say that the same principles are at work in the major parties. Those party platforms are elected by a massive number of voters from throughout the country. Having looked at the number of seats required locally for the smallest Democratic offices in my area means swinging a solid 15-20 votes. No Purity tests can be said of a party that produced both Barbara Lee and Henry Cueller.
If they want to be an issue advocacy group, then be an issue advocacy group, if they want to be a party they need some ideas. I also don’t believe for a second they care at all about the issues in question, because they haven’t worked with the groups actually doing that work. Ohio passed an anti-gerrymandering law, which is being roundly ignored. The Forward party couldn’t bother to join the lawsuits.
From a study of 1791 proposed policy changes 1981 - 2002
Proposals with 61-80% approval pass less than 40% of the time,
up to 90% a little better than 40%,
even 91-100% approval has less than 60% chance of passing.
Much more inDemocracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It by Benjamin I Page and Martin Gilens
Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 2017
ISBN 978-0-226-50896-2
Yang has to confront these political realities to popular and “common sense” solutions. So does Jim Acosta and the rest of the media.
He’s the problem with the Forward party. They currently have exactly three stated policy positions:
We should adopt ranked-choice voting
We should adopt nonpartisan primaries
We should adopt independent redistricting commissions.
In general, I support two of those; I’d be happy with alternatives to RCV like approval voting, but broadly anything besides FPTP, and provided the criteria for independent redistricting commissions are reasonable, I want that too. I’m agnostic to nonpartisan primaries; I need to learn more before I make a decision.
So cool, I agree with most of their positions! Except that 100% of their policy positions are about elections. The absolute only way any of their candidates win is either:
A: One of the two major parties collapses
B: RCV at minimum has been implemented; IRC likely but not required.
Assuming a major party doesn’t collapse (in which case, my decision is likely made for me by whichever party collapses), Yang only wins if at least one of their major planks has already been implemented. So what is the plan for the day after election day?
How are you going to address widening income inequality?
How are you going to address our abysmal healthcare system?
What are you going to do with the massive American war machine?
How are you going to protect the rights of everyone who isn’t a cisgender white male Christian?
Yang has no answer for any of this. Why would I ever vote for him when his victory is predicated on his core policy position having already been enacted?
That guy seems to be too liberal to be a “centrist” now.
It feels like “centrism” has become “Well, if you weren’t so angry towards the kitten blenders I might have supported you, but now I fully support them because they are calm and polite.”
I think it means that anyone can vote in a party’s primary regardless of the voter’s own affiliation. In practise that ends up being used for various attempts at sabotage or gaming of the primary by the non-party voters.
And you can have run-off elections instead, which wouldn’t interfere with parties’ internal affairs.
Perhaps “nonpartisan primaries” are just first-round elections for Americans, in the same way that “Medicare for All” is a way to explain universal healthcare to Americans.
I just read about this when reading about the Alaska primary this week.
In that state, it looks like this: All people running in the primaries are on one ballot. In this case it was something like 1 D and 17 Rs.
The top 4 vote getters proceed to the general election.
The general election is then decided via ranked choice voting.
It’s weird to me, but I haven’t really thought through repercussions.
I’m not defining the terms, just sharing what I learned about the Alaska primary.
But according to Wikipedia,
Primary elections , often abbreviated to primaries , are a process by which voters can indicate their preference for their party’s candidate, or a candidate in general, in an upcoming general election, local election, or by-election.
Andrew Yang strikes me as particularly hollow. Even more so than most politicians. He just seems to be flailing around, grasping at whatever is within reach to get him attention.
Unfortunately he could still do a lot of damage
This reminds me of Lawrence Lessig’s run in 2016, but he had the integrity to explicitly state that his run was a referendum on campaign finance reform. This is more than a “single issue voter” thing, it’s procedural. Yang should be pouring money into state races where these election decisions are made, not a presidential run if his only discernable values are “let’s make it better for third parties.”
Wow, confession time. Every time @gracchus has dropped a Zentrum reference on the bbs, I thought it was a sarcastic jab at older conservative voters by referencing Centrum vitamin ads (My brain had actually started Mandella-effect-ing the vitamins as Zentrum, as their slogan is Centrum A to Z) . TIL indeed.
I wish I could like this reply more than once. Everything I came to say and more.
I’ll just add the same thing I find myself adding now in every Yang thread: if he really cared about the issues in that platform, he would be working on them at the state level through grassroots organizing. Starting a political party does nothing toward these goals because as noted above, these are all election reform issues. His party mathematically cannot get elected in the current system, thus his party will never be in a position to enact these policies. Yang is not stupid and surely knows this, so his motivations for starting a party must be otherwise. Vanity, perhaps?
As I always say, he should clear the stage for people like Stacey Abrams, who actually know how to make changes like he wants in the system. Or hire her. Even better- fund her and get behind her.
I’m a huge fan of Yang’s stated goals, but he seems willfully or naïvely ignorant (not sure which) about how to achieve them.
That’s it. The entire world just waited for his mom to forget her birth control pills so Andrew could come along and solve all the complex problems for us. (Stolen from Lore Sjoberg, iirc)
