What will it take for staunch Democrats to vote third party?
What will it take for staunch Democrats to vote third party?
With the dust is settling from their defeat on Tuesday, it's becoming clearer that there was some incredible malpractice going on in the Democratic party. As shown in the tweet I linked, Biden delayed dropping out even though his team knew it was going to be a complete blowout for Trump. Then, we have Harris's campaign spending over a billion dollars and still losing all of the swing states she needed to win.
For all the Democrats who would never vote Republican and would have never voted third party, are you now considering voting third party in future elections? If not, what would it take?
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Disclaimer: I am a registered Democrat, but do not consider myself one. Where I live the Democratic primaries are the election. I've never had the opportunity to cast a nonprimary vote for a candidate that represents me.
For me to vote for a 3rd party candidate for the presidency would require that there be a leftist third party willing to build power from the ground up. Local->County->State->Federal until that happens there really isn't a point.
Sanders understood this, that's why he ran through the Dem's primary system.
That's why Jill Stein isn't a serious 3rd party candidate: there is no party.
The Green party is less relevant power wise than the first time she ran. It's a vanity candidacy. Organizing is not glamorous work. It's hard. It's slow. It's frustrating. Stein hasn't shown any interest in doing that work.
In recent history, Ross Peort and the Reform party probably did the most in this direction, but he had billions of dollars to pay other to do the hard work for him.
We tend to over-mythologize voting in this country. It's a tool. It's not sacred. You use it to try to build the best future you can with the parts you have to work with.
I am personally not a fan of the Green Party, but as a point of fact they are more than just Jill Stein. My ballot had Green Party candidates running in three races.
Yeah, of course I know it's not just one person. But 174, and maybe more, is not much in a country of 346 million+ people. Hell, that's not even half of the number of reps in the US house. They hold no federal offices. They hold no state offices.
They may be the 4th largest US political party by registration, but the DSA has a fraction of that registration and I see them doing so work on the ground than I have ever seen from the Green party.
I would love to be able to vote for a viable leftist 3rd party presidential candidate. Viable. We're not there.
Right, but the premise of the question is that the Democrats are no longer viable at the Presidential level either.
In my lifetime, it's been a 50/50 split, with 6 presidential terms to each party. I'm not sure how you can assert that either party is any more or less viable than the other.
They did really badly this time, repeating mistakes from previous campaigns. I'm not saying they can't fix their problems, but it will be clear that they haven't if the same people are running the next campaign and they keep trying to court Republicans.
Sure, maybe, I would argue that that's pretty debatable, whether true or not. If that was the premise of your question though, you didn't do a good job of making that clear.