Why don't Leftist just create their own political party?
Straight forward question. If leftist hate the Democratic Party so much, why don’t they all come together and create their own party. Have their own primaries, campaigns, candidates, etc.
The easiest switch is Approval Voting, which every tabulation machine in America can handle right now without any issue. Plus, it's very easy to adapt to Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, and proportional representation is the thing that will actually break up the two party system.
Are you sure. I feel like leftist talking points and leftist figures are more popular with right wingers than people think. They just hate democrats. You don’t think the right’s base would be effective after 4 years of trump with another party there to vote for?
While correct, Republicans are stupid. I don't mean that to be mean, they are, at best, low information and deeply disengaged with something they have very strong feelings about. They vote based on vague vibes instead of anything sensible. A rich leftist might be able to save the next generation, but the current Republicans are completely lost.
Turkey layer: Most of the United States has a first-past-the-post winner-take-all system of voting. There's a great if old video by GCP Grey about this where he uses the animal kingdom as a somewhat cartoonish example. That if you start out with a cheetah, a tiger, an owl, a turtle, a gorilla and a chimpanzee all running for the office of King Of The Jungle, and all animals vote for their species, gorilla ends up elected with 19% of the vote. So 81% of the animals in the jungle now have a king they didn't vote for. So the owl and the turtle drop out of the race, now you've got two cat parties and two ape parties, those who would prefer owl or turtle win have to either pick one of those to vote for or none at all. Then Cheetah voters get an idea: Yeah we'd like the Cheetah candidate to win, but Tiger is more likely to win than Cheetah, and we'd prefer Tiger to either of the two ape parties. So what if we vote for Tiger instead? The vote goes 40% to Tiger, 30% Gorilla, 30% Chimpanzee. More animals voted for apes but the tiger won because the apes split their votes across two candidates. This is called the Spoiler Effect, and you can see it in real life if you look at certain races in red states where a Democrat won pretty much entirely because a Libertarian ran and some people who would have otherwise voted Republican voted yellow instead of red.
Forming your own political party that is further to an extreme than one of the two major ones means handing more elections to the opposite side.
Duck layer: That assumes you're allowed to create a party in the first place. Yes, the right to peacefully assemble enshrined in the first amendment of the constitution means that groups of people can hold meetings and say they're the Leftist Party and whatnot, but the Republican and Democrat parties have inserted themselves into the workings of our government in much the same way a tick does. They have control over things like who gets to put candidates on ballots. "As duly elected person who decides these things, I decide to do things in the way that keeps me in power and you out of power."
Chicken layer: A Leftist party is going to meet exactly once, the meeting will immediately devolve into a hair pulling match over identity politics and no platform will be built or second meeting scheduled. The American Left can do nothing but argue about whether it's feminist or not to hate trans women or which ethnicity should the group feel most offended in behalf of?
You can't get more than 50% of popular support without compromise. The people who hate the democratic party to the point they'd rather organise a new party are A: too few and B: bad at compromising
But if you believe in it go for it.
Just make sure that you give up and endorse the democrats if you're polling lower than 50%, or you'll be an effective supporter of Trump
In addition to the practical realities of a 2-party system as others are pointing out, there's the fact that the Left eats its own. Nobody is ever good enough, and compromising with "the enemy" is "bad", hence people can either keep their moral purity and lose, or else compromise their ethics in order to move forward, but not both. For example, Biden reached across the aisle and managed to get a ton of shit done - but who even cared? To anyone not on the right it wasn't enough, while to the right itself it was all (claimed to be) bad to begin with, hence the message of "BoTh SiDeS sAmE" won out and thus the puppetmasters wanting to influence the election got their desires met.
As long as people choose to remain in their ignorance, we can't influence outcomes for either better or worse.
On my voting ballet, I had 7 people running for presidency from seven DIFFERENT political parties. Yet the news only talks about two (well three... Fucking Jill Stein.)
We have a billionaire class that controls the media.
Yeah, with the current political system in the US there is simply no way to get a third party any real traction.
Abolish first past the post and the electoral college, then you will see (slow) change, as it stands now, FPTP will only serve to maintain this two party system.
There already are multiple leftist parties in the US. The Green Party is the main one, but there are others.
The issue is that they don't get much press coverage, and a lot of people use the argument that if leftists split off from the Democrats and divide, then the Republicans will win. That keeps a lot of people from voting for those parties.
But who is this Dems voting base? Are they mostly liberal? If so, they wouldn’t go anywhere else anyways. But I feel like they’ll be a lot of disenfranchised MAGA voters by 2028, that would be willing to support anything other than the democrats.
Right wing media would immediately jump on promoting the alternate party as horrible communist socialist liberal whatever other words they like to use to scare an anger their base, and the net result would be the same.
America went through huge population shifts, and changes of economy the last two generations which was much greater than the original Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.
It sort of broke the neighborhoods being sociable places, destroyed grassroot movements, and prevented new parties from developing.
Politics that is new, these are created in the communities and transition from the local to regional so to national.
They have. They can't get any traction. The major political party closest to them is the target of constant derision and they would rather feel morally superior than be successful
Compromise. No matter what voting system you have eventually you need to vote on some bill. If you can't work with those who partially agree with you they will find moderates on the other side to work with and thus get their agenda passed not yours.
Our voting system favors 2 parties, so successful parties must do the coalition building before elections. And if coalition building is required to get a majority, then leftists aren't popular enough to do it on their own.
Because actual leftists reject the entire existence of the state, and therefore its institutions. We know that electoral politics are nothing but theatre that is corrupt by design and exists solely to provide the illusion of choice to placate the public, and manufacture consent for our own oppression and that of others. Even if we thought there was any sort of merit to it, we know that no one who threatens the system will ever be allowed to get to the top of said system to "change it from within", that's just another lie perpetuated to maintain the status quo (as long as people believe that elections are the only way to change things, and keep trying that despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, those in power get to keep it).
If you genuinely care and want to know more, you could start here:
Both sides of the spectrum have probably thought about it. But if a party splits they don't have the numbers so they don't risk it.
So an example election result is no longer 50/50 where there's a decent chance to win. Split those voters with two parties. At worst it would be 50/25/25. Your opponent wins all the time. So they wait for the other side to break apart first.
Most Americans don't bother with learning the history of how power has been consolidated from the local to the state, state to federal, and to the federal executive. They don't know that it just takes 5% of their general election vote for President to bypass ballot access obstructionism nationally, to put a new platform on every ballot. They choose not to understand how a third party choice is probably more valuable if it repeatedly does not win.
None of it's super-complicated. The vast majority of us Americans just don't really give a fuck. We like to talk about how much we care. Then we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, trust no one. It's just pillow talk, baby.