#third party politics

[fairy-princette]

just misread a phrase as "third party gender" like yeah my gender's pretty niche - you can't get it direct from source and isn't covered by a lot of insurance policies. probably won't do great in an election either

[bullmoosepartytime]

[ivygorgon]

AN OPEN LETTER to THE PRESIDENT & U.S. CONGRESS; STATE GOVERNORS & LEGISLATURES

Implement Ranked-Choice Voting & Election Reforms For Vote Integrity

3 so far! Help us get to 5 signers!

I am writing to urge your immediate action on introducing and passing ranked-choice voting (RCV) and other vital election reforms at both the federal and state levels. As a concerned constituent and advocate for democratic principles, I believe that these reforms are essential to improving our electoral processes and ensuring fair and representative governance.

Ranked-choice voting has proven effective in promoting democratic outcomes by enabling voters to express their preferences more fully and ensuring that elected candidates enjoy broad support from the electorate. RCV mitigates wasted votes, reduces the spoiler effect, and fosters more inclusive and issue-focused campaigns.

In addition to advocating for ranked-choice voting, I strongly support comprehensive election reforms, including campaign finance reform, gerrymandering reform, and initiatives to enhance voter access and participation. These reforms are critical to strengthening our democracy and restoring trust in our electoral system.

The implementation of Ranked-Choice Voting is a crucial step towards enhancing our democratic process. RCV, which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, ensures that elected officials have majority support, eliminates the spoiler effect, and encourages positive campaigning. This system is already in use in several U.S. cities and countries like Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. Alaska recently became the second state to adopt RCV for statewide offices, following Maine's lead. It is time to consider this reform at both federal and state levels to ensure our electoral systems reflect the diversity of our nation and empower all voices. Therefore, I urge you to introduce and support legislation that promotes RCV and other election reforms.

We must recognize that Americans are more than a two-party system. Let's take meaningful steps to ensure our electoral systems reflect the diversity of our nation and empower all voices.

Thank you for considering my perspective and taking decisive action to improve our electoral processes. I stand ready to support your efforts in advancing these important reforms.

📱 Text SIGN PMZPRT to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW IVYPETITIONS to 50409

[creature-wizard]

Whatever happens, two things remain true: 1. Trump might be distancing himself from Project 2025, but his Agenda 47, which is on his website, is basically the same thing. 2. Third party voting is useless without ranked choice voting; it's mathematically impossible to elect a third party candidate. DO NOT SPLIT THE VOTE.

[usa2024election]

VOTE BLUE! No matter what state you're in. Enough people deciding to challenge the preconceived notion of being in a "red state" can make a difference.

[mikewheelerfan2022]

At this point I’m convinced the majority of people promoting voting for a third party are Russian bots. Voting third party fixes NOTHING and only takes away votes from Harris. You want third party? Wait until 2028. Hopefully Trump will be dead by then and it’ll be actually safe to do so. But this election is the most important in American history. VOTE BLUE

[littlematchagirlll]

one of my friends (also a leftist) said that because we live in utah, it doesn't matter who he votes for, and there's no way he will vote for a "fucking cop who was complicit in genocide."

he is telling his friends in utah that they have zero say in who is president, so they shouldn't vote for harris.

and, i love him, but i think that line of thinking is really damaging.

if the stakes were lower for this election, then sure! i'm all in favor of third parties, and i do think that should be more normalized. it would be great to get to a point where we have more viable options than just democrats and republicans.

but this election is against trump. if trump wins, we get project 2025.

this isn't your father's republican party that just wanted to lower taxes and have more free trade. we are looking at rights being taken away for several marginalized communities. major changes that will set us back decades. there is too much on the line, and harris needs every single vote she can get.

saying you won't vote for harris because you live in a red state and don't think your vote will count... like a vote for a third party will??

you're really just saying that you don't mind trump winning, or if you do, you aren't willing to actually do what it takes to stop it.

as for being complicit with the genocide, aren't we all? our tax money is going to the genocide. we are complicit, whether we like it or not.

and harris has openly advocated for a ceasefire! also, do you think trump won't be complicit in the genocide? do you not think he would actively support israel? i'd rather have a president that calls for a ceasefire than one who doesn't. i'd rather have a president who is willing to push back on israel than one who be pushed around by israel.

there's more hope for a ceasefire with harris than there is with trump, and that's worth something.

my friend said "when people look back at your history, don't let them see your name next to a war criminal's."

honestly? in this election, i would rather have my name seen next to harris because that shows i understood that the future of our country and the safety of its citizens was more important than my personal moral superiority.

i don't just vote to make a fucking point. i vote because it impacts people's lives.

it seriously feels like some people are okay with watching the country burn, as long as they feel morally superior.

[blujane]

"Voting third party does no harm—"

If we lose so much as 11% of the votes to third party votes, Trump wins and Project 2025 plays out.

Source.

In case you didn't know, Project 2025 is the Republican Party's nightmarish dystopian and genocidal 920-page plan for the first 180 days of Trump's second term reign (the Supreme Court has now granted absolute immunity to presidents; Trump will be effectively a tyrannical monarch).

Note: Read Project 2025 here.

Third votes are doubly useless for another reason: there are too many third party candidates and none of them are known well enough to have a chance in hell to win.

Voting third party as things are helps no one but the Republicans.

It is as helpful as abstaining from voting, which is to say not at all.

Please, for the love of god and democracy, vote blue up and down the ballot!

[mugiwara-lucy]

One of the main reasons why I’m voting for Kamala Harris is because sometime within the next couple of years there will be two open seats in the Supreme Court.

Let’s not forget one of the judges that Trump appointed in his first term OVERTURNED ROE V WADE. And the old fucker BRAGS about it:

If he gets back into office, I’m sure we can all anticipate AILEEN CANNON being one of those Supreme Court justices. And if you all don’t know who she is, she threw out the case where Trump STOLE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE:

In a nutshell, if Trump gets into office, he will appoint two younger Supreme Court justices younger than Clarence Thomas, meaning the Supreme Court will be locked HARD RIGHT for AT LEAST 30 years.

By then, that means our potential children and grandchildren (if you even want to have kids) will have LESS RIGHTS THAN US.

Do you really want that?

That’s why I feel with Kamala Harris being President, we can BALANCE OUT the courts!

Please Vote Blue.

Thank You 🙏

[quitepossiblytall]

I’m not voting 3rd party because America’s 3rd party choices are trash. On the merits, they are just not a good choice and I wouldn’t trust any of them to be a better president the Joe Biden.

1)They have not made it on the ballot in enough states to actually win the election. Williamson fully lost the democratic primary to Joe Biden. The people have already spoken.

2) Cornel West is a political hack who is being used by the republicans to syphon votes from Biden. He’s mismanaging his campaign - he spent more money on graphic design than petitions to get on the ballot. He supports republican education policies (google Classic Learning Test. A conservative backed replacement to the ACT and SAT that focuses on “western literature”. It’s supported by DeSantis, if that is any indication of quality).

3) Jill Stein is a millionaire who larps as a activist, while actively lying about the Biden administration and generating wealth (she’s worth 7 million dollars and inherited half a million from her parents) from the very industries she claims to be against (big banks, big oil, military industry, big pharma).

5) Neither Jill Stein nor Cornel West are truly anti-genocide. They’re pro-Putin. Meaning they would allow the genocide of Ukrainians to continue. West wants to fully dismantle NATO, which would put former USSR countries like Estonia, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania in danger of Russian aggression without NATO protection. Both are a threat to the sovereignty of former Soviet Union countries.

6) All of our presidential candidates this year, aside from Jasmine Sherman are 70+. So, if Biden is too old, so are all of them.

7) Marianne Williamson, one time spiritual advisor to Oprah Winfrey, lost to Biden in the primary. People didn’t vote for her in the primary - full stop. She’s a wacko, who describes AIDS as “angels in Darth Vader suits”. She’s a pseudoscience pedaler and an anti-vaxxer (long before COVID-19), excuse me a “safe-vaxxer”, who once tweeted that the “power of the mind” could save people in the path of hurricanes. She is wrong about both mental and physical health (because pseudoscience), calling clinical depression “a scam”.

[charlesoberonn]

"The demise of the Republican party is bad because it'll mean there's only gonna be one viewpoint in America"

Absolutely false. There're already plenty of viewpoints under the Democratic Party right now but they're all forced under one label because it's a two-party system and the other party has been taken over by fascists.

In the absence of the Republican party, the Democrats can easily split into two or more ideologically distinct parties. In fact, it'd be significantly better.

Joe Biden should be the most right-wing candidate in American politics.

[incorrectbatfam]

You will never be as cool as your favorite superhero but you can get pretty darn close by registering to vote and knowing your rights to take time off on Election Day

[uboat53]

Well, RFK Jr. is all but admitting his campaign was a ploy to help Trump win, Republican operatives are committing fraud to get Cornel West on the ballot in Arizona, Jill Stein is openly talking up her genuine love for Vladimir Putin, and the Libertarian Party is such a wreck that my most openly libertarian friend has stepped back from their organization.

Is it time to admit that there is no genuine third-party option in America anymore?

[creature-wizard]

It's finally dawning on me that a lot of hard leftists actually do think the US presidency is already a dictatorship.

Like they think that the reason the Biden administration didn't cancel college debt on the grand scale they pictured, is that he just didn't want to. They have no comprehension just how much Republicans were working against him to stop literally anything he could do to make things in this country less dogshit. (BTW, this is why we need to vote blue all the way down the ticket.)

And then they think they can elect some third party rando with no actual allies in the senate or congress or anywhere, and people will just have to do what they say, and won't try to sabotage them even harder because they're even further left. (The aforementioned efforts to sabotage Biden? It would be even worse for an actual leftist president.)

Like no, sorry, the US presidency is not actually a dictatorship.

[tomorrowusa]

Don't risk a rerun of the 2000 election.

In the first presidential election of the 21st century many deluded progressives voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

Their foolishness gave us eight years of George W. Bush who plagued the country with two recessions (including the Great Recession) and two wars (one totally unnecessary and one which could have been avoided if he heeded an intelligence brief 5 weeks before 9/11).

Oh yeah, Dubya also appointed one conservative and one batshit crazy reactionary to the US Supreme Court. Roberts and Alito are still there.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post offers some thoughts.

Why leftists should work their hearts out for Biden in 2024

Ask a Democrat with a long memory what the numbers 97,488 and 537 represent, and their face will twist into a grimace. The first is the number of votes Ralph Nader received in Florida in 2000 as the nominee of the Green Party; the second is the margin by which George W. Bush was eventually certified the winner of the state, handing him the White House. Now, with President Biden gearing up for reelection, talk of a spoiler candidate from the left is again in the air. That’s unfortunate, because here’s the truth: The past 2½ years under Biden have been a triumph for progressivism, even if it’s not in most people’s interest to admit it. This was not what most people expected from Biden, who ran as a relative moderate in the 2020 Democratic primary. His nomination was a victory for pragmatism with its eyes directed toward the center. But today, no one can honestly deny that Biden is the most progressive president since at least Lyndon B. Johnson. His judicial appointments are more diverse than those of any of his predecessors. He has directed more resources to combating climate change than any other president. Notwithstanding the opposition from the Supreme Court, his administration has moved aggressively to forgive and restructure student loans.

Three years ago the economy was in horrible shape because of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic. Now unemployment is steadily below 4%, job creation continues to exceed expectations, and wages are rising as unions gain strength. The post-pandemic, post-Afghan War inflation rate has receded to near normal levels; people in the 1970s would have sold their souls for a 3.2% (and dropping) inflation rate. And many of the effects of "Bidenomics" have yet to kick in.

And in a story that is criminally underappreciated, his administration’s policy reaction to the covid-induced recession of 2020 was revolutionary in precisely the ways any good leftist should favor. It embraced massive government intervention to stave off the worst economic impacts, including handing millions of families monthly checks (by expanding the child tax credit), giving all kids in public schools free meals, boosting unemployment insurance and extending health coverage to millions.

It worked. While inflation rose (as it did worldwide), the economy’s recovery has been blisteringly fast. It took more than six years for employment rates to return to what they were before the Great Recession hit in 2008, but we surpassed January 2020 jobs levels by the spring of 2022 — and have kept adding jobs ever since. To the idealistic leftist, that might feel like both old news and a partial victory at best. What about everything supporters of Bernie Sanders have found so thrilling about the Vermont senator’s vision of the future, from universal health care to free college? It’s true Biden was never going to deliver that, but to be honest, neither would Sanders had he been elected president. And that brings me to the heart of how people on the left ought to think about Biden and his reelection.

Biden has gotten things done. The US economy is doing better than those of almost every other advanced industrialized country.

Our rivals China and Russia are both worse off than they were three years ago. And NATO is not just united, it's growing.

Sadly, we still need to deal with a far right MAGA cult at home who would wreck the country just to get its own way.

Biden may be elderly and unexciting, but that is one of the reasons he won in 2020. Many people just wanted an end to the daily drama of Trump's capricious and incompetent rule by tweet. And a good portion of those people live in places that count greatly in elections – suburbs and exurbs.

Superhero films seem to be slipping in popularity. Hopefully that's a sign that voters are less likely to embrace self-appointed political messiahs to save them from themselves.

Good governance is a steady process – not a collection of magic tricks. Experienced and competent individuals who are not too far removed from the lives of the people they represent are the best people to have in government.

Paul Waldman concludes his column speaking from the heart as a liberal...

I’ve been in and around politics for many years, and even among liberals, I’ve almost always been one of the most liberal people in the room. Yet only since Biden’s election have I realized that I will probably never see a president as liberal as I’d like. It’s not an easy idea to make peace with. But it suggests a different way of thinking about elections — as one necessary step in a long, difficult process. The further you are to the left, the more important Biden’s reelection ought to be to you. It might require emotional (and policy) compromise, but for now, it’s also the most important tool you have to achieve progressive ends.

Exactly. Rightwingers take the long view. It took them 49 years but they eventually got Roe v. Wade overturned. To succeed, we need to look upon politics as an extended marathon rather as one short sprint.

Republicans may currently be bickering, but they will most likely unite behind whichever anti-abortion extremist they nominate.

It's necessary to get the word out now that the only way to defeat climate-denying, abortion-restricting, assault weapon-loving, race-baiting, homophobic Republicans is to vote Democratic.

[sirenium]

if you even think about voting third party fuck you, shut the fuck up, vote blue. I am not the first to say this but in America there is no fucking choice other than red or blue. Vote blue. Vote blue, or human rights are fucked. Being genuinely serious. If Trump or some other republican clown gets into office we all might as well throw in the towel for all the basic rights and quality of life we'll get.

"oh but Kamala's a cop!" I am being so serious when I say I couldn't care less when the alternative is forced detransition. Get your head out of your ass and stop playing pretend and acting like there's a feasible choice other than democrats, because there fucking isn't. Transition changed my life for the better, and I am facing the possibility of having to throw that all away because some pretentious fucks decided to split the damn vote more JUST for Trump to be elected. I don't care if I'm in a blue state, because I have enough brain cells and basic decency to see that not everyone IS; if you want to gamble the lives of queer people and anyone who isn't a cishet white male just for a huff of moral superiority, I genuinely hate you. It fills me with so much fucking rage that people can just pretend their precious third option will do SHIT. IT WON'T.

Fucking GOD. Anyways, this has been a PSA to vote blue or you have blood on your hands. :3