Tea Party should divorce the Republicans: Why America needs more political parties

[jacktar48]

I've been to Turning Stone - Oneida run - and Akwesasne - Mohawk run and my nation. I'm addicted to gambling as far as my $40 I brought to spend takes me LOL

Heap Big Spender!

I limit my investment to a dollar, which I figure covers the cost of my free drink.

The troubling thing is, at least at the UKB casino in Tahlequah, it appears that most of the patrons are Native. This kind of indicates that we are screwing ourselves...not really a productive enterprise in the long run.

 

[RjThoughts]

Heap Big Spender!

I limit my investment to a dollar, which I figure covers the cost of my free drink.

The troubling thing is, at least at the UKB casino in Tahlequah, it appears that most of the patrons are Native. This kind of indicates that we are screwing ourselves...not really a productive enterprise in the long run.

Both places have a large, older, white crowd. If my cousin, a Mohawk-Oneida mix, is working when my wife and I arrive at Turning Stone, she'll give us free non-alcoholic drinks and passes to the buffet.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Nothing worth doing in politics gets done without a nasty fight of some sort. So what? Fight the fight.

Tell that to the pussy ass bitch made spineless fuckers sitting left of center....god damn they could own the fucking government ultra omega super majority....what would the DNC do with that power???

Bush 3.0

 

[about_average]

And how would that help? The team you hate the most would get more votes, win, possibly in a landslide and run rampant. The most you could hope for from this plan is changing which two parties you deal with.

Eventually they other party/parties would be getting enough votes that the repulicrats might realize they are doing something wrong. And, perhaps, we might get some more rational voices in congress.

I just got tired of voting for the lesser of 2 evils.

 

[richard_daily]

Two things helped Bush win in 2000. First, his brother rigged Florida, second, Al Gore was a shitty candidate. No need to blame Ralph Nader.

From Salon:

Wednesday, Jul 2, 2014 02:27 PM EDT

Tea Party should divorce the Republicans: Why America needs more political parties

It’s the biggest problem with our democracy no one talks about. Here’s how to make our electoral system make sense

Michael Lind

The biggest problem with American democracy is one that hardly gets any attention. The United States doesn’t have enough political parties. Two is not enough.

Most modern democracies are multiparty systems. They use fair electoral methods like proportional representation (for multimember legislative districts) or ranked choice voting, sometimes called the alternative vote (for single-member districts) to ensure that the full spectrum of political opinion in the society is represented among elected representatives.

The U.S. does not. Along with Britain and some of its former colonies, including India, the U.S. is stuck with single-member districts in state legislature and the House of Representatives and an archaic voting system called “plurality voting.” This means that the candidate who wins the most votes — even if the number falls short of a majority of 50 percent — wins the race.

The candidate with the most votes wins — that’s fair, isn’t it? But plurality voting can lead to perverse results. In a race among three candidates, a candidate opposed by a majority of voters can win, because the majority splits its vote among two other candidates.

This is why countries like the U.S. with plurality voting tend to have two dominant parties. If you vote for a third party, you may end up electing the one of the two main parties you like the least. Progressives who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 took away votes from Al Gore and may have helped to elect George W. Bush.

But what if your society is not naturally divided into two parties? If your country has plurality voting rules, you will still tend to get two national parties; but they will be incoherent coalitions of what, in a system with other electoral rules, would be independent parties.

Under a different, more fair electoral system, the Tea Party would be a real political party. It would not be stuck in a loveless marriage bickering about “crony capitalism” with Wall Street kleptocrats.

If the U.S. had a fair voting system, the Democratic Party might fission into more independent caucuses or even different parties. Why should upscale environmentalists who want to eliminate hydropower dams, nuclear power plants, natural gas pipelines and automobiles be in the same party as unionized workers who want to build all of these things? In a fair voting system, they wouldn’t be.


This being America, any inherited institution, no matter how obsolete, destructive or mindless, is wrapped in the flag and sanctified with patriotism, and our antiquated premodern British colonial electoral system is no exception. For generations, defenders of plurality voting have praised it for producing stability and consensus and keeping radical minorities at bay. But that was before the age of gridlock and government shutdowns produced by a minority of the minority party.

Some defenders of plurality voting claim that it has a moderating effect, by forcing groups to join larger coalitions. True, no doubt — but why should a faction get permanently stuck as a coalition partner in one of two parties? The more parties you have, the more chances there are for cross-partisan coalitions. The Tea Party right and the anti-corporate left might team up today against “crony capitalism,” while battling on other issues. The need to maintain unity and discipline in one of two major national parties would no longer exist. Instead of gridlock, we’d have ever-shifting alliances, like multiparty democracies elsewhere in the world.

Our inherited plurality voting system has many other terrible effects. One is the correlation among region and party. The correlation is partly the result of our electoral rules. There are Tea Party conservatives in Massachusetts, and quite a number of non-Hispanic white Texan liberals, but their views are neutralized in single-member districts electing members of Congress by plurality voting.

What if we had multimember districts elected by fair voting — that is, some kind of proportional representation? The electoral reform organization Fairvote (I am privileged to belong to its board) has illustrated what a radical impact a more democratic electoral system could have in its latest “Monopoly Politics” report, by contrasting likely 2014 House election outcomes with what the state’s congressional delegation would be under multimember districts using fair voting rules. In some cases the differences are striking. For example, conservative Virginia might go from a current 8-3 split, with seven Republicans and one Republican-leaning district to one likely Democrat, to five Republicans, five Democrats and one seat up for grabs. In liberal Massachusetts, underrepresented Republicans under fair voting might shrink the Democratic share of the state’s congressional delegation from eight out of nine to six out of nine.

In today’s politics, regional cultural differences — over gun culture, for example — are often politicized and turned into partisan issues. If there were more New England Yankee conservatives and more white Southern progressives in Congress, it’s a good guess that regional culture-war issues would play a greatly reduced role in national politics, compared to truly national issues like economics and foreign policy.

The Fairvote simulations assume that most Americans would remain Democrats or Republicans. But as the authors of “Monopoly Politics” point out, what they call “fair representation voting” might generate successful new parties, once voters realized that they were not wasting their votes by voting for third or fourth parties in multimember congressional districts. And once new parties took root in the multimember House, no doubt they would soon begin to run candidates for governor, president or senator, which could also be elected by fairer voting methods like “ranked voting” or “instant runoff” in which voters rank multiple candidates by preference.

By now, the world-weary cynics have sighed that this entire discussion is a waste of time, because it will supposedly never happen.

Struggles to enlarge democracy always begin with oddballs and troublemakers who reject the idea that things must always be done the way they have always been done in the past. In trying to make the U.S. live up to its claim to be the world’s greatest democracy, we can be inspired by George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

 

[jacktar48]

Two things helped Bush win in 2000. First, his brother rigged Florida, second, Al Gore was a shitty candidate. No need to blame Ralph Nader.

Don't forget how the Supreme Court was willing to get up in the middle of the night to help out...or Grandpa's ill-gotten fortune.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Two things helped Bush win in 2000. First, his brother rigged Florida, second, Al Gore was a shitty candidate. No need to blame Ralph Nader.

Regardless, I hope the Naderites enjoyed the 8 years of Dubya they foisted upon America.

 

[jacktar48]

Regardless, I hope the Naderites enjoyed the 8 years of Dubya they foisted upon America.

Kind of vindictive there, chooch...once again, we had a choice between a pseudo-fundamentalist moron and a fatuous douchebag. Few people really liked either of them unless they anticipated some kind of personal reward. Turns out Nader probably wouldn't have been much of an improvement, but at least he offered a third choice.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Tell that to the pussy ass bitch made spineless fuckers sitting left of center....god damn they could own the fucking government ultra omega super majority....what would the DNC do with that power???

In its present formation, not much. "Left of center" != "left."

 

[KingOrfeo]

Eventually they other party/parties would be getting enough votes that the repulicrats might realize they are doing something wrong. And, perhaps, we might get some more rational voices in congress.

And more irrational voices too, but, see post #15.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Two things helped Bush win in 2000. First, his brother rigged Florida, second, Al Gore was a shitty candidate.

Kind of vindictive there, chooch...once again, we had a choice between a pseudo-fundamentalist moron and a fatuous douchebag.

He wasn't shitty, just stiff, and certainly not a fatuous douchebag. Really smart guy, judging by his book. Would have made a much better POTUS than W. I doubt 9/11 could have happened on his watch, and if it had, he certainly would not have bothered with Iraq, that's like FDR responding to Pearl Harbor by invading Brazil and Gore ain't that stupid.

 

[Sean Renaud]

He wasn't shitty, just stiff, and certainly not a fatuous douchebag. Really smart guy, judging by his book. Would have made a much better POTUS than W. I doubt 9/11 could have happened on his watch, and if it had, he certainly would not have bothered with Iraq, that's like FDR responding to Pearl Harbor by invading Brazil and Gore ain't that stupid.

Which knowing what we know now might have meant one less place for Hitler to escape to.

 

[jacktar48]

He wasn't shitty, just stiff, and certainly not a fatuous douchebag. Really smart guy, judging by his book. Would have made a much better POTUS than W. I doubt 9/11 could have happened on his watch, and if it had, he certainly would not have bothered with Iraq, that's like FDR responding to Pearl Harbor by invading Brazil and Gore ain't that stupid.

Good points, certainly. I do doubt that he would have started two pointless wars which have not been paid for and are still getting people killed. But that's hindsight. At the time...he seemed like a stuffed shirt to me.

But of course that was still preferable to an obviously hypocritical moron.

I heard some commentator remark when Gov. Christie got his tit caught in the ringer a few months ago: "It's really too bad (Christie just crapped in his nest.) He was the only possible Republican Presidential candidate who wouldn't have to pretend to be a religious fundamentalist to get elected."

And lo and behold: look at the phony twits who are rallying for position at this very moment.

 

[jacktar48]

Which knowing what we know now might have meant one less place for Hitler to escape to.

Actually we did invade Columbia, technically. I knew a guy who was on a troopship headed for the Pacific that broke down and ended up in west Columbia where everybody promptly forgot about it.

He and his companions spent the entire war there; pretty much took over the place and had a grand old time screwing willing ladies and drinking rum on the beach.

So who said, "War is hell?"

 

[richard_daily]

Regardless, I hope the Naderites enjoyed the 8 years of Dubya they foisted upon America.

They didn't foist Dubya on anyone. Al Gore was a sucker, and was terrible in the debates. He campaigned on a boring platform and didn't have good recognition since he was about as much in the public eye as Joe Biden is now.

The democrats sunk themselves in 2000, with a little help from Jeb.

 

[jacktar48]

They didn't foist Dubya on anyone. Al Gore was a sucker, and was terrible in the debates. He campaigned on a boring platform and didn't have good recognition since he was about as much in the public eye as Joe Biden is now.

The democrats sunk themselves in 2000, with a little help from Jeb.

Clinton's proclivity for sticking Cuban cigars up a fat girl's hu-hu in the Oval Office didn't help his chances any either.

Although I thought it was kind of funny, actually...

 

[about_average]

Two things helped Bush win in 2000. First, his brother rigged Florida, second, Al Gore was a shitty candidate. No need to blame Ralph Nader.

Perfect example. WTF is wrong with the 2 parties that the best candidates they could field were Bush and Gore?
That was another major "You Gotta Be Kidding Me" election.

 

[about_average]

Clinton's proclivity for sticking Cuban cigars up a fat girl's hu-hu in the Oval Office didn't help his chances any either.:

Although a fairly dumb thing to do, I don't really think anyone would have cared, other than the nutjobs. If he hadn't lied about it most people would have forgotten about it.

 

[Liar]

Perfect example. WTF is wrong with the 2 parties that the best candidates they could field were Bush and Gore?
That was another major "You Gotta Be Kidding Me" election.

IIRC, Bush's primary success was a bit of a surprise to the GOP too.

Gore was the veep and a shoe-in. Nobody serious enough even tried.

 

[jacktar48]

Perfect example. WTF is wrong with the 2 parties that the best candidates they could field were Bush and Gore?
That was another major "You Gotta Be Kidding Me" election.

That is something that puzzles me deeply, and I think we're about to see a similar situation in the next election.

Is it because the Presidency is just not that important to them anymore? It seems that the only thing the president can do without cooperation from Congress is start a private war...and since that's always profitable for those who are not dying or paying, no one cares.

At least everyone has enough sense to know that doofus Joe Biden is not a viable candidate, so that's out. But that leaves Hillary...uh oh. I have an uneasy feeling she would feel compelled to show that she has more balls than the guys by attempting to beat the crap out of someone...and here we go again.

 

[about_average]

Gore was the veep and a shoe-in. Nobody serious enough even tried.

Yeah, I agree. Not that it should be that way.

 

[about_average]

Rumors are starting to make the rounds that Bernie might run, not that anything will come of it. It's interesting though that really conservative areas in VT really like him.

 

[Que]

That is something that puzzles me deeply, and I think we're about to see a similar situation in the next election.

Is it because the Presidency is just not that important to them anymore? It seems that the only thing the president can do without cooperation from Congress is start a private war...and since that's always profitable for those who are not dying or paying, no one cares.

At least everyone has enough sense to know that doofus Joe Biden is not a viable candidate, so that's out. But that leaves Hillary...uh oh. I have an uneasy feeling she would feel compelled to show that she has more balls than the guys by attempting to beat the crap out of someone...and here we go again.

Republicans have this weird habit of whoever wasn't good enough to win the LAST primary, gets to go to the front of the line on the NEXT primary.

Like..."Oh, we lost with our starting lineup? Maybe next game we go with the farm team."

According to that logic who was not good enough last time? Santorum??? Gingrich??

Scary.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

That is something that puzzles me deeply, and I think we're about to see a similar situation in the next election.

Is it because the Presidency is just not that important to them anymore? It seems that the only thing the president can do without cooperation from Congress is start a private war...and since that's always profitable for those who are not dying or paying, no one cares.

At least everyone has enough sense to know that doofus Joe Biden is not a viable candidate, so that's out. But that leaves Hillary...uh oh. I have an uneasy feeling she would feel compelled to show that she has more balls than the guys by attempting to beat the crap out of someone...and here we go again.

You know Hillary will do what she always does: Promote her books, drop the ball and blame anyone else, and star in as many dramas as possible.

 

[RobDownSouth]

IIRC, Bush's primary success was a bit of a surprise to the GOP too.

Gore was the veep and a shoe-in. Nobody serious enough even tried.

It was a surprise to Bush too. I recall reading Bob Woodward's book on Dubya's initial efforts, where his advisors told him to run solely on "tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts" and he said "I can't believe that is my entire platform!"