OK, fine, let’s do this.

VOTING THIRD PARTY IS FOR SUCKERS: A THREAD

As long as we use Plurality Voting — which is idiotic, but we do — the winning strategy for any party is to appeal to >50% of the electorate. That means parties become large, ideologically diverse coalitions… https://twitter.com/nada_lemming/status/1321823745921658880

…which means any nationally viable party as a whole isn’t going to represent any one individual’s ideology all that well.

It’s tempting in that context to vote for a third party that is ideologically based, not a coalition, and thus represents your beliefs! Feels good! But…

…it’s a fool’s game, because you’re forgetting we use Plurality Voting.

Suppose we had _all_ ideological parties: a socialist party, anarchist party, fascist party, evangelical party, status quo party, etc. Suppose each gets 15-20% of the vote. (Pretend.) What happens?

The fascists and the evangelicals realize if they team up and we religion to authoritarianism, they get 30-40% of the vote — and start winning everything.

Now the other parties have to merge to stay viable. Maybe the anarchists team up with the socialists, but lose the capitalist anarchists, so they try to water down their anti-government philosophy a bit to siphon off some of the status quo party….

See what’s happening?

If you use Plurality Voting — you can only vote for one choice, most votes wins — the winning strategy for a political movement is to merge until there are only two parties left.

This is “Duverger’s Law,” and it’s a booby trap built into our whole electoral system to ensure that even if a third party wins, it loses:

If the Greens — or any third party — rise to national political prominence, parties will quickly merge and realign so there’s only 2 again.

This isn’t hypothetical. It already happened.

In the early 1800s, we had a two-party system: the Democrats and the Whigs. (Apparently “Whig” sounded cool in the 19th century?)

An insurgent third party, fielded a presidential candidate, and…

…they actually won!

Yes, a third party won a presidential election in the United States! That actually happened!

That party was the Republicans.

The Republican Party is happens to a successful third party under plurality voting.

What happened? Realignment. The Whigs were already crumbling, and the reason the Republicans won was there was a many-party fragmentation happening in the 1850s, much like my “suppose…” above.

Once Republicans won decisively, the system quickly collapsed back to two parties.

This is the problem with voting third party: it’s booby trapped. The electoral system itself is rigged against it; if you win, you lose.

But it gets worse.

Suppose a party, the Greens, say, stubbornly refuses to go along with this merging? They can’t win a national election hovering at 1-4%. But they hope that stubbornly howling into the wind, casting votes that can’t win, will shift the major parties.

And it will: to the right.

The thing about Plurality Voting is that if a party doesn’t come close to a majority, their votes don’t count for crap. They have no influence on the outcome. That’s why it’s broken. And thus…

Thus if Greens shave Democratic vote share from 50 to 48% of _just the two major party votes_, Democrats have to get that 2% back from somewhere. They have a choice: shift a little left and peel off the Greens, or shift a little right and peel off moderate Republicans.

Either shift would both gain _and_ lose voters, so the party has to shift in the direction of greater density for it to be a net increase.

Greens are at the sparser edge of the distribution.

Thus the Democrats move right.

This is — and I cannot stress this enough — this is the actual net effect of having a consistent Green voting block:

It moves the Democratic Party to the right.

THE GREENS MOVE OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM TO THE RIGHT.

The Republicans know this, which is why they’ve consistently funneled money to the Green party for the last 20 years.

https://apnews.com/article/65e9d5d001dfd10c86ca9ab37e53e159

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/489505-montana-gop-spent-100k-to-get-green-party-on-the-ballot-report https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/us/politics/green-party-republicans-hawkins.html

In the face of this depressing reality, many people fall on “fuck it all” cynicism. It has the advantage of being easy and feeling good.

It has the disadvantage that it’s killing us.

Say what you will about the Democratic Party — and I could say plenty — https://twitter.com/nada_lemming/status/1321833243814121472

but it’s just bonkers to imagine, to pick just one example, that we’d be this screwed on the climate if Al Gore had been president in 2000.

No, politicians won’t save us.

Yes, winning or losing elections changes outcomes that matter.

There is a popular idea on the left that somehow it’s uniquely _this_ Democratic party that’s the problem. No, I promise you, any party that has to form a messy coalition of >50% of the electorate is going to be a sprawling, inconsistent muddle. https://twitter.com/unbandito/status/1321835546050764801

And no matter _if_ a party collapses, no matter _which_ party collapses, you’ll still get a realignment that quickly leads to two new parties, and they will just be _new_ sprawling, inconsistent muddles. https://twitter.com/emma_butthole/status/1321834982906748930

Look, right now, we’re up against climate disaster and yes-actual fascism.

You want to help the world?

- Don’t expect any party to match your ideology. They can’t. It’s systemically impossible.

- Look instead at the two parties not as _destinations_, but as _directions_.

- Treat voting as a tool of power, not an expression of belief.

- Vote for the direction that points toward your beliefs. Do you want to move a toward or away from fascism? More or less climate action? More or less access to health care?

- Then, after voting, hold politicians’ feet to the fire. Many of them are more decent people than we give them credit for being, but still, they will not save you. You are here to save yourself, and politicians are tools of your political power.

Honestly, a _lot_ of politics makes more sense — and is more heartening — if you understand that people in the parties, both candidates and staff, share a lot of your values and are just trying to work within this bonkers Plurality-induced system I describe above.

BUT DOES ELECTING DEMOCRATS ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING, PAUL?

Ask me about what health care was like for self-employed Paul and his epileptic relative before the ACA. Seriously, as bad as health care is now, you can’t _imagine_ what it was like before unless you were there.

Ask the 270,000+ (look at excess deaths) people who died in the last 8 months.

Ask me about the human cost of missing our last best chance to head off a climate disaster. That death toll will be a lot larger than 270,000.

Ask yourself when the new Supreme Court starts handing down decisions.

But what if you actually want to shift US politics to the left — or at least away from authoritarianism?

Don’t vote third party. That’s for suckers.

First, change people’s minds.

But also: end voter suppression, disenfranchisements, and non-proportional representation.

In the USA, we increasingly live under a system of minority rule that favors an increasingly authoritarian right wing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/opinion/sunday/disenfranchisement-democracy-minority-rule.html

To fight this:
- establish new VRA to fight voter suppression
- establish independent redistricting commissions
- establish clearer legal standards for ballot counting
- mandate paper ballots
- get states to pass NPVIC
- enfranchise DC & PR
- make Senate (more) proportional

These are all things that elected officials — and only elected officials — have the power to change.

They’re also things that have somewhere between mixed and near-universal support in the Democratic party, and all but universal opposition in the Republican party. There really is a clear, impactful difference here between one party or the other controlling legislatures.

More distant, and not so widely supported, we should switch to Approval Voting or Score Voting for elections, which would combat all the Duverger’s nonsense upthread. (Note that Instant Runoff doesn’t work nearly as well. Another thread.)

But for now:

Vote. Protect the vote.