I don’t know what was wrong with Joe Biden. It’s hard to imagine that they ever would have asked for a debate if this was the way he is normally. We’ve seen him recently holding press conferences and giving speeches and he seemed to be fine. They said he had a cold so maybe he really was on drugs — Nyquil or Mucinex or something that made him seem so shaky and frail. Whatever it was, it was a terrible debate for him and if he does stay in the race (which is almost certain in my opinion) the campaign is going to have a lot of work to do to dig out of the hole that was dug last night. The media smells blood and they are circling like a bunch of starved piranhas.
. . . For some odd reason, moderator Jake Tapper told Trump in the beginning that he didn’t need to answer the questions and that he could use the time however he wanted. Trump ran with that, essentially giving a rally speech whenever he had the floor and was unresponsive to the vast majority of the questions. He made faces and insulted Biden to his face, at one point calling him a criminal and a Manchurian candidate. If anyone had said 10 years ago that this would happen at a presidential debate they would have been laughed out of the room.
After the debate when most of the country had turned off cable news or gone to bed, CNN aired its fact check. And it’s a doozy:
It sure would have been good if even some of that epic litany of lies could have been checked while people were still watching. The decision to have the moderators sit like a couple of potted plants woodenly asking questions about child care while Trump responded with irrelevant lies was inexplicable. Why did they even bother to ask questions at all? They could have just run the timer and let the candidates talk for two minutes each about anything they wanted. It probably would have been more enlightening.
That’s not feasible in a FPTP system. Best you can do is keep voting for the least bad between the two “real” candidates and shift the Overton window overtime.
Or have a violent revolution, but that’s a bit more difficult to coordinate.
It’s literally what every third party campaign in our lifetimes has done.
Perot 92 pushed both parties to actually address nafta instead of sweeping it under the rug, Nader 2000 forced the democrats to run left in 04 and 08.
I saw these things happen with my own eyes and if anecdote isn’t enough for you they’re both well studied!
I’ll admit I’m not that well-informed on those elections, but would’ve they really been capable of being more than a spoiler candidate, had they not been “listened to”?
Looking at the data, every election in the past 200 years has been won with more than 50% of the electoral college. Latest one where a state has been won by a third party is ‘68. If those phenomena have been studied I’m interested, because it really doesn’t seem like they did anything looking at the results at a surface level.
Perot 92 was not a spoiler campaign.
After the dust settled, everyone accused it of acting as a spoiler. In the next two decades several groups studied the results and found that Perot only reduced Clinton’s margin of victory.
Perot 92 was listened to. Every candidate from it’s inception to the adoption of the usmcta had to answer “what are you gonna do about nafta?”
People like to call Nader 2000 a spoiler, but that’s just a distraction from the fact that jeb bush stopped the recount and the supreme court declared bush the winner.
Nader was listened to. The democrats ran left in 04 and 08, at least in word.
What I’m saying is, how did those studies reach the conclusion that said third parties were actually a factor in those changes, and didn’t just happen at the same time?
Because again, considering the statistics for recent years’ elections, third parties haven’t been a threat to the major two for over 50 years. I’m interested in why would they care about the relatively small voter base of those parties when they wouldn’t have changed any recent American election.
Hmm, yes, who can say why every candidate for over twenty years has had to explain what they’d do about nafta after the year some guy got on tv and yelled about it non stop when before no one could even describe it?
Who can say why the democrats tacked left after they failed to out conservative the bush administration?
Perhaps things are just occurring with no relationship to each other and can’t be connected!
Of course you’re not gonna find much succor for voting blue no matter who when you’re suggesting that we live under a complete breakdown of causality…
Your point that third parties havent been a threat isn’t in any way related to the documented effects third parties have had.
If the only outcome from a vote was winning or losing then you’d be right, but votes are used to figure out which parties get funding, presence on the ballot, event appearances, media coverage and public awareness.
Both major parties look at the recorded vote and triangulate how to get the numbers they need from the electorate that came out.
If there were a set number of voters than you’d be correct, there’s no reason to care about third parties, but third parties pick up tons of voters who’d otherwise stay home. Something like 30% in perots case and upwards of half in Naders 2000 campaign.
The reason the two major parties pick bits and pieces off third party formations is so they can add to the voting base and not have to try to chase after their opponents constituency. You know, like how the democrats are doing.
You said “if anecdote isn’t enough, they’re both well-studied”, so I thought some research actually existed about it.
I’m not saying third party campaigns are useless or always spoilers, I just don’t think they can actually force a change since it seems they can successfully be ignored with no repercussions. Sure, major parties can pick up bits from their programs if they want to, but they’re definitely not in a situation where they have to or else they’ll risk the election.
Even now for example, I think every non-major candidate except Kennedy is against funding Israel. But despite that, and despite (I think?) the majority of Americans being against it as well, both Biden and Trump are running with it. Because they know it’s not an issue that actually “matters” to the campaign, since there’s no viable alternative that doesn’t support it.
you’ll have to forgive me, i’m not here to debate people so i don’t link a million things or drop the good ol’ tankie wall of links unless its asked for. my assumption is that if someone wants to learn something they can just look it up themselves.
Perot was not a spoiler, another source for that, people mad at hw bush lying about taxes voted for clinton, the wikipedia article on public opinion about nafta.
now usually I wouldn’t link a wikipedia article but there’s just so fucking much there that i’d rather someone actually read the sources linked in it rather than try to wrangle its’ citations. one thing that isn’t covered in the wikipedia article is that as public opinion changes, polls that ask specifically about nafta get negative results and polls that use more open ended language about “free trade agreements” get more positive results.
of note: the wikpiedia article specifically recognizes the effect perot had on public awareness of nafta, citing two sources that say support rose after his 93 debate with al gore (those sources cite one of the polls that asks about “free trade agreements” and not nafta specifically, natch).
I don’t have the energy to figure out what sources would convince a person that kerry ran to the “left” of gore. i just have to trust that a person would see it and figure it out even though kerry was a piece of crap in his own way. as far as proof that platform was a response to the greens in 2000, there was no major third party turnout in 2004 and the greens positions in 2000 were subsumed into the democrats platform or winnowed away in 2004.
to your claim that third parties can’t force other parties to do anything: you’re right, they can’t. we have the right tacking biden regime because of that. the democrats have decided that it’s a better electoral strategy to run on, and i know i’m sounding like a broken record and its frustrating to always have to respond to these positions, genocide and border detentions rather than literally anything else.
third party votes can’t force the biden regime and the democrats to abandon those positions, but they can show the democrats how much support they could pick up by taking them on.
you said every major candidate runs on platforms that the majority of americans don’t support. you’re right. why can they get away with that? is it possibly because people have accepted the “throw your vote away” logic?
I don’t know the answer to that, but i do know that actually expressing what we want with the only voice we are given that politicians can’t deny is a phenomenal way to change it!
Thanks for the sources, I was genuinely not aware of how many people supported Perot.
But even then, it’s usually not enough support for it to actually change the outcome. In the case of Perot it was, apparently, but even then it still didn’t push either of the candidates to change their views on nafta. If support that big is still not enough for them to worry, it’s hard to believe it can ever make a difference.
No, it’s because the US got so divided on stuff that’s supposed to be a given, that contributing to an ongoing genocide isn’t the most important thing for voters right now. When the main candidates are polar opposites on key issues in people’s lives like Abortion or LGBT rights, anything happening outside of the country becomes an afterthought.
It is, but not by voting third party. I can understand it if the candidate is actually leading in polls like Perot was, but right now hoping for a third party (or worse, Kennedy is apparently the most supported after the main two so FOURTH party) exploit is way too unrealistic to take the risk.
As I’ve said in another post, to me the only feasible way to get stuff to actually change is to keep voting for the “least bad” of the main candidates. If Republicans keep losing every election, eventually they’ll resign to the fact that they can’t keep running on christofascism and give their platform to a candidate that at least has the same opinion as the Dem one about basic human rights. And only at that point, when Dems won’t be able to run on “my opponent is literally Satan”, they’ll have to shift to more progressive positions to keep getting elected. If at that point they still don’t, you can safely vote for third parties because “wasting your vote” isn’t that much of a risk.