One House Democrat said he spoke for others in the wake of the president’s stunningly feeble debate performance on Thursday: “The movement to convince Biden to not run is real.”
The House member, an outspoken defender of the president, said that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should consider “a combined effort” to nudge President Joe Biden out of the race.
Crestfallen by the president’s weak voice, pallid appearance and meandering answers, numerous Democratic officials said Biden’s bet on an early debate to rebut unceasing questions about his age had not only backfired but done damage that may prove irreversible. The president had, in the first 30 minutes of the debate, fully affirmed doubts about his fitness.
A second House Democrat said “reflection is needed” from Biden about the way ahead and indicated the private text threads among lawmakers were even more dire, with some saying outright that the president needed to drop out of the race.
We need ranked choice voting, and this 2 party system is complete bullshit and needs to go. Obviously, neither will happen, but it should.
Funny how people elected under the two party system aren’t super motivated to change it.
This is why it has to come from the bottom up. All of the people saying “im sitting out of this election” or “i’m voting third party” are just acting in vain. It’s all vanity as they want to pretend they are doing something while not actually doing anything. If you want this system to change, you have to go out in local elections and push for people who will change it to ranked/star voting, and then have that move up. Then you have people who have won under those conditions voting for it, which makes it a ton more likely.
Voting 3rd party in this election is a vote for Trump. If Trump wins, this will be the last real election the U.S. ever has. All future elections will be Russian style.
Just changing the voting system by itself won’t get rid of the two party system, we also need proportional representation. I much prefer Approval Voting and Sequential Proportional Approval Voting because the results are as good, if not better than RCV, they’re easier for the individual to understand, and it’s impossible to submit an invalid ballot using either method. Plus RCV doesn’t actually change the winner the vast majority of the time. Fargo and St. Louis both use approval voting and folks there appreciate being able to vote for everyone they like and know that their full ballot will always be counted.
Not immediately, but it is a necessary condition. A third party really can’t exist without ranked choice voting. If allows for a third party candidate to run without pissing everybody off.
There are lots of voting systems that make third parties less damaging to major parties. Approval, RCV, STAR, Score, to name a few. Approval is a better choice because it’s much easier to use and explain to people (RCV disenfranchises minorities, poor people, and under educated voters), while generally agreeing with RCV on the results. Plus, it’s much easier to expand to proportional representation, when we get there.
We’re not trying to force a change in winners though. The elections below president are far more dynamic and the people elected usually win for a reason beyond FPTP.
But also, any kind of proportional representation requires a constitutional amendment. RCV can be installed with a state legislature making a 2 sentence bill.
Really what needs to happen is removing the 100 year old cap on the size of the house. 800 reps would drastically change both presidential elections and representation of people in general. Using 800 reps puts California at 96 members to Wyoming still having 1.
Honestly I’d go further, let’s get a round thousand and hook it to a ratio. Obliterating the ability to buy house races will result in better high level candidates and better low level representation. I’d say let’s do the full ten thousand if I thought people would for it.
That linked data is collected from local American races. The winner is overwhelmingly the person who won the first round, which is the only round the majority of the time. When people claim RCV will break the two party system they are trying to claim it will change the winners. The evidence largely shows that no voting system can take a single-winner duopoly and break it.
Any new voting system would require only a simple bill from the legislature. “Ballots instructions for every election at every level shall direct voters to select any number of candidates. The candidates with the most votes wins their respective election.”
Proportional representation specifically refers to how parties divide the available seats in a parliamentary body. Not how you cast your vote.
RCV allows for changes that FPTP doesn’t but that has never meant this would be shaken up right away. Mostly it’s a way to avoid vote splitting. So you can run a progressive, moderate, conservative, and an alt right candidate without the traditional alliances worrying about vote splitting.
I apologize for not addressing that, but I didn’t think it required expanding on. Yes, that’s correct. I feel the preferred proportional method is Sequential Proportional Approval Voting
RCV doesn’t eliminate vote splitting, it only mitigates it. If two candidates have similar support in a non-final round, one can act as a spoiler for the other. The problem is that it’s harder to understand and FairVote used to lie about it, so a lot of people think it’s not a problem. The Alaska special election from a few years back is an example of a spoiler election. If Palin hadn’t run (or fewer Palin voters voted) the other Republican would have won. If you want to completely eliminate vote splitting you have to move to a cardinal voting method that satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion, which is most of them, including approval voting.
SPAV is specifically constructed to work with proportional representation. It iterates until all seats are filled. But in the US, by Constitutional law, it’s one seat per geographical district.
About RCV though it’s still head and shoulders above FPTP, and easy to understand. About Alaska specifically, I don’t understand why you would call the party backed candidate who got more votes a spoiler?
Palin lost in the second round because roughly half of Begich’s voters did not want Palin. If the less popular Republican candidate wasn’t in the race then Peltola still wins. This was a case of RCV working exactly as advertised. A traditional party primary would have nominated Palin, not Begich, and she would have lost anyways.
Yes, that’s how it works. The first round is functionally identical to regular approval which is why I like using the two. Approval for single-winner, SPAV for multi-winner.
I’m pretty sure it’s just federal law, but I would have to double check. Not like Congress would change it anyway.
That’s pure speculation. But using the voting data from the general, we Begich was preferred to both Palin and Peltola in head-to-head matchups. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich to eliminate him in the first round and he lost to Peltola in the second. If Palin hadn’t run Begich would have won.
You can read more about it from the linked sources here.
Here’s the most relevant section:
You have to be careful analysing RCV results, because people tend to only look at what the election did, and fail to look at what it didn’t do. One of the good things about RCV is that it collects a fair bit of information, but then it usually ignores a fair bit of it. When trying to understand whether a candidate was a spoiler or not, you have to ask what would have happened if they didn’t run at all, which requires considering collected information the “unaltered” election didn’t take into account. If removing them from the election changes the winner of the race, then they were a spoiler. We know that removing Palin would have resulted in a Begich win over Peltola, so that makes Palin a spoiler. She’s a losing candidate that changed the winner of the race simply by entering, assuming voter preferences are stable.
Yeah no. That’s a lot of noise to ignore that the party and Republican voters preferred Palin. Begich wouldn’t even have been there in traditional FPTP. Calling the most popular candidate from a party “a spoiler” is a rhetorical device republicans came up with to go after RCV.
Peltola is also hardly some far left representative. So calling it a center squeeze is a bit rich. This entire write up screams, “I can’t approve of the Alaskan RCV election because I’m paid not to.”
To be clear, not you, the author of that Wikipedia article.
Edit to add- and sure enough if you go to the talk page there’s a partisan group defending it from any changes to bring it towards Wikipedia objectivity standards. This is why your teachers told you Wikipedia is a bad source.
Sounds nice and fair. Also won’t ever happen. Our options will always be giant douche or turd sandwich.
You start from the bottom and work your way up. Switch your local elections to approval with a referendum campaign, and by the time you get up to the state level you’ll have people in office who have already proven they can win under approval. I’m serious. You should run a referendum campaign.
Lol, my state, county, and city are so deep red that there’s no chance. Most local primaries, there’s not even a democrat on the ballots. My options are to write in my favorite fictional characters or vote for the least shitbag republicans. My votes are quite literally a waste.
Changing the voting system has nothing to do with the parties in power. Also, it’s a referendum campaign. You’d be collecting signatures from the citizens in order to get it on the ballot. Pretty much all you have to do is find some primaries where the winner got like 25% percent of the vote and talk about how unacceptable that is. St. Louis uses approval for their primaries instead of the general. Approval asks what fraction of the population approved of a candidate, so the winner’s percentage is practically guaranteed to go up, demonstrating they actually do have broad support.
RCV will end the two party system. France uses runoff and they have more than two parties
That said, I’m partial to the systems in Sweden and Germany, plenty of options to choose from.
RCV and two-round runoff are very different in practice because the two round system encourages strategic voting, has a higher potential for spoilers (RCV has them too), and has an intermediate time where the advancing candidates have to fight over all the voters who didn’t pick them in the first round, which is meaningfully different from when they were a part of the pack.
France has some amount of proportional representation at the local level.
They’re not starting from an entrenched two party system.
They’re honestly simply one of the big exceptions, it’s fairly well-established that single-winner methods tend towards two parties pretty much no matter what you do. Typically when you see more than two parties at the national level, it’s because there are regional pockets where only two parties are competitive, but it’s not always the same two parties. I’m not familiar with the details about the French political situation, but yeah, they’ve got a very unusual number of parties for a single-winner dominated structure. Compare them with Australia, who have proportional representation at the national level, and it should be pretty clear they’re just plain exceptional. If you need more evidence, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia already use a two round system for their legislatures but they still have a two party system.
I dunno how much you know about representation and voting systems, but the wiki article on two round systems is pretty good.
Okay. Go convince the Republicans who control over half the states to switched to rank choice voting.
I think we’ll first have to convince the Democratic leadership since they’re about as equally interested in changing things. Both parties want to maintain the status quo because it keeps them both in power.