No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.
That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it’s a cognitive bias, because you’re, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the “lesser of two evils” mentality, or whatever else. It’s not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It’s that it’s a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Then there is the problem of corruption
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with “representative democracy”. I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I’m complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you’re blue in the face, but you’re literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.
the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.
No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.
I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
Then you cherry-pick “50 years”. Completely ignoring the 18.9% the Independent party got in 1992 for some reason (which I already mentioned in this thread). Quit running victory laps and examine your faulty logic. What an asshole.
“Why next time will be different”? This isn’t a predictive theory, it’s a fact that whoever the population votes for will win, assuming you discount rigged election theories (and putting aside electoral college complexities). Let me repeat that for you. Whoever the population votes for, whatever logic they decide to use, particularly if they subscribe to “lesser of two evils” theory OR NOT, will dictate the outcome of the election. The behavior is a product of their logic. Your mentality, as I already spelled out in my last message, and you completely ignored, predisposes the outcome of a third party to failure. 90% of voters in a population religiously believing that they must vote for the Know-Nothing-Whig party or God will incinerate them, will result in 90% of an election going to the Know-Nothing-Whig party. 47% of voters religiously believing that they must vote for the “lesser of two evils”, which in their mind is the Democrats, will result in a 47% outcome for the Democrats. Understand? They - like you! - don’t yet comprehend that this is circular logic. When will that change? Whenever you all get that through your thick skulls - no sooner, no later. That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.
The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn’t even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That’s hardly a record that’s dispositive of anything I have said, and it’s still focusing on just one office that can’t do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn’t include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.
This isn’t a predictive theory,
I’m not asking for a prediction, I’m asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren’t going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that’s just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don’t even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?
If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn’t take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.
That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.
Repeating bullshit over and over doesn’t make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.
Nah. We’ve been over this enough times. You are still failing to understand how many people are robotically repeating the exact same thing as you, and how this is the factor that determines the election outcome.
EXACTLY! You do get it! Yes, that is EXACTLY the problem. How do you convince me that if I vote third party that they will too? How do you convince them that I will vote third party?
Here is the brilliant argument you are making put just a bit differently. “If enough people would just vote the way I want them to vote, we could elect who I want to elect!”. Congratulations, on that brilliant observation!
Here is the thing. If you had the power to do that, inside or outside strategy would no longer even matter. You could pick the winning candidates for the Democratic primary then pick them to win the general, or you could pick your third party candidate to win, and it would work fine either way.
But you can’t do that. You actually have to convince people to go your way. I’m still not hearing how you plan to do that for an outside strategy when every attempt to do so has failed miserably. I’ll ask again. How do you plan to run a third party strategy differently in 2028 than in 2024 or prior elections. How do you convince me or anyone else that you have enough people on board? I’m not even convinced that most Democrats even want a third party - nevermind being willing to risk splitting the vote to get there.
“I am so stupid, how will you convince me and people like me”? Literally how the fuck do you think all this responsibility falls onto me alone. Man up and own your shit.
If you all - collectively - want to pull the world back from the brink of annihilation and permanent totalitarianism, stop voting for the people who are implementing that plan. If you don’t, fine, then fuck off and stop replying to me. Enjoy total world slavery.
I shouldn’t have to explain that “you” refers to all proponents of the third party strategy, not you personally.
If you want people to do what you say then, yeah, it falls on you to convince them that it makes sense. It doesn’t fall on me to convince people to follow a deeply flawed strategy that I think will only lead to even worse outcomes when it fails yet again.
We both want to put better people in power and remove the people running the Democratic party from power. There is an inside strategy to do that, and an outside strategy to do that. The inside strategy has more of a chance to win, and less of a downside if it fails.
People didn’t vote Democrats this time around, and the world is about to get a whole lot worse. Gaza isn’t the only thing that matters. It isn’t even the worst ongoing genocide. Assuming you didn’t vote for Harris, did you even consider what a Trump win means for those other genocides? What it means for the people of Ukraine? Does it somehow help Gaza that we are about to do ethnic cleansing right here at home? Trump turning back the clock on fighting climate change alone will make Gaza look quaint.
I know who’s implementing the plan for totalitarian disaster. It’s morons who don’t understand politics.
Then you cherry-pick “50 years”. Completely ignoring the 18.9% the Independent party got in 1992 for some reason. Quit running victory laps and examine your faulty logic. What an asshole.
What percentage did they get in 1996? 2000? Perot split the conservative vote with Bush and allowed Clinton to win the election with only 43% of the vote. That’s not an outcome I want to replicate on the left.
Compare Perot with Trump who ran a very similar nationalist/populist strategy as a party outsider. Trump ripped the party out of the establishment’s hands and won the Presidency. Perot would have been well advised to run as a Republican.
I didn’t ignore 1996, I just don’t see it as a counter example to what I said. Perot lost by a wide margin, split the vote with his next closest candidate, then dropped to half as many votes in the next election. And that was when third parties could get into the debates.
I deleted the message by accident and reposted it. No idea why you decided to respond to it twice. Not even sure how it’s possible for you to respond to a deleted message. Kind of annoying dude!
No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.
Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.
That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.
Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.
Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.
It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory. As I already pointed out. That is why it’s a cognitive bias, because you’re, again, myopically focusing on choice given to individuals with the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise. You have an entire population of people MAKING this choice, MAKING these analyses, they are just doing it in an incomplete way. What happens when the population actually understands this fallacy and acts accordingly?
There are two paths long-term. You continue indefinitely with the self-defeating logic that never allows a third party to gain prominence or achieve power because the population collectively refuses to vote for them, or you teach the population to actually wield control of its own democracy rather than being dictated who they must vote for, by the corporate media, or the “lesser of two evils” mentality, or whatever else. It’s not that there is no obstacle to achieving the latter. It’s that it’s a moral imperative and MUST be achieved.
Yes, that is a fundamental problem with “representative democracy”. I would advocate even more extreme reforms to implement direct democracy. But what would you say to that? No doubt, more defeatist rhetoric that completely eliminates the possibility of constitutional reform - refusing to vote for candidates in Congress or state legislatures etc. that would actually vote for major constitutional reform, or especially not for any form of revolution. All you do is bitch and moan about every possible path to actual reform, then settle on the little 2% or 5% or whatever sliver of improvement that Democrats offer over Republicans, and then go on social media and gloat about your perceived moral superiority. This is the entire problem I’m complaining about. The population acting like YOU is what DESTROYS CHANGE. That IS the problem. You need to get up off your fucking asses and MAKE the change. You can sit here making arguments about why all change is impossible until you’re blue in the face, but you’re literally just proving my point, it is YOUR mentality across millions of people that MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.
No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.
I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.
Then you cherry-pick “50 years”. Completely ignoring the 18.9% the Independent party got in 1992 for some reason (which I already mentioned in this thread). Quit running victory laps and examine your faulty logic. What an asshole.
“Why next time will be different”? This isn’t a predictive theory, it’s a fact that whoever the population votes for will win, assuming you discount rigged election theories (and putting aside electoral college complexities). Let me repeat that for you. Whoever the population votes for, whatever logic they decide to use, particularly if they subscribe to “lesser of two evils” theory OR NOT, will dictate the outcome of the election. The behavior is a product of their logic. Your mentality, as I already spelled out in my last message, and you completely ignored, predisposes the outcome of a third party to failure. 90% of voters in a population religiously believing that they must vote for the Know-Nothing-Whig party or God will incinerate them, will result in 90% of an election going to the Know-Nothing-Whig party. 47% of voters religiously believing that they must vote for the “lesser of two evils”, which in their mind is the Democrats, will result in a 47% outcome for the Democrats. Understand? They - like you! - don’t yet comprehend that this is circular logic. When will that change? Whenever you all get that through your thick skulls - no sooner, no later. That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.
The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn’t even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That’s hardly a record that’s dispositive of anything I have said, and it’s still focusing on just one office that can’t do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn’t include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.
I’m not asking for a prediction, I’m asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren’t going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that’s just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don’t even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?
If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn’t take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.
Repeating bullshit over and over doesn’t make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.
Nah. We’ve been over this enough times. You are still failing to understand how many people are robotically repeating the exact same thing as you, and how this is the factor that determines the election outcome.
EXACTLY! You do get it! Yes, that is EXACTLY the problem. How do you convince me that if I vote third party that they will too? How do you convince them that I will vote third party?
Here is the brilliant argument you are making put just a bit differently. “If enough people would just vote the way I want them to vote, we could elect who I want to elect!”. Congratulations, on that brilliant observation!
Here is the thing. If you had the power to do that, inside or outside strategy would no longer even matter. You could pick the winning candidates for the Democratic primary then pick them to win the general, or you could pick your third party candidate to win, and it would work fine either way.
But you can’t do that. You actually have to convince people to go your way. I’m still not hearing how you plan to do that for an outside strategy when every attempt to do so has failed miserably. I’ll ask again. How do you plan to run a third party strategy differently in 2028 than in 2024 or prior elections. How do you convince me or anyone else that you have enough people on board? I’m not even convinced that most Democrats even want a third party - nevermind being willing to risk splitting the vote to get there.
“I am so stupid, how will you convince me and people like me”? Literally how the fuck do you think all this responsibility falls onto me alone. Man up and own your shit.
If you all - collectively - want to pull the world back from the brink of annihilation and permanent totalitarianism, stop voting for the people who are implementing that plan. If you don’t, fine, then fuck off and stop replying to me. Enjoy total world slavery.
I shouldn’t have to explain that “you” refers to all proponents of the third party strategy, not you personally.
If you want people to do what you say then, yeah, it falls on you to convince them that it makes sense. It doesn’t fall on me to convince people to follow a deeply flawed strategy that I think will only lead to even worse outcomes when it fails yet again.
We both want to put better people in power and remove the people running the Democratic party from power. There is an inside strategy to do that, and an outside strategy to do that. The inside strategy has more of a chance to win, and less of a downside if it fails.
People didn’t vote Democrats this time around, and the world is about to get a whole lot worse. Gaza isn’t the only thing that matters. It isn’t even the worst ongoing genocide. Assuming you didn’t vote for Harris, did you even consider what a Trump win means for those other genocides? What it means for the people of Ukraine? Does it somehow help Gaza that we are about to do ethnic cleansing right here at home? Trump turning back the clock on fighting climate change alone will make Gaza look quaint.
I know who’s implementing the plan for totalitarian disaster. It’s morons who don’t understand politics.
Then you cherry-pick “50 years”. Completely ignoring the 18.9% the Independent party got in 1992 for some reason. Quit running victory laps and examine your faulty logic. What an asshole.
What percentage did they get in 1996? 2000? Perot split the conservative vote with Bush and allowed Clinton to win the election with only 43% of the vote. That’s not an outcome I want to replicate on the left.
Compare Perot with Trump who ran a very similar nationalist/populist strategy as a party outsider. Trump ripped the party out of the establishment’s hands and won the Presidency. Perot would have been well advised to run as a Republican.
I didn’t ignore 1996, I just don’t see it as a counter example to what I said. Perot lost by a wide margin, split the vote with his next closest candidate, then dropped to half as many votes in the next election. And that was when third parties could get into the debates.
I deleted the message by accident and reposted it. No idea why you decided to respond to it twice. Not even sure how it’s possible for you to respond to a deleted message. Kind of annoying dude!