Sweeping Democratic victories in off-year elections seem to be foreshadowing a very good midterms for the party, and one expert believes it’s even bigger than that.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which focuses on electing Democrats to statehouses, told Mother Jones.
Because the current system is setup to exclude third party voters, mathematically the FPTP system will result in a two party duopoly. And we’ve seen time and time again that the spoiler effect reduces votes to the party more similar to the third party.
So yeah, unless you get all the people to dedicate to a third party blowout, it is a waste. If an incumbent president didn’t have enough influence to break the duopoly by going third party, do you really think it’s ever going to happen? Particularly without a huge movement of said third party?
Pragmatically speaking, voting third party only serves to help the people you disagree with more.
The same argument applies in every other voting system and that is simply not how it works. If you never vote what you actually want you will never get what you actually want. Saying all need to change at once is nonsense, a gradual shift is more than enough. But people argue exactly like that and so never vote what they want, that is the core issue. Other voting systems still see few % parties get nothing and the argument people use to not vote them is exactly the same. The has to be some cutoff below which you get nothing and there is no way to prevent that in a real system with integer numbers.
Yep. Every voting system has anomalies that can be gamed. FPTP leads to a 2-party equilibrium. Most proportional-representation systems lead to coalition governments, and such systems give disproportionate power to small centrist parties needed by a coalition in order to form a majority.
What tha means is that under PR, people like Manchin and Schumer would be included in every coalition government. Just what we need: more power to unprincipled opportunists.
It literally does not, there are ranked voting and instant runoff systems where it doesn’t apply.