[geofft]

It's not at all, but the rational thing to do is still to support bad and not worse. (Unless you have a realistic way of introducing good, but I don't see any of them that will work in the short term, and I think promoting bad and eliminating worse is probably the best way to get there.)

[logfromblammo]

Introduce an option, to be included in all races on all ballots: disqualify these candidates and start over from the primaries.

It even works for uncontested races. The office goes empty until an acceptable candidate can be found to fill it.

[geofft]

1. I see no realistic route to the introduction of that option - you would need to convince a fairly large political apparatus, most of whom has no interest in the option regardless of party affiliation, to support it, and you'd probably need to change many state constitutions.

2. I'm not sure that option is actually a good idea, since the effective result is that either the incumbent continues longer - which means the none-of-the-above vote is a vote for the incumbent, so it's still rational to vote for the "other party" - or the office is empty. That's good if your goal is a small and weak government, which is a totally reasonable thing to want, but probably not one that reflects the will of the majority of Americans.

[logfromblammo]

A realistic route to implementation was not one of the requirements. If it is, the only solution is pretty much to eject Washington DC from the planet, fill in the hole, and start over.

And I explicitly said the office would remain empty. If an incumbent runs unopposed, the new option would be the way to force their party to pick someone else, since obviously no one had the moxie or political capital to challenge in the primary.

If it is important that the office be filled, it is important that the parties run candidates qualified to fill it. In light of recent events, I'd rather have no elected official or a temporary placeholder than a bad official. It would seem that our government has a limited capacity to operate rationally even when the person nominally in charge is incompetent or non compos mentis. It certainly happened in the later years of the Reagan administration. It might be happening now.

Europe has proved that short election cycles are possible. We could survive six weeks of vacancy in most offices while cranking out a mulligan election. And where it really counts, existing succession plans apply. We could certainly run one mulligan between November and January, and if another one is required, Congress still has time to pick their Speaker of the House before inauguration day, who would then have to take the office until an election finally succeeds in naming a full-term replacement.

The sheer panic, expense, and inconvenience of the first time would likely encourage the parties to not run crap candidates in the future.

[geofft]

> A realistic route to implementation was not one of the requirements.

I said "(Unless you have a realistic way of introducing good)" - I meant that the way of introducing it must be realistic, not simply that the good must be realistic. (Let me know if I could have phrased that more clearly!)

[logfromblammo]

There are many ways to pass legislation that are not clearly in the best interests of the legislators. Lobbying, logrolling, stealth amendment, procedural gambit, grassroots effort, convincing rhetoric, sound argument, blackmail....

Any one of those might work.

But you don't always have unlimited attempts, so it's still worth considering the amount of resistance a sound, sensible, rational solution to a real, obvious problem that affects every constituent might face in the typical congressperson, especially when the problem at hand is the prevalence of congresspersons stubbornly obstructing bills that would benefit the whole population at their expense.

[vec]

That ends up with the same fundamental issue as a third-party run. If I think the Purple Party's candidate kinda sucks but the Fuscia Party's candidate would be an absolute disaster, I'm incentivized to vote Purple instead of "wasting" my vote on an alternative that I don't think has a realistic chance of winning in order to avoid what I see as the worst case scenario.

It's a natural side effect of a first-past-the-post voting system[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law