[xg15]

> If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.

I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.

Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.

With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.

The populace chose the pit full of spikes.

[tbrownaw]

> broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.

As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?

[PessimalDecimal]

Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run. It's an extremely old and simple way of structuring elections, but the US government has a system that has remained mostly intact for centuries now. We're stuck with it for now. If we wanted this system to be peacefully replaced with something more modern, the parties who benefit from this arrangement would have to be the ones to champion its replacement. That doesn't seem likely.

[skissane]

> Isn't it more structural than that? The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run.

Canada and the UK have first-past-the-post too, yet lack the hard two party system the US has.

One factor is both Canada and the UK have much stronger regional identities than the US - some Americans talk up how strong American regional identities are, but the US has nothing comparable to Scotland or Quebec.

Another factor is the parliamentary system encourages stronger party discipline, which leads to more parties having narrower definitions, compared to the two big tent parties in the US who have such weak party discipline, the party leadership has very little control over its elected officials.

The greater significance of primaries probably also contributes - although in recent decades Canada and the UK have started copying that institution, but still to nowhere near the same degree. A strong primary system weakens a party’s self-control and internal cohesion, and hence promotes it becoming a bigger tent that helps further further entrench the two party system.

Look at the current split of the UK right between Conservatives and Reform - such a split would be far less likely in the US, because the Republican brand is so vague and generic it is much harder for a renegade right wing party to succeed (and the same applies on the left)

> We're stuck with it for now.

One advantage the US has, is electoral systems is mostly a state-level decision, even for federal elections. In most other federations, the voting system used in federal elections is a federal competency. And with 50 states, it only takes one to introduce reforms. But, while there has been some experimentation with alternatives, by and large American states haven’t used their competency to carry out electoral reform. I suspect that is because Americans are fundamentally conservative-in the sense of resistance to change, even self-identified progressives in the US tend to focus their energies on changing certain key issues, and on other issues will let the status quo be.

[tbrownaw]

> The first-past-the-post system can only support two parties in the long run.

And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat.

And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are.

And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach.

And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties

The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.

[resize2996]

I don't think it's trite at all. The US electoral system is insane. President is chosen by the same few states every time. I haven't had a vote for president that has mattered ever, and I'm kinda old and have voted in several states.

[talldrinkofwhat]

A wishlist as short as it is improbable:

1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics)

2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics)

3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics)

4. Mandatory voting / national holiday.

e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.

[rat87]

Biden supported our allies while also pressing for a path to peace. Jill Stein had a terrible foreign policy especially with regards to russia. Anyone who thought Trump would do better ...

Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation

Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change.

Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't

[parineum]

You can stop campaigning, it's over.

Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work.

Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to).

People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.

[bamboozled]

I don’t think you’re invalidating much of what they’ve said and much of what happened.

People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?

[parineum]

I think I (or attempted to) invalidate everything up to the final paragraph because everything before that was about the Biden presidency which was not positively relevant to the Harris campaign.

Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV.

Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats.

Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left.

Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.

[rat87]

Democrats put up the only candidate likely to unify the party at that stage. I'm not defending a campaign which lost to Trump. But at some point we also have to blame ourselves and the voting population at large. As well as a media way too forgiving to Trump. How could they vote for something so self evidently self harmful.