concordtom said:
Anarchistbear said:
DeSantis is way worse than Trump. He's actually smart , equally ruthless and unlike Trump would probably win .
Trump vs Biden would definitely open possibilities of third and fourth party candidates and unlike most years they may not be trivial considering that the two most unpopular Presidents may be running against each other. Fun times
it'll never happen.
In order to have another party joint the fray, laws about ballots need to be put in place everywhere. Two parties have a lock on that. It won't get voted in everywhere.
Right now it's automatic that a Republican will be on every ballot and a Democrat will be. You have to go thru a special process of signatures for each and every non R/D candidate and ballot.
Duopoly is the problem.
It's really the American system that prevents third parties from getting any traction. The problem is that our national government is only partially based on proportional representation (the House). The Senate and Presidency are decided on first-past-the-post popular votes by state. That encourages everyone to sort themselves into two parties: one to support the President and one to oppose him.
It's not like a Parliamentary system where everyone votes for candidates or parties and then the winning coalition votes for a Prime Minister. That allows the 3rd or 4th strongest parties to still potentially wield influence if one of the top two can't gain a clear majority. There's more incentive for cooperation. In America you don't need that, you just need to finish in first place in enough places. That incentivizes adversarial behavior. In the past, even when one of the major parties has collapsed (like the Whigs), everyone still just re-sorted themselves into one of the two new contenders.
You'd basically need to revamp our national government and design it more like Germany or Canada or something, if you really want third parties to be viable.
