politics

Yup, it's why I fucking love Canada... when the Cons and Libs fight the NDP and regional parties like BQ pick up votes.

Now explain to me how first past the post works with our electoral college.

Then explain how any 3rd party candidate gets to 270.

To add on to what @[email protected] said, you need to change the voting system first before that becomes viable, and then it happens naturally without any manual intervention.

Take the Alaska 2022 election as an example. Before, candidates had to be extreme in order to appeal to their base, as all that mattered was making the other side look "evil". Once they switched to rank voting, all of a sudden they had to convince voters of their own worth so they'd be put in at least second or third place, if not first directly. It also meant people could safely vote third party or alternative candidates within the major parties without a spoiler effect, as if the candidate is unviable, the vote just gets transferred to the second place pick.

Tl;Dr: The real solution to what you're trying to do is abandon first past the post and adopt some kind of ranked choice voting.

one party can simply distinguish itself from te other by being more extreme. Where this leads you can currently see with the Republicans

Conversely, the other party can get votes just by not being AS bad as the alternative, never under any pressure to actually be good. Where this leads you can currently see with the Democrats.

As soon as you have more than two, parties need to have their own agenda to distinguish themselves, and this "vote so tue other doesn't win" thing that is currently going on for almost a decade fades away.

Ideally, yes, but in cases with a severely entrenched duopoly like in the US, it's gonna take more than just the presence of alternatives. It's a start, though.

The issue is that Really only works with a system that doesn't inherently result in two viable large parties. In a first past the post system like the US, any options other than the major two just end up being spoilers, pulling voters from whichever of the main two parties they are more closely aligned with. So the least wanted set of beliefs is what actually wins in that system.

The current IS Republican party has only managed to get to the point they're at because the Democrats have also shifted right along with them. Either with the mistaken belief that they needed to follow to appeal to "centrists", who were just the right before, or because they were actually more conservative and were trying to shift the party on purpose. Add those shifts up over 40-50 years and you end up with a right wing party and a fascist party, the ones US currently has. There is no actual left leaning party in the US anymore when you view it from outside the US bubble of bullshit.

That is just silly. Everyone knows whoever raises the most money wins!

That's actually exactly the problem on this one. They would need to have a state congressional candidate to validate the party's list of electors for President.

They seem to have mostly School Board members.^[1]

And it seems like their ballot-access problem in Wisconsin is directly related to that.

In the complaint, Strange writes that Wisconsin law requires the people nominating electors to be the political party's state legislative candidates or legislators of the party. There are no Green Party legislators in Wisconsin.

"The August 13, 2024 primary was the last opportunity for [Wisconsin Green Party] to nominate a candidate for Wisconsin Senate or Assembly before the 2024 general election. But, WGP failed to nominate any candidates for Wisconsin Senate or Assembly, and a sufficient number of electors did not nominate a candidate by writing in any WGP candidate for Wisconsin Senate or Assembly," Strange wrote in the complaint.

If they were a real party, they might have actually tried to run someone for the Senate or Assembly. There's got to be some solidly blue district with a shitty centrist they could have actually challenged from the left.

I mean, no matter your opinion on smaller parties, they should still have the right to participate, that's democracy isn't it?