Third parties and why their strategies suck

[eric]

Third parties need to start at local levels, work their way into Congress, than go from there. Any sort of presidential run at this point is a joke.

[The Dharma Bum]

[Boris Johnson]

So far that's a fairly dismal effort.

British Green Party has an MP now, Germans have a descent showing in parliament, Similar story in Denmark. Likewise with others. U.S green party in comparison.. pretty shitty job guize. Not something you can blame on corporations or the man either. Large parties take certain seats for granted and will always focus on each other. There is always room to nuzzle in somewhere.


Anyway. Said this dozens and dozens of times now. Of the two 'saner' parties the Libertarians and the Greens. I see little from them to evidence a sustained strategy towards gains on a local or state level.

They frankly need to bite the bullet, realize they really are 'politicians' and hire some descent campaign organisers, start training up a crop of young up and coming candidates and start a sustained strategy in 3-4 states, to get to the point where they can start making the news cycle with actual governing in 10-20 years.

[OGPhilly]

Parliamentary systems encourage smaller parties. Apples and oranges.

[Boris Johnson]

[OGPhilly]

[Boris Johnson]

[OGPhilly]

How many parties currently have seats in the British Parliament?

[Sazari]

It's not parliamentary systems that drive the two party system, its the winner take all system that all but ensures we will have two and only two parties for as long as the current system is in place. Britain's system is actually similar to ours in this respect, in that it is very much a plural system. This is why you seem Labor/Tory for the most part dominating the system, because it is quite plural.

When the legislature is based on single member districts, it is going to naturally divide into two and only two parties. This is because there is zero advantages to claiming any proportion of the vote unless it is a plurality. This makes voting for anything outside of the two parties quite infeasable. We caquite easily see it in our system today, most people vote democrat or republican because even if you don't alight with the party, you won't vote for a third party because they stand no chance of winning, and they gain no representation unless they win.

Contrast this with proportional systems, where if a party takes 5% of the vote, they get 5% of the seats in the legislature. You can easily vote for a 3rd, 4th or 5th party because even if you only capture a small amount of the vote, you still capture a small amount of the legislature. In america, if you capture 5% of the vote in every congressional district, you will end up with 0% of the congress.

This is why everyone who talks about 3rd parties seriously in an America system is just ignorant of basic political facts. We will never have a viable 3rd party because our system is way to plural to ever allow it.

[PoS]

The reason why third parties dont succeed much is because of the media: the media distort the message of third parties and labels them as extremist groups or ignores them entirely- I think its a conspiracy since people in the media have a progressivist agenda and anyone who strays from that message gets skewered or ignored.