How can we really get a third party?

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Cowman

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I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say if you voted for Kerry in the last election you really were trying to cast a vote against Bush.

Bush did win though. Why did Bush win? However you feel about him, I think that it's an undenyable fact that a pretty hefty segment of the population was unhappy with how he was running the country.

I think that it's safe to say most of us are not really voting for a candidate as much as we are voting against another one these days. It's really become all about which freedoms you're more worried about. Do you want less government intrusion into your privacy? Democrat. Do you want to keep your guns? Republican.

Neither choice is all that wonderful is it, but if you're like me as you look through the issues one side probably ends up scaring you a lot more than the other.

I've been looking at the Libertarian party. I can't say I agree with them on every issue, but on the whole I agree with their philosiphy and I would be interested in seeing more of that philosiphy in government. But if I vote for them and encourage my friends to vote for them and actually succeed will I just be handing the election to the party I don't want to see win? And that's a concern a lot of people have... and yeah you can argue that you should just vote for who you want to win but let's be practical about it.

How can we convince people to switch over in mass? How can we start to fix the system? Yeah, I want an answer. I'd really like to see things improve.
 
I'd say the best thing to hope for if you want a pro gun democrat is that in the next election something horrible happens like Rudy VS Hillary, and the NRA votes going to Libertarians. Perhaps that would cause the Dems to put up someone legitimatly pro gun in 2012 out of the realization of how many votes they have thrown away over the years.
 
Want to start a viable third party? Do you have $500 million to spend on it?

It's all about the money. As Al Pacino said in one of his movies, "First you get-a the money, then you get-a the power."

Capisch?
 
Most people think of an election as some sort of bet. They just don't want to "waste" their vote on a loser. In the process-- they are the real losers. The only way to get a third party is to vote for it. Once it gets enough votes it will get more recognition, more good candidates and more money.

It's kinda like the chicken and the egg: No money = no votes and no votes= no money. People who have a conscience need to vote like it rather than wasting their vote on the lesser of two evils.
 
Name

Well you can't use that name for it, as it might get confused with the two bull-something parties;)
 
I think the third party your talking about is already here.

It's the American people, we need to figure out how to get them active. If the politicians raise taxes, the people just gripe a little and sit back and take it. NO political party is going serve the people if the people just sit back and take it.

This country could EASILY send a very harsh messege to this lame government and scare the hell out of it.

But, America marches in fear, and believes the worthless bs their morning paper and their government tells them.

Taxes is the first place to start. The liberal party wants more taxes on oil, co. profits, land, and even gas. If the people are really this stupid, they don't deserve a better government, they should give up ALL their money to the government.

Maybe we could just have the gov print our newspapers for us too, the sheeple would love it.
 
If you want to be realistic, you must admit that a third party has a ZERO chance of electing a president.
While neither party suits many of you/us, the best way is to vote for the one which most nearly agrees with those issues you believe to be most important. To vote a third party is not the best for the nation or for your cause.

Voting third party does not teach either party anything, except that it is a spoiler.

The current "third" parties do not have platfroms that so many of us can agree with.
The Libertarian Party, for example, could never get my vote, as it ignores the fact that "No man is an island." It tolerates immorality in the guise that everyone has a right to do what he desires, "as long as it does not hurt others."

There is no realization that many things do hurt others in ways not obvious at first. There is no moral compass within the Libertarian Party.
I suspect it is mostly for those under 30 who are still idealistic as to how the world really operates, and who ignore moral wrongs such as abortion, and homosexuality.

Forget the third party thing and try to get one of the major parties to change enough to reflect your thinking.

Jerry
 
There is no viable Third Party. More important, you can't start one. We tried. Advertised, created a website, Forums, chatted it up on libertarian and conservative and even (wannabe) anarchist boards. Had bumper stickers. Had sig-line links. Had literally hundreds of thousands of hits to the site...

The whole premise was to start from the ground up, build a platform, define stances, then start pursuing offices at the smallest local level. Forget POTUS, we don't need that to be influential. Wanted to be a part of it? All anyone had to do was join the forum and start contributing ideas. No cash, no demands, no requirements(yet), nada. Just put in enough time to contribute the ideas that would define the initial position.

In 18 months we got 100 people who were interested enough to register and maybe 20 of them actually offered ideas.

Everybody wants to talk. Nobody wants to do. Worse, the tiny number that ARE willing to do get to listen to everyone else tell them how bloody crazy they are and how it'll never work. Well, the latter part was correct, but the former remains at least slightly in question...

We are, in fact, well and truly screwed. Sorry to break that to ya'll...
 
oh for goodness sake...

Government has little stake in morality, that's the church's business. Leave it at the church. One of your members does something immoral? Punish them within the bounds of the church. The government ought to stay clear until it violates someone else's rights, then it's *illegal*.

Apparently most "moral compass law" people seem to think that punishing people in the here and now is more important than them getting their uppance in the hereafter. God's apparently become impotent, so we must take his place...
 
The current two parties were not the original two. Both were new parties at one point, and new parties can rise again when the conditions are right.

Perot came very close to winning as an independant without even a party backing. He took such a large percentage of the vote away from Bush that Clinton won.


A third party is going to happen when a very, very popular candidate fails to get his party's nomination but keeps his following intact - especially if that following is bipartisan (Perot's was mainly Republican).


But such events form around the candidate, not around a platform. You can't form a third party then look for politicians. You need a Lincoln or Roosevelt to rally around.
 
How can we convince people to switch over in mass? How can we start to fix the system? Yeah, I want an answer. I'd really like to see things improve.
Click to expand...

This reminds me of an interesting thing.

A frog will sit in a pot of water until it boils and he dies, provided you bring it to a boil slowly. Good thing humans are not that foolish--if they were, they'd all stick with the two parties who work alternately to confiscate liberty in America!

...oh...wait a second.
 
But such events form around the candidate, not around a platform. You can't form a third party then look for politicians. You need a Lincoln or Roosevelt to rally around.
Click to expand...

The two last things our country needs are:

Another president who tramples rights wholesale like Lincoln, and
Another president who initiates a socialist welfare state like Roosevelt (assuming you meant FDR and not the excellent Teddy Roosevelt)
 
Those days are passed. Now you have your powerful persona and you get him elected to POTUS...

So what.

You have an impotent figurehead with no capacity to influence anything in a meaningful way, who the Parties whip four years later by driving home that very impotence...

*or*

You have a (insert either Party name here) who just happened to win under some other label and who still operates within his Party's parameters, makes nice with the egos he bruised in stepping out and plays his presidency like he was always one of them...

Look at the new boss, same as the old boss.

A Third Party today will have to coalesce around Ideals and ideas and gain power from the bottom up. The most rarified strata(the oxygen is thin up there which is why none of their minds work quite right) are off limits due to budget considerations. Don't need 'em anyway. If you can get control of the states and maybe even the House then the Senate and the Pres really don't matter much anymore. THEN, after a very, very...very...long time and lot of effort you can worry about breaking down those walls and making that game affordable to play again.
 
Every so often the smell get so bad the voters act and hit the handle. Last time was '94 when democrats were flushed out of the system. I think we're smelling pretty high now. We may well be ready to hit the handle again.

Now if you're interested in lasting change something else has to happen. In addition to wanting to get rid of the smell, there has to be a seachange in what Americans think this country is all about. Such changes occur only every 2 or 3 generations. We MAY well be facing one now. The flashpoint seems to be illegal alien immigration. Immigration is merely the most visible of a host of related issues. What we may be witnessing is the rise of American Nationalism. If so we can expect to see developing influence of alternative political power. In the absence of a fundamental reorientation of public attitude no third party will ever see any success.
 
Government has little stake in morality, that's the church's business. Leave it at the church. One of your members does something immoral? Punish them within the bounds of the church. The government ought to stay clear until it violates someone else's rights, then it's *illegal*.

Apparently most "moral compass law" people seem to think that punishing people in the here and now is more important than them getting their uppance in the hereafter. God's apparently become impotent, so we must take his place...
Click to expand...

I wholeheartedly agree. The government should only protect our rights, not dictate how we live our lives.
 
If you can go back and look at what we were promised by Bush and what we got..it is obvious the best spinmiester wins. We the American people hav fallen under the spell of whoever has the best BS. One party screws up we put the other party in. I am not that solid on the Libertarian Party but every day since Bush was elected ( I voted for him the first time) and some of the Democrats are only interested in politics and power, the pull becomes stronger to go a third party route.
 
If you want to be realistic, you must admit that a third party has a ZERO chance of electing a president.
While neither party suits many of you/us, the best way is to vote for the one which most nearly agrees with those issues you believe to be most important. To vote a third party is not the best for the nation or for your cause.
Click to expand...
To vote for and give more of a mandate to one of two absolutely terrible major parties also does not help my cause. (Whether my vote is actually part of a mandate or not is irrelevant; the candidate will claim that it is, and most people believe that it is. That's the primary reason why I generally don't vote for the lesser of two evils, even in this two-party, plurality voting system where 3rd parties really have no chance.)

Current elections, which mostly use plurality voting, need to switch to another method like Condorcet (Schultze or Ranked Pairs variant, specifically). That allows voters to vote first for a 3rd party, while still allowing them to specify a preference between the two main candidates (or voters can refuse to prefer one over the other, either by refusing to rank them or by ranking them equally). Other alternatives, mainly Approval voting and Independent Run-off Voting (IRV), have problems, even though IRV in particular is popular in some other (backwards) countries (like Australia).*

Unfortunately, given the number of voters who can't choose the right candidate on the simple ballots today, a multiple-selection ballot might be overwhelming.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Criteria_in_evaluating_voting_systems
 
Phetro said...
"The two last things our country needs are:

Another president who tramples rights wholesale like Lincoln, and
Another president who initiates a socialist welfare state like Roosevelt (assuming you meant FDR and not the excellent Teddy Roosevelt)"

+1
 
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