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That's not the only alternative. There is overlap in the spheres of voters of the green party and democratic party.
The issue is the spoiler effect which is a result of the overlap.
Again, 4x as many third party votes on the right. Spoiler effect ain’t shit to the left. If it was they would’ve actively tried and court progressives past Obama. The overlap exists yes but the DNC has not moved left much in 12 years leaving progressives pretty disenfranchised. It’s pretty obvious why many refuse to vote for a woman who used DNC funds to fight against the progressive candidate in primaries, or an old man who helped write one of the biggest anti-crime bills (which ends up a large anti-minority bill) and said nothing will fundamentally change,, or now a prosecutor who is “tough on immigration” refuses to denounce those actively committing genocide.
Medicare for all, or not supporting a genocide, or plenty of other options available to help attract progressives if they wanted it.
BUT again, rather than not vote at all those can at least vote 3rd party and still help down ballot. A lot better to win house and senate than lose everything.
Edit: updated to correct ratio of 4x based on 2020 data
On its own that statistic is meaningless, as it doesn't tell you how much overlap there is, and therefore how much spoiling there is. And regardless of which side, the spoiler effect is a symptom of a terrible voting system. The entrance of an irrelevant candidate should not sway the results of an election at all.
Additionally, everything is looking like it will be a very close race, in which case every bit of the spoiler effect matters, even if more of it is on the right, which you haven't established.
I don't like it either. But my point stands, there is an alternative choice.
The problem here is the spoiler effect, the system in which we elect representatives. It is in large part what allows the doupoly to remain uncompetitive.
You say 3rd party is irrelevant but also that 4x(revised now that I looked up exact numbers from 2020) more right 3rd party doesn’t prove it’s more than the left…. If there are only 2 relevant parties then… right goes to right, left goes to left. Shock. Awe. Ignore the weird centrist or actual independent or etc ones as those are hard to place.
Again, the issue is not that we have any third party vote. We should. It should be encouraged. It’s a fucking democracy. Dems trying to say trump will end democracy while simultaneously trying to remove 3rd parties is wild.
If we look at 2008 the left actually had 1.16x more than the right on 3rd party votes, and still won by 7% (10x the 3rd party votes on the left) where as 2016 the right had 3x the lefts 3rd party votes (2016 was a big third party year at ~3% right vs ~1% left. Who would guess 2 bad candidates leaves a huge 3rd party.) and then in 2020 the right had 4x the lefts third party votes. If anyone should be worried about “spoiler” candidates it’s the right as their third party has grown a lot more than the lefts. Hell 2020 the left lowered by half of 2008 (Even the crazy year 2016 it was only 0.71% of possible voters, 2020 was only 0.2% of possible voters. 2008 was 0.43% of possible voters.)
No I didn't. I said the introduction of an irrelevant candidate (meaning one that did not win) should have no effect on the outcome of an election.
As I already explained, that statistic is meaningless, as it doesn't say anything about how much overlap and therefore vote spoiling is taking place. I'll demonstrate:
That means green has 40 potential votes, democrat has 200 potential votes, republican has 190 potential votes, and libertarian has 100 potential votes.
There is double the number of 3rd party voters on the right than the left. But it doesn't matter, because the dems overlap with 10 voters of the green party. And the repubs overlap with 10 voters of the libertarian party. They'll more or less cancel each other out despite there being way more right wing 3rd party votes.
Unless you have data to show how much overlap there is, this statistic is meaningless.
Not in a FPTP system, because that leads to the spoiler effect.
The United States is a failed democracy by any reasonable measure.
I love that you love this theory that you cannot possibly get any data on magically but also cannot realize that the 0.7% of the total vote in 2016 the leftist third parties got is almost 10x less than the loss from voter turnout between 2016 and 2020. the 40% of people who simply did not vote at all are a BIIIIIIT more to blame than the 0.7% of people who voted third party, no matter how many of them would overlap with the DNC or not.
Spoiler candidates exist, sure, but that is shit like IIRC when republicans in miami funded a dude who didn't live in florida in a miami race because he has the same legal name as the democrat who was running.
That is a lot different than third parties who aren't even getting 1% of the vote. the DNC shot themselves in the face in 2016 and cannot get over it, so they would rather continue to scapegoat bernie bros and green party instead of just admitting their plan of pissing off as many progressives as humanly possible and trying to court republicans instead has not worked extremely well.
and finally, if you're cool with FPTP then great for you, keep voting DNC. No need to remove money from politics, support the poor, stop genocide, or anything important that would lose us money when we have something more evil than us to vote against! Yay! Some aren't stoked on how complicit in that idea the DNC is. I'm not going to tell someone with a straight face that democrats will fix everything we just have to vote for them another 600 times so they can.... keep going further from progress each year. Example being immigration they're pushing which is fully 2 steps backward to take one step forward.
It's not a theory or hypothesis. It is how a venn diagram works, it's geometry. And both geometry and that loss of turnout can be the case, they are not mutually exclusive. And I also never said that those who didn't turn out to the polls weren't to blame. You're putting words in my mouth at this point.
Both are to blame. Anybody who didn't vote or voted for a candidate who had no chance is 100% to blame. Distinguishing blame by group isn't of value.
I'm glad we agree. That's the whole point.
You're preaching to the choir. I hate their shitty ass strategy too.
I am explicitly not cool with it.
Welcome to FPTP two party systems.
Trump has literally said he would end democracy. Third parties literally by design are either irrelevant or destroy the party they are most like because of the electoral college. Trying to prevent a situation in which a third party acts as a willing pawn to spoil an election is pro democratic in terms of leading to an outcome that is desirable to a larger portion of the electorate.
The spoiler effect is at best a bad hypothesis, and has never been proven to effect actual votes.
People voting third party just would not vote if there was no third party option. This means there is no spoiler.
No, it's well understood, and very clearly exists. Here is an example using randomly generated voters ans candidates:
The problem is that these are in effect venn diagrams. There will always be overlap, and that's the problem. That's what leads to election results being changed by the entrance of an irrelevant candidate (the spoiler effect).
That's because the spoiler effect most easily happens in races that are already close, because we don't do much actual real life testing with actual elections because of the uncountable number of variables, and because doing it the python data science way is significantly more meaningful because of the aforementioned number of variables problem.
If that's really true, then this whole idea about the democratic party trying to earn the votes of green voters is bunk. Either there is no overlap, in which case it's bunk. Or there is overlap, in which case we have a spoiler effect.
You went to a lot of effort here to present that very clearly, and I salute you. I’d like to think others here are just blinded by their own ideals, and that’s why nobody is answering, not because they were just arguing for a side they didn’t believe in and don’t have response to that.
Thank you. I'd hesitate to speculate exactly why it hasn't been addressed.
But at least part of it is because arguing against what I've presented is akin to arguing that 2 + 2 != 4
You have just proven my point, it's not a thing that happens in reality if it were you'd point to actual data, not randomly generated test cases where the hypothesis works assuming everyone has to vote and is going to vote.
To your second point, they not trying to win voters, Dems have never attempted to court anyone left of Reagan voters, ever. The point is demoralization. Non voters are better than energized voters that will never vote for you; the latter group protests, riots, threatens your monopoly on power.
I already explained why this is a terrible goalpost. But even under this terrible goalpost you're still not correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
See the section under "Notable unintentional spoilers"
Additionally the 2000 election:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_2000_presidential_campaign
That's already accounted for. The gray dots are non voters. Including non voters doesn't actually change the math, because the math is the overlap of circles. It is already only accounting for the subset of people who are voters.
Yep! I'm one of them who thinks like that.