• Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    4 days ago

    I don’t understand Americans, there must be appetite for a third option and yet whenever a third option is presented virtually no one votes for them.

    • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      The voting system is fucked. It’s not called a two-party system for fun, but because systematically that’s what happens with a first-past-the-post system. It’s the spoiler effect.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        This is why I interpret candidates who support FPTP as hostile. They fucking know, everybody has known since the 2000 presidential election.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      4 days ago

      Because of the way our voting system works, voting for a third party usually votes against the voters interests.

      For example…the 2000 Election was a huge hubbabaloo over the voting results from Florida…was a very narrow margin between Democrat and Environmentalist Al Gore, and Republican George W. Bush.

      Ralph Nader also ran for the Green Party, one of the larger and more well-known third parties. Green is very left, and very environmentalist.

      Nader didn’t get very many votes…but he did get enough that had like half of those voters just voted for Gore, Gore would’ve won the state and thus the election, and the world would be a much cooler place today.

      I’m certain that if we had a preferential/ranked-choice voting system, the runoff process would’ve revealed Gore as a very clear winner.

      But instead…we got George W. Bush.

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      American voting behavior is entirely controlled by the media and their oligarch owners. Americans believe so thoroughly in the myth of their free press that they outsource their political analysis to whatever media outlet triggers their specific fears/hatreds/desires.