this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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You're missing the point. As long as the electoral college and first past the post remain, third party candidates will never win. Never. It has nothing at all to do with people being "too afraid".
The last time a 3rd-party candidate got ANY electoral votes(despite what the other person said, it has happened) was in 1968, and that was literally only because it was during the tail end of the civil rights movement and Nixon wasn't quite racist enough for the south compared to the full blown white supremacist George Wallace.
The ONLY time a 3rd-party candidate has done better than one of the two major parties was over 100 years ago in 1912. The only reason for that is because the candidate in question was 2x former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, running as a 3rd-party specifically to oppose his handpicked successor turned rival Taft, who had become immensely unpopular with Rooseveltian Republicans. Well, two reasons: surviving an assassination attempt & giving a speech leaking blood with the bullet still in him like a total badass, just weeks before the election, probably helped too. Guess what though, it caused a huge spoiler effect that gave Woodrow Wilson a landslide 81.9% of the electoral vote despite only getting 41.8% of the popular vote.
Third parties are just inherently incompatible with our current election system. We need to adopt ranked choice voting and ditch the electoral college first.
I'm not missng the point, you're agreeing with me without realizing it.
As i said, the us voting system is broken, needs reform and is teaching Americans to be afraid of voting.
A broken system doesn't make the voters wrong. The system is wrong.
Voting for your candidate, whichever numbered party they are, is the right way to vote.