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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

"Vote blue no matter who" attitudes can be thanked for this. People have been scared into never taking a 3rd party seriously. The Republicans are unthinkably bad so it is too risky to split the vote on the left. The only option is the Democrats. Corporations simply migrated their lobbying efforts slightly further over to the left side of Congress during the Obama admin. With strategically placed Senators like Gilibrand for Wall Street and Manchin for the coal/energy industry the corporate oligarchy has pretty good control over things now, the actual political desires of the electorate be damned. Notice how the democrats are politically leading the war/defense efforts now as well, something that used to be a more conservative aim.

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People aren't scared into not taking 3rd parties seriously, our system is just fundamentally designed to only have two realistic parties. It's just inherent in a first past the post system.

Yeah, fix the voting system to allow ranked choices and you'll find third parties doing a lot better. Until that voting third parties is sadly irrational until one of the top two parties becomes dominant, at which point switching out the party in second becomes potentially feasible.

The UK uses FPTP and has at least three major parties in Parliament (Lab, Con, SNP) and in the past Lib Dems were big enough to enter into coalition. There are also smaller parties in the Parliament too, like the Greens and sometimes independent candidates.

The reason the US only has two parties is because those parties are sufficiently loose and internally democratic enough that there's no need to start a third party, when you can come in as an outsider and take over one of the existing ones. Parties in the UK exercise much tighter control over who can lead them, and so there's more pressure to set up alternatives. If the US big tent parties worked the same way you'd have more than two parties as well.

I think we could more comfortably vote for a third option if failing to elect the least bad of two did not result in using women as medical equipment and insurrection against the federal government.

Classic sacrifice everything to gain nothing take from a leftist. Third parties can not work in our country with the way elections are designed. You are advocating for wasting your own time

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