this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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The whole thing is really unfortunate, because we do need more than two political parties, but even if the candidate they put forth is actually great, the fact that Musk is involved will immediately make me assume they're corrupt as fuck.
We already have more than two political parties. What we don't have is more than two that are viable for anything above the local scale, which Musk can't change because that's a consequence of our electoral system. The best he could hope for is for one of the parties to collapse so thoroughly that it's base moves to his and it becomes one of the two major parties, which has happened before a couple times but is very unlikely I would think.
If it was anyone else putting it together, I think you'd be right, but Musk has a pretty large cult following, and an absurd amount of money to throw at this. If anyone is capable of drawing significant voters to a new party, it's him.
He wants to be the new Trump. I'm convinced he sees the adoration and unquestioned loyalty Trump gets from the MAGA crowd, and he wants that, too, but he can't run for president, so this is the best he can muster.
We only have two political parties with money. There i fixed it for ya.
We can’t have more than two political parties, this is one of the major failings of our first-past-the-post voting system. CGP grey has made a couple of really good videos breaking down the why of this, but the tl;dr is that FPTP voting effectively necessitates strategic voting (voting against who you don’t want rather than for who you do want).
Until we move to something better, such as ranked choice voting, we’re always going to effectively have two parties.
I agree with you, but in this case it's likely the new party will act as a spoiler against the republicans, so I'm all for it. It might even open the door to a new progressive party splitting the democrat vote without guaranteeing a republican victory.
The UK has somehow managed to have multiple reasonable scale independent parties survive, but agreed.
The UK has, for some reason, 5 different voting systems, only one of which is FPTP.
The more competition the better even though though this new party is hot trash, Trump must be breathing a sigh of relief he has his truth social alternative to Twitter.
How would more than two work in your system? In the UK it has led (and looks like it will continue to lead) to some very unrepresentative results. FPTP means that the vote gets split so e.g if there's 3 left wing parties and they each get 24% of the vote but there's only 1 right wing party and they get 28% the right wing candidate will win (even though 72% of people voted against them)
Ideally, the existence of more than 2 serious parties would lead to the widespread adoption of ranked choice voting. Right now, neither democrats or republicans really want it, because it threatens their power consolidation, but if they both felt threatened by the existence of serious alternatives, they might be more inclined to embrace it.
With FPTP voting, the third party will (as you note) just act as a spoiler for whichever of the two pain parties it's closest to ideologically. I think we all assume that Musk's party will be closest to republicans, so those are the votes it'll primarily be siphoning.
The problem we've had over here is the big parties haven't wanted to relinquish power or don't seem to recognise how much the political climate has changed.
UKIP got big because people wanted an alternative not really because people wanted to leave the EU. You can tell that because Cameron gave people the EU referendum to try and neuter them. They just reformed into Reform UK and are now polling scary well.
The most sensible thing Labour could do this parliament is introduce proportional representation in some kind. That way at rhe next election they'd likley be the biggest party in a centre left colalition. There's no signs of them even considering it. They seem to still think that power should be all or nothing.
What we get now, because they've hung on so tight to FPTP is a really big chunk of people voting tactically against the party they don't want.
I honestly would love an option to vote against a party (as in, give them -1 vote) rather than voting for a party. Kind of a "I don't care who wins, as long as it isn't this person", or "I don't want this person in office, but I don't like their opponent enough to vote for them." I think it'd be very telling if you had an election and all candidates had a negative vote total at the end.
Haha yeah that would actually be really good.