this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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2024:
Trump - 49.8%
Harris - 48.3%
All others - 1.9%
3rd party is a losing proposition and you have to go back to 1968 to find an election where a 3rd party won ANY Electoral college votes*.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election
* Not counting the accidental electoral vote for "John Ewards" in 2004.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election
This is a multifaceted issue. The Democrats need to do better, and voters need to be better informed about the process. Both things are true.
From a numbers perspective, though, this supports the Democrats moving further right simply because there are more votes in that direction. "Vote Blue" voters will not abandon the party they believe is less evil, and targeting 5% of republican voters will tip the scales twice that of gaining 100% of the third party voters (who are spread across various hopeless causes). If more progressives were willing to leave the centrist party and vote for third party candidates, it would force the Democrats to the left as long as the number of voters leaving exceeded the number of voters gained on the right.
In other words, being a pragmatic voter weakens your influence on party politics. Look at how unreasonable the far right wing is, and how outsized their effect has become. Most Republicans aren't fascist nazis, but they roll with it because they want the benefits that come with being inside the circle when the nazis get violent. And if you're a conservative, then aligning with the Nazis is just as pragmatic as progressives aligning with centrists. It's the same thought process, just with completely different systems of morality.
If you believe in your cause, then you should be unreasonable. You should reject compromise, and you should demand justice. And the math supports it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. See the ratchet effect:
https://youtu.be/6LPuKVG1teQ#t=2m03s
That's precisely the way I described it working. The ratchet effect exists because there's never more progressives willing to leave the party, but some do and the remaining progressive voters weaken their own position with compromise.
More progressives leaving the party will freeze the ratchet harder.
We need more progressives in the party and evict the centrists, the same way the Tea Party and Red Hats did on the Republican side.
Leaving the party creates a minority party with zero power, it doesn't convince Democrats to move left, it convinces them they were right to move right.
Primary and remove. That needs to be the goal.
I mean, yeah. The centrists run the Democratic party. They aren't going to relinquish control.
Then you primary them and get them out. That's what the Red Hats are doing.