what the fuck is up the Democratic party? why do they suck so much? from the moment i first registered to vote, i have been a happily declared independent (lower case "i" independent, as in "no party affiliation", not upper case "I" independent) because i firmly believe that the two-party system reduces politics to a game of football where issues of gray are separated into black and white. rather than individual politicians, or even smaller caucuses, dealing with the issue on its face value and making a decision based on what they believe is right, Democrats and Republicans rarely step outside the boundaries of what the party leadership dictates as policy. this is a broad-sweeping generalization, but, generally, it's quite true. national politics, state politics, even local politics are affected by this game.
Gavin Newsom was just elected mayor of San Francisco. he's a Democrat. his opponent was a member of the Green party. throughout the election, article after article was written about how Democrats across the country were freaking out because, oh sweet jesus, a Green party candidate may be elected mayor of a major U.S. city. from what i gathered, the concern was the split of the liberal vote. if, say, half the country is liberal and half the country is conservative, and any great portion of the liberal half decides to vote for a progressive candidate rather than a hand-picked member of the Democratic machine, the conservatives win. touchdown! end of quarter! spike the ball! do the funky chicken dance! rape the forests! bomb the Netherlands! drive the planet into the sun while drinking fresh crude oil through a straw!
i agree. that could happen if the Democrats don't continue to feed liberal America cookies and tell us ghost stories about The Way It Will Be If You Vote For Anyone But Us and scare the crap out of us. i don't believe that's why Gore "lost" 2000. i don't believe that fear invalidates the Greens or any other progressive third-party. and i don't believe anyone is looking at this the right way.
the problem is politics as usual is not addressing the needs and concerns of this country with much success. the problem is how to give large minority parties a voice without, by default, giving a majority party more power. the solution is not to shut them up or relegate them to the backseat or call them "kooks" or "spoilers". the solution is TO LOOK AT IT ANOTHER WAY, stupid.
in San Francisco, when a candidate for office does not get a 50% + 1 vote in an election, he or she plus the runner-up are put into a run-off election against only each other. (in the future, this will be an "instant run-off" process where voters rank the candidates -- a pretty cool idea.) for example, if an election has four candidates -- A, B, C, and D -- and the election returns give A 45%, B 25%, C 20%, and D 10%, A and B would be placed into a run-off election.
now, at first glance, you may say that A had nearly twice the votes of B and seems to be the candidate that most of the people want. however, consider this: candidate A is a conservative, where candidates B, C and D are all liberal with very similar ideologies and politics. if you combine their votes, they equal 55% -- an easy victory. so, in a run-off election, B would most likely scoop up all the votes of C and D, and become the new elected official. meanwhile, C and D both had opportunities to make their respective Important Issues known, make the dialog between the four candidates more sophisticated and robust, and ultimately, lead to better government. not only that, but candidate C may have represented a very radical idea. the 20% of voters who voted for him have told the government that they think this idea is important to them and that it should pay attention.
in a simple election process, A would have won and probably C, and definitely D, would have been disregarded as not viable. their issues would not have been heard and the people they speak for would not have been well represented.
do you see how this works much better? do you see how it improves your voice in our government? are you asking yourself why you haven't heard of this before and why our election process has refused to change while the world has become way more complex? yeah.
by the way, if you think the primary system is anything like this, you're wrong. not only does a primary election only elect a candidate for a particular party, it still is run as a less-than-majority, winner-takes-all.