Hot take but no. I’ve seen no convincing polling on basically any topic that says that the average voter, or, under-educated working class schmuck, is some hardline neoliberal, or free market libertarian. The average tends to skew populist, for pretty obvious reasons.

There’s also a multibillion dollar propaganda apparatus spinning at all times which is created to convince people that climate change isn’t real, natural gas cookware is good, their lives are actually great, they can work themselves out of the hole and into the dwindling middle class, and government austerity measures are good because the meritocratic private sector will just altruistically innovate and make everything more economically efficient, and if anyone’s getting hurt, then it’s the real poor who aren’t like them at all, because those people are lazy and can’t be changed. So what little anti-populist sentiment we see in the population, I would argue that’s something that’s been pretty deliberately manufactured.

And yet he was elected to highest office in the land and went very close again 4 years later and will likely go close again.

So there are plenty of “stupid” people who are “ignorant of reality” and they have vote same as you.

I recently saw someone in the comment section on another social media site (video of Jan 6th) legitimately have their mind blown that January 6th was not peaceful. They had multiple comments of them coming to the realization that it was anything other than peaceful. I think we often underestimate how uninformed (or willfully ignorant) the general public is.

Frankly, you might as well not bother to vote if’n you’re going to vote third party.

Advertising your party platform, signaling strength, and delegitimizing the electoral system are valid reasons to vote third party.

Frankly I won’t take any third party seriously until they start caring about down ballot elections where they can make a difference, show people why they should be elected, and change the laws that keep them from being elected.

This is ridiculous. Third parties are not allowed to work within the electoral system, the DNC and GOP collude against that. The electoral system isn’t some fantasy where a bunch of parties try to prove their worth, it’s dominated by Capitalist donors and establishment parties, hence the necessity for delegitimizing it.

I see your point but again I’d say it’s because of the US’s winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats

Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats

And yes, that could be broadly true of a ‘spoiler’ candidate in the US presidential election, except that:

1. Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK

2. more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to ‘spoil’ a seat

3. The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can’t focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat

4. Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?

I’d love to be wrong, and I do think that there’s probably also a cultural/historical element to the US’s two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK

You can’t just focus on the bad and ignore everything that’s good about these countries. Give us universal healthcare; give us socialized higher education; give us universal basic income; do away with for profit prisons and replace them with a system focused on rehabilitation.

So yeah, right wing idealism is on the rise but that’s a global trend. These countries, in general, are light years ahead of the US.

FPTP Britain says Good Morning 👋

Still more likely than a socialist being elected though :(

Like all meaningful change, you have to convince enough people to get involved and to do so more often and consistently than every four years at the Presidential general election. It’s this belief that the change is going to come from the parties that is the core problem. Everyone complains about having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but then they do it and go back to sleep for another four years. At best, they just gripe about the government never acknowledging that they are responsible.

It’s also not like local or even state level RCV would realistically be sufficient for these whole sets of overarching problems that the US struggles with. You’re not locally voting for RCV and then gaining the ability to vote for a party that will actually give you healthcare, will connect your city with others via rail to help rework infrastructure, will solve your housing problems and your homelessness, and they probably won’t be solving unemployment. You can maybe vaguely hope that the existence of such a party would put pressure on the federal government to ask “why can’t you do this”, but that would only happen at the state level with one of the states that actually matter, like california or new york or texas, and good luck getting any of those places to go in for RCV considering how strangleheld they are.

The most you could hope RCV to improve is maybe to make it so you can get someone that’s willing to make your ISP give you free shit, or establish a free ISP, and also maybe to give your town a bunch of roundabouts, and maybe approve some missing middle housing which will probably skyrocket housing prices in the surrounding areas since it won’t really be doing anything to solve the problem at a national level. Which isn’t nothing, right, but that’s kinda boof.

Then we vote them out