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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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I didn't realize I thought democracy was a bad system.
You think the US's implementation of democracy that forces you to pick the least bad between two candidates you don't like is
?
And that's without getting started on the electoral college.
Democracy, yes. It will always be the 'least bad' choice in a democracy, unless you have some miracle roll of the dice where a candidate 100% agrees with you, or a cultlike devotion to them.
What parts of the system that make it bad are anti-democratic elements - which are not particularly relevant in whether my choice should be Biden or Trump.
This may come as a shock, but if the majority of people in any democratic system prefer candidates that I think are shit, those are what my effective choices are going to be narrowed down to. That's kind of the point of a democracy.
You know there are other forms of democracy right? This isn't the only way to select an executive, and many of those systems aren't about choosing the least bad option.
What system would present more than two choices when two candidates hold near-majority support?
Parliamentary systems. Ranked choice or approval voting. These two candidates don't actually hold majority support, they're just the end result of filtering and internal politics in a FPTP system that needs to have two parties.
So then I don't get a choice as to who becomes the executive at all. Wonderful.
Ranked choice still results in one of two candidates if those two candidates have near-majority support. They simply allow voters to pick one of those two candidates whilst expressing support for less-popular candidates. It creates MORE scenarios in which there are more than two candidates with a chance to win, but it neither eliminates the existing problem nor prevents it in all cases.
Ranked choice is better than FPTP. But it's not a silver bullet to the issue being discussed.
Ranked choice's end results are not the issue. It solves the problem because it allows multiple similar candidates to compete, which means the left wouldn't have needed to winnow down to a single candidate. If Biden becomes incapable that's fine, people have another candidate already available who wasn't spoiling him by existing. And if we don't all agree that Biden is incapable? Biden-stans can vote him first and the other candidate second, and vice versa, and one of them will garner the full vote of the left.
Again, I appreciate the advantages of ranked choice and support the implementation of ranked choice as a massive improvement over FPTP - but it's not an answer to the question of "What system offers more than two choices, practically speaking, when two candidates have near-majority support", which is the question under discussion.
What kind of nonsense question is that? These candidates both don't have near majority support (polls of head to heads are not measuring that) and there's no reason to have a different system if two hypothetical candidates actually did. Most people did not want this rematch in the first place.
If you have a situation where say there appeared to be two likely dominant candidates, but one crashes and burns spectacularly, other voting systems wouldn't cause a default decision for their single opponent. And the people who thought Joe Biden was too old from the very beginning could already be supporting their replacement. Hell, we could just have all these potential replacements already competing and work it out in voting.
Despite insisting otherwise, PugJesus is a through-and-through centrist who prefers the convenience FPTP offers to those who don't want things to fundamentally change.
It is the only reason he would be insisting on the head-to-head interpretation of "near-majority support" and only agrees to popular progressive positions when there is a systemic hurdle that prevents that position from coming to fruition.
75% of democratic voters would prefer a different candidate to Biden, I wouldn't consider that a near-majority support.
Or in other words, the system you're in is flawed but you're working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.
Making the best of a bad system
The US is only in this predicament because the system it has currently allowed a candidate who lost the popular vote in 2016 to get into an office that had enough power to meaningfully damage the country.
However it's clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren't arguing in good faith here.
Except that the issue you're discussing, the choice being narrowed between Biden and Trump in this election, is not related to the anti-democratic flaws of that system.
Sorry that you find democracy such an offensive concept.
If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn't be running if he hadn't lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.
This started as you deriding the US's system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it's your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?
How is that relevant to my choices being narrowed down to Trump and Biden by the opinions of the electorate?
Sorry that the idea that the candidates with near-majority support being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you, and the idea that an ultrawealthy megadonor attempting to change one of the candidates without democratic support being a symptom of oligarchy is, likewise, apparently incomprehensible to your worldview.
Given that the overarching question here is "is biden really the best candidate?", and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.
But again, this is just more bad faith whining so goodbye.
Yes, he is the best candidate currently running.
No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.
Okay, cool, if ranked choice voting was implemented, who would have the support of the electorate who isn't Biden or Trump?
On what basis are you making the claim that Biden has near-majority support here? Because if it's simply the fact he's the candidate that was produced by our shit system, it seems like you're just begging the question.
Is this the part where I post polls and you say "Well, we can't TELL because if things were different the POLLS would be different too"?
Did you read the article? It says everyone polls approximately the same as Biden.
Yes, that one. The difference between all the candidates falls in a range of about 3 percentage points, meaning that everyone has near majority support.
Lmao, those polls are asking how people would vote in hypothetical head-to-heads - as in:
But I guess since this says each hypothetical polled resulted in near the same chances, that means all of the alternatives have 'near-majority support', right?
Good to see you still can't read worth a damn.
idk what to tell you, the article you linked shows alt candidates having similar support as biden in head-to-heads. I'm not sure in what world that means Biden has majority support. They can't all have near-majority support
if 75% of the democratic electorate would prefer a different candidate, then in a ranked-choice election 75% of democratic voters would likely be putting him as second or third choice, not their first.
This is the third or fourth time I've seen you hide behind "the opinions of the electorate" as a defense of status-quo positions, except this time it's pretty clearly not the opinion of the electorate that Biden is the preferred candidate to go up against trump.