Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Lorinda Bloch's avatar

Amen, Walter. A 3rd party divides the vote and gives it to the Dems. Look at the countries that have Parliamentarian structures: UK, Canada, Australia, Germany. WE DO NOT WANT GOVERNMENTS LIKE THEIRS. Thank you. Great article.

Expand full comment
Buck Nimz's avatar

King Solomon was right. There is nothing new under the sun. Remember the Reform Party? The Reform party was Ross Perot. The America Party will be Elon Musk. One of the more important points to consider is that outside of Ross Perot and his billions of dollars, the Reform party had very little actual infrastructure. They never invested in state and local organizations, they never ran down-ticket candidates, and basically they never spent any money on anything other than promoting their billionaire candidate. Without said billionaire, they were left with little money and a candidate who had very little appeal. Welcome to the Elon Musk party. He's already losing a small part of his fortune as Tesla collapses. History lesson for Elon: Whenever a 3rd party in American history gets a major amount of support, the other 2 parties figure out ways to modify their party platform and messaging to attract said third party voters to their side. If Musk thinks he's gonna take votes from Trump and give it to the Dems, he's on the wrong side of history. In 1994 House election the republicans took many of the issues that Perot campaigned on in 1992 like strong fiscal conservatism, and the balanced-budget-at-any-price mentality became a hallmark of the GOP throughout the 90s and they relied heavily on stealing Perot's voters to achieve electoral success. Donald Trump toyed briefly with joining the party but it was already starting to collapse. Musk, like Perot, will spend money like crazy but eventually it will collapse because of two reasons: 1) Musk will get bored with it and tire of spending money and, 2) something called Duverger's Law where in most electoral systems like the US, first-past-the-post voting system is where the most votes win. In the long run you still only get two political parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Expand full comment
2 more comments...

No posts