From Shea Gunther:
I’m so over third party politics. We have two parties right now. Work within that system, especially in this election cycle. If you’re not working to get the Democrats in office you are working for the Republicans.
Right now there are 26,000+ votes that some stupid Green Party Senate candidate pulled in in the Virginia race where the difference between George “Macacca” Allen (R) and Jim Webb (D) is hovering around 6,000 votes. If he wasn’t in the race where do you think they would have gone? Yeah, most likely Webb.
I suppose that it would be wrong of me to point out that perhaps Webb is being taught the same lesson that the GOP was taught last night: If you don’t “get it” in the eyes of your (potential) constituents, they are liable to vote for your opponent even if they disagree with your opponent.
Perhaps Webb is just as much to “blame” for his loss (for failing to better court and seek to represent Green-hued voters) as the Greens are for playing spoiler.
Thinking over this election cycle, I have a number of ideas floating around in my head in a general dissatisfied-with-our-political-arena-and-voting-system kind of way. True, I’ve had that dissatisfaction previously, but it’s been evolving over the past few weeks.
I dislike the duopoly in American politics, but I’m also coming to realize just how “down” the downsides are of pursuing a third-party option. The duopoly may be a “logical” artifact of how our political system works…and that leads down an interesting line of thinking:
Given our practice of electing candidates solely to represent geographic regions, the duopoly is probably the “best” political structure we can have, provided that the American people make choices that maintain effective checks and balances on the different branches of government.
I think we probably could do better by rethinking the wisdom of purely geography-based constituencies…but I don’t hold much hope of such a change being made.
I’d settle for seeing curbs on gerrymandering and seeking cleaner, more trustworthy elections.
If/when I have some time, I’ll probably be revising some of the “Centrist Platform” pages linked in the sidebar to build upon those thoughts.