Listen now | With the return of The Vanguard hosts Zac & Gavin to KK&F, we’re looking at the field of 2024 presidential contenders. The frustrations and letdowns of the Biden presidency — expected, to be fair, from someone who promised wealthy supporters that “nothing will fundamentally change” — have us thinking about what it would mean to have a substantial progressive challenger going toe-to-toe with Biden this election. To that end, we break down Marianne Williamson’s presidential prospects, taking lessons from the Bernie 2020 run in order to map out her potential road to the nomination.
In which case you are an incurable optimist :) The thing is, these spaces are deliberately curated as echo chambers. Because, at the end of the day, they are little more than the 'new media' enterprises designed to make money through giving their target audiences what they want to hear. They aren't any different from mainstream media outlets in this sense. It's just that the latter are also up to their ears in all sorts of state sponsored propaganda...
It's absolutely correct that first-past-the-post/plurality voting must be done away with for a more representative democracy (whether that includes the rise of third parties or not), but it's worth noting what the actual problem with plurality voting is: the spoiler effect. The dirty little secret of RCV is that it doesn't do away with the spoiler effect - it lessons it to a certain extent, but mostly it just obfuscates it. And that's because RCV is basically just a series of plurality votes done in automatic succession.
Australia remains, after about a century of using RCV, locked into two major parties just as the US is.
What we really need is a voting system that doesn't have the spoiler effect. And while there are as many voting systems as there are flavors of ice cream, the two with any political viability (besides RCV) are approval and STAR voting. If you want to unlock a path for third parties, you want one of these.
It may be too in the technocratic weeds to dive into this on the show, but I'd highly recommend looking into it personally, at least - what RCV has that approval or STAR don't is a multi-million dollar advocacy group behind them, and they could use all the publicity they can get. Even just being mentioned in the same sentence as "ending FPTP" is helpful.
Talk about being in an echo chamber..... expected so much more
In which case you are an incurable optimist :) The thing is, these spaces are deliberately curated as echo chambers. Because, at the end of the day, they are little more than the 'new media' enterprises designed to make money through giving their target audiences what they want to hear. They aren't any different from mainstream media outlets in this sense. It's just that the latter are also up to their ears in all sorts of state sponsored propaganda...
It's absolutely correct that first-past-the-post/plurality voting must be done away with for a more representative democracy (whether that includes the rise of third parties or not), but it's worth noting what the actual problem with plurality voting is: the spoiler effect. The dirty little secret of RCV is that it doesn't do away with the spoiler effect - it lessons it to a certain extent, but mostly it just obfuscates it. And that's because RCV is basically just a series of plurality votes done in automatic succession.
Australia remains, after about a century of using RCV, locked into two major parties just as the US is.
What we really need is a voting system that doesn't have the spoiler effect. And while there are as many voting systems as there are flavors of ice cream, the two with any political viability (besides RCV) are approval and STAR voting. If you want to unlock a path for third parties, you want one of these.
It may be too in the technocratic weeds to dive into this on the show, but I'd highly recommend looking into it personally, at least - what RCV has that approval or STAR don't is a multi-million dollar advocacy group behind them, and they could use all the publicity they can get. Even just being mentioned in the same sentence as "ending FPTP" is helpful.