learn me the american presidential race

In reply to Keith Tanner:

I guess I'd like to turn the question back to you: what is it about the Canadian system that allows room for a third party? Why do the two major parties not decide it's in their better interest to broaden their platform, appeal to third party voters, and be able to secure 51% of the vote to win everything?

Oh, the parties are always trying to broaden their platform to appeal to as many people as possible. They want that majority number of seats, and they often get it. Very rarely do they get 50% of the popular vote, though. It last happened as part of a big swing in 1984.

But with three relatively strong parties, there's a lot of jockeying around for position. Nobody takes a really extreme position one way or the other, so you don't get quite as much polarization. If one group goes all Tea Party and extremist, they lose more than they gain and become a fringe player. I think one of the keys is that, if you're dissatisfied with a particular party but you don't want the guys who are diametrically opposed to them, there's somewhere to go.

There's more shifting around than I've seen in the US, parties popping up regionally (out west and in Quebec, for example), picking up a lot of regional support and then becoming nationally important. The 2011 election was really interesting this way, where one of the secondary parties got demolished, one of the major parties got demolished, and the perennial third place party picked up the opposition role by taking over all those seats. And in 2015, that demolished major party won a big majority.

I think a part of it comes from the fact that the leader of the party is just the leader of the party with no separate election, so if you don't like a particular leader then you vote for another party. Probably explains the swings - if Party A picks a real dud for their leader, then you vote for Party B or C. This is the biggest difference I see compared to the US. Also, because the parties are less polarized, it's easier to switch from one to another. That's definitely what happened in 2011 and 2015, the Liberal party (yes, that's the name of the party) went from having a poor leader to an inspiring one, and it's also a big reason why the usual third party did so well in 2011.

Is this part of how the system is designed? I don't think so, although it's not an unusual design or an unusual situation as far as I can tell. I am far from a scholar in this stuff, and I'm sure my historian father would love to school me on how it's changed in the last 150 years. Looking at historical elections, it looks as if it was originally a two party setup but it's evolved in the last 50 years with a third party coming in to play. Which would make for some interesting study as to how it happened and if it could happen in the US.

It sounds as if Canadian party leaders actually do something significant; in the US, the party leaders are more like marketing directors, political strategists, or cat herders. I've only heard about Prebius - however you spell that - from his arguing with Donald Trump, and I have no idea who the actual national Democratic party leader is. (That would not be the President, although he probably does have more effect on the party than their nominal leader.) The party leaders aren't a government office, and the national party leadership is not really able to exert very much control over local party decisions. Like when Eric Cantor found the local party decided not to put him on the ballot for re-election on the grounds that he'd been paying too much attention to Washington and not enough to his home district.

I kind of think that if someone wanted to start a third party in the US that actually has a large following, their best bet would be to form a centrist party and focus on states that lean heavily to one party or the other and position themselves as the party for "If you're tired of party X, but don't want to go all the way over to party Y, we're your party!" Most existing efforts at establishing a third party seem to have been aimed at people who don't think the existing parties are extreme enough.

In reply to Keith Tanner:

In Canada, if everyone hates a leader the vote him out, correct? I honestly don't know, but that's what I'm taking away from your explanation.

Here, people will moan and complain and gripe about a leader, senator or congressman, but will continue to vote him back in like it will change anything. Some of them are finally starting to die, but a big issue is a lot of the old time politicians just keep getting voted in because "that's who our parents voted for". Call it tradition, fear of change, stupidity, complacency? it doesn't matter and it doesn't make sense. I've actually heard the argument "at least we know the kind of crap he pulls now, we won't know about a new guy".

I could be entirely wrong with this thought process, but I don't hear about a lot of career politicians in the Great White North, while being a congressman seems to be a lifelong career path as long as you don't get (publicly) caught up with the law in a really negative way. It's amazing, to me, that of the 550 politicians in the house and senate, there are longer rap sheets than in my local county prison, but that's another topic.

Like I said earlier, I think the interweb could really help bring a third party to life here, but when the people who could make that change are too busy making cat videos, watching other people play videogames, posting snapchat selfies over 100mph on public roads, and doing the "insert random pseudo celeb and bodypart here" challenge, it seems we lost that tool before we figured out how to use it.

Our system is not great either. You get a government with an often very small percentage of the popular vote taking power, and the swings are broad enough that when there is a change in government the new party spends the next four years systematically dismantling the work of the previous government. It is not like we pick a direction, and then make small deviations to the route every four or five years. We make a 180 degree turn and go the other way.

bearmtnmartin wrote:

Keith Tanner wrote: I don't see how it's different. In fact, it sounds pretty much exactly the same as Canada. You vote for who you want to represent you, and they go to DC (in theory) to be the voice of their constituents. The ruling party is the one with the greatest number of elected officials. There's nothing in that system you've described that prevents a third party from sending people to Washington. You can get elected with less than 50.1%, you just need more votes in your district than anyone else. Some districts will have a blowout, some will come down to hanging chads. But the total popular vote doesn't matter. Unless you are only given two options as part of the design of the system or you are required to have 50.1%. What's preventing the California Freedom Party from having a name on the Senate ballot? Now, it could be that you're used to it being a two party system with any third party basically being crackpots and whackjobs that have no chance of being elected. But I haven't heard anything that forces it to end up that way.

There kind of are three parties this time around. I don't think Trump is a crack pot or a whack job, but he is not easily identifiable as either republican or democrat. In fact he was a declared Democrat for a while wasn't he? And both sides are out to get him. Really he is an independent masquerading as a Republican.

That's truly because I don't believe Trump is actually aligned with either major party, but is probably the more moderate middle ground despite people claiming otherwise. He's pulling his voting base from many people who are tired of the constant shifts left & right. His major base in my area are manufacturing Union member types, it's astonishing they would abandon their traditional democrat party leanings, but it really shouldn't be much of a surprise since Clinton/Sanders are associated with several things that have screwed them over.

You do have to hand it to Republicans however for their diverse primary field, which really should have completely dispelled the notion placed upon them as the "Old White People" Party. There were a ton of options there when this started out.

One major issue we have here is horrible gerrymandering. When the party in power gets to draw the districts, you get some messed up stuff designed to maintain status quo, rather than give people a real choice.

My grandfather (former Congressman) railed most that if an election wasn't close, the people were being cheated.

In reply to Beer Baron:

On a related note, there is a proposed amendment to the constitution to put in a guideline determine the House of Representatives seats.....it has however been pending since it was proposed, which was just prior to our first 10 ratified amendments that became the Bill of Rights. IIRC, it's sitting at 228 years since proposal currently.

Also, the redistricting gerrymandering can and has blown up in the face of the would be gerrymanderers before.

revrico wrote: In reply to Keith Tanner: In Canada, if everyone hates a leader the vote him out, correct? I honestly don't know, but that's what I'm taking away from your explanation.

It sure seems that way. Not necessarily immediately, but big shifts do happen occasionally. Most people are not registered with a particular party. The ruling party changes every decade or so. There are definitely career politicians in the system, but they tend to keep their heads down.

It's sure not perfect. The Senate is appointed, and it's effectively a lifetime position for being such a handy dandy dude for whoever's in power at the time - then they go to sleep on the public's dime. So it's basically useless. There's a push to go to an elected Senate, but that's a long-term process. If the ruling party does not get a majority of the seats, then they need to work with one of the other parties to get anything done - which seems like a good compromise, but in reality it gums up the works. Still, a minority government like that is viewed as "safer" by a lot of Canadians because it prevents one party from going nuts and doing whatever they want to do.

Anyhow, it's curious that the Canadian system seems to be fracturing into more and more parties while the US is getting more and more polarized between the two. I don't think it's baked into the fundamental system.

It isn't. It is just the difference between how Canadians and Americans approach government.

Beer Baron wrote: One major issue we have here is horrible gerrymandering.

Our politicians have always tried their best to skew the popular vote in their favor. Whether it be through an electoral college or funky districts.

PHeller wrote:

Beer Baron wrote: One major issue we have here is horrible gerrymandering.

Our politicians have always tried their best to skew the popular vote in their favor. Whether it be through an electoral college or funky districts.

I love this forum because we can have intelligent conversations about things like this without automatically going straight to yelling at each other.

In Canada, the ridings (roughly equal to districts in the US) are set by an independent commission that tries (in theory) to balance population with geographic area. Since populations change, the ridings change and are adjusted every 10 years. Rural ridings will tend to be geographically larger and have smaller populations than urban ridings. In general, the government takes a reasonably hands off approach to this. Every time there is a redistribution of ridings, the political wonks will scrutinize every squiggle on the map looking for evidence of a conspiracy to gerrymander, but my impression is that the process works reasonably well.

As Keith has said, having 3 large parties tends to moderate governments. Our parties are nominally right (Conservative), middle (Liberal) and left (New Democratic Party - think Bernie Sanders). The history of Canadian politics for the last 100 years or so is that if the population veers right, the Liberals move right, and if the population moves left, they move left. It can be viewed as cynical opportunism or as listening to the mood of the people. As a result, the Liberals have been in power for the majority of the last 100 years. Every 10 years or so, the government gets complacent and arrogant, and gets turfed out for a term or two. The net result tends to be a race to the center, and tends to moderate any tendency to extreme views.

Does it work flawlessly? Not even close - we have our scandals and crooks too. But we seem to muddle along reasonably well.