I know we technically have more than two choices, but what would need to change for it to simply be 1) person A, 2) person B, or 3) throwaway vote.
And maybe there are multiple avenues?
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Less money in politics. Not only the citizen united bullshit, but individual contributions too. In the US, the maximum personal amount someone can give is around 175 000$. In Canada, it’s 3300$. In the province of Quebec, it’s 500$. I know only a handful of people who make that much per year and I don’t know of anybody who can afford to **give it all to a political party**.
The 2020 election cost around 14B$. I don’t have the breakdown, but it’s roughly 7B$ per party. It’s not realistic to raise 7B$ without… “very motivated” backers, which is something emerging parties are extremely unlikely to get. 7B$ is 40 000 at maximum contribution. In a country of 330M people, it’s not that much. With Canada rules, you’d need over 2.1M donors at maximum contribution.
In Canada, when you get a certain threshold of votes, your party gets financing per vote and other benefits. I voted for losing parties in the past, because every vote helps. It didn’t tip anything, but it did more than “nothing at all”.
There’s also some kind of ideology shift, or education, that needs to be done for those parties to succeed. I’d imagine a newer party to be more to the left than the existing choices, promoting more social policies. Unfortunately, socialism has been demonized for a long time in the US, mostly as a word though. There’s a ton of very successful social programs in the US that many refuse to call as such, like medicaid, medicare, food stamps and all other transfer of wealth from the government to the people. This would be for a leftist party, but other conditions would apply for other ideologies. I just assumed so because the dems and the gop are respectively the right and the far right in other countries, which leaves a large gap in the balance
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