Tulsi is considering a third party run.
Now ya’ll know I worked for a statewide third party back in 2016, and I rolled with a lot of our supporters who were all over the map politically. Some of them were Never Trumpers happy to vote for Johnson/Weld. Others were burned out Berners happy to vote for Stein or even Trump. Others still wrote in candidates or stayed home. We welcomed them all, because we wanted to stay on the ballot and we hoped they would support our down ballot candidates. I respect that they feel disenfranchised by the two party system.
These people have a point that the game and even the law is rigged in favor of the two party system. The Democrats and Republicans are grandfathered in as valid party registrations while the minor parties need to enroll or re-enroll their members every election cycle or hit 3% in a statewide election. That’s a high burden when you’re chronically underfunded and relying almost entirely on dedicated volunteers to get the job done. I would love for a viable statewide Green party to elect climate hawk legislators to push our reluctant Democratic super majority statehouse on climate. I would love for the centrist or libertarian remnants of the New England GOP to seceded from their Dixiecrat nationalist counterpart. The Progressive Conservatives (not an oxymoron up north) have done as much in Atlantic Canada, and they are a model for what a regional third party could do here. Fun fact: Multiparty democracies tend to be more stable and less likely to descend into authoritarianism. Fun fact: America is NOT a multiparty democracy and won’t be by 2020.
These are all reasons why I support Ranked Choice Voting and encourage the rest of you to do the same. It’s a cooperative rather competitive form of politics and would allow third parties to mature and govern in coalition with the major parties, as they do in places like Germany. Until that day happens, I will oppose third party presidential politics. They helped result in President Bush and President Trump. They will help re-elect him today.
So no Tulsi, stay home. Glad to see you won’t be in Congress anymore. Andrew Yang, stay in the game, but if you lose, back the nominee instead of backing Trump which is all a third party run would accomplish. Never Trumper who worries about Warren and hates Trump? Vote for Weld in the primary. Perfectly good dude. Then follow your homeboy David Brooks and vote for Warren or whichever Democrat wins the nomination. Want viable third parties? Back ranked choice. Want a President who follows the law, respects all races, and is competent on foreign policy? Vote for the Democrat.
No, she’s not going to run as a 3rd party candidate and you know it. Just because Hillary thinks Tulsi may be a Russian asset and that the Russians are “grooming” Tulsi to run as a 3rd part candidate doesn’t make it so.
Maybe you need to watch this and this.
New York Times 10/23/19 correction : ” While Mrs. Clinton said that a Democratic presidential candidate was ‘the favorite of the Russians’; and an aide later confirmed the reference was to Ms. Gabbard, Mrs. Clinton’s remarks about the ‘grooming’ of a third-party candidate in the 2020 race was in response to a question about the Republicans’ strategy, not about Russian intervention.”
Maybe get rid of all parties or at least don’t have a system where candidates who could theoretically win aren’t even allowed to be in the debates. If Gary Johnson had been allowed to debate he might have pulled Trump votes and Clinton might have won.
If Johnson and Stein weren’t allowed to run at all, I bet Trump would have had the popular vote.
That Twitter link is a bit to vague for me to get too upset about yet, though she lost any respect I might have had for her with her “Queen of warmongers” tweet worthy of Trump. I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about the Dems and GOP being grandfathered in to party status. As a practical matter they are entrenched enough to not have to worry about it, but the rules are the same in the sense that if either of them fell below enrollment or election result requirements they would have to start from scratch too.
I knew you would pick that particularly nit. Grandfathered in the sense that neither party had to jump through those particular hoops at the time of their founding since those hoops did not yet exist and those hoops were predominately written by lawmakers from one of the two major parties. There is always a chance that either of the two parties falls below that threshold at some point, but it is infinitesimally small for them whereas every election cycle is an existential crisis for one of the minor parties. Compounded by the fact that those voters have to unenroll from the state party they support in order to vote in one of the two major party primaries for president.
I am with Scott. I would eliminate party registrations entirely have a truly open primary with ranked choice. I also felt at the time that Stein and Johnson should have been included in the first debate since Hillary would have made mincemeat of their lack of ideas and qualifications. It would’ve made it harder for them to run as blank slate ‘none of the above’ candidates after that debate. My subjective opinion, but one I think Johnson’s poll drop after Aleppo and the reticence of many Sanders supporters to back an anti-vaxxer like Stein confirm.
As to betsey I encourage you to support Sanders. Tulsi is not the dove you think but a religious fanatic driven by a history of homophobia and Islamaphobia which guided her past open hostility against the LGBTQ community an present foreign policy idiosyncratic foreign policy. She supports secularists no matter how cruel against Islamists. Hence her backing of Saudi Arabia against Yemen and Assad against ISIS (and hundreds of thousands of his own people). Putin largely shares that worldview. It is one that will cause more wars since she is also an Iran hawk who voted against the Iran deal. Like Henry Wallce in 1948, she is not a sleeper agent but a useful idiot.
Sanders opposes the war in Yemen, supported the Iran deal, and is the only candidate questioning our long time symbiotic relationships with the Saudi and Israeli governments. He is a much better choice on foreign policy than Tulsi.
Fixed this for you.
He is a much better choice on foreign policy than anyone.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King. Bernie has next to no real foreign policy experience, but he has a better one than anyone else in the field other than Biden, who has largely followed Washington conventional wisdom down the intervention rabbit hole time and time again. Warren doesn’t have a foreign policy and it’s her weakest area.
They all stand in remarkable contrast to Weld who laid out a realist yet multilateral foreign policy agenda in Foreign Affairs. It’s a shame his ideas aren’t gaining traction on our side.
Absolutely not regarding party registration. We need to know who our members are and I only want partisans participating in primaries. I do believe that at least one debate should include all candidates who made the ballot in enough states to potentially win 270 electoral votes.
Anyone who follows political rhetoric at all closely and cannot see what is happening has not watched Tulsi closely. Anyone who has, in fact, watched her closely and cannot see it is stubbornly unwilling to give up the same blind spot that they had in 2016.
A small but significant minority of my fellow Bernie supporters were weirdly taken by the skillful Russian propaganda in 2016. I have to believe that they cannot possibly be that oblivious again. Hillary certainly isn’t. When will they learn?
Thankfully, this time I think most can see the events of the past four years and make the proper assessment.
jconway – I’m already supporting Sanders, and Warren is my 2nd choice. I never said that I was supporting Tulsi, and I agree with everything you wrote about her. But I still don’t believe that she is a Russian asset like HRC suggests, nor that she would run as a 3rd party candidate.
I think the media accusations that Ms. Clinton called Ms. Gabbard a “Russian asset” are just more Clinton-bashing from the usual media suspects.
What she said was that the Republicans are grooming Ms. Gabbard and that Ms. Gabbard is the favorite of the Russians. Ms. Clinton did characterize Jill Stein as a Russian asset, and I think that’s a legitimate characterization. It was Ms. Stein pictured at the Moscow bash with Mr. Putin (alongside Michael Flynn), not Ms. Gabbard.
I think HRC continues to be demonized by the media, as she has been for most of her life. It is not acceptable to be a strong, powerful and smart woman in today’s media culture.
It is no accident that the same sources (such as the New York Times) that have been so undeservedly hostile towards HRC are now starting to do the same with Elizabeth Warren. How DARE she threaten the wealthy men who control the media (including the New York Times).
I did not say she was an asset either-merely a useful idiot by espousing the same viewpoints that Moscow is. A worldview where the real enemy is “radical Islam”, Moscow and Assad are our partners in that fight and not our enemy. I find those views disqualifying. She’s the one meeting with donors about a third party run and ending her campaign for re-election to the House, so I think it’s a fair concern for us to have. There’s a reason Hillary singled her out for criticism and it’s not because she’s a threat for the Democratic nomination.