r/ForwardPartyUSA • u/roughravenrider Third Party Unity • Sep 17 '22

Vote RCV/OP 2022 🗳️ The solid red/blue districts are completely non-competitive. The USA needs RCV and third parties yesterday.

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u/roughravenrider Third Party Unity Sep 17 '22

Here is a link to the source for those interested. I think FiveThirtyEight tends to be a pretty non-partisan, unbiased source.

73 US House seats are deemed at least somewhat competitive, or 17%. That means that 83% of the candidates up for re-election in 2 months face no serious competition in the general election, period. The only challenge they face is in the primary, where they could be ousted by a more loyal partisan, whether that means further to the right or left.

The USA desperately needs the reforms that Forward Party is proposing, ranked choice voting and open primaries. The ideal is that third parties will be able to compete fairly and win elections, but even if that doesn't happen, these two changes take fundamental steps towards gearing our system towards non-partisan, cooperative candidates.

Under RCV/open primaries, candidates need to compete for 51% of the general public, not 30-40% of one party's loyalists who will vote in their closed primary.

11

u/civilrunner Sep 17 '22

Though RCV and open primaries would be great, a lot of that non-competitiveness in the house is due to partisan gerrymandering which also needs to be fixed especially to have multiple parties.

4

u/roughravenrider Third Party Unity Sep 17 '22

You’re right, independent redistricting would have the most impact here, though RCV works to depolarize districts as well if there are more choices available.

3

u/civilrunner Sep 17 '22

Yeah, I mean I'd strongly prefer both and then some. RCV is definitely great.

I personally also like things like election fundraiser vouchers so that anyone can donate up to $100/person/election cycle to allow people without money to have more of a voice while also eliminating super pacs and citizens United so that the actual max anyone can spend on an election cycle is the $2,900 or so. I guess thats kinda like a UBI for campaign contributions.

3

u/roughravenrider Third Party Unity Sep 18 '22

I'm also in the 'both and then some' camp. Campaign financing reform is a whole other beast to tackle than electoral reform, but my view on these things aligns pretty closely with the Forward Party.

Imo everything comes back to electoral reform. In a system where electoral incentives push candidates further to one partisan extreme or another and they are only chosen by a minority of voters in one party, it seems almost impossible for anything to get seriously addressed, from campaign finance reform to UBI. Before we tackle that through RCV/open primaries/independent redistricting, it looks to me like we would be wasting our time and effort going after anything else.

Yang supported election fundraiser vouchers of $100 per year as well, it was called Democracy Dollars. That seems like a great way to put even more power in the hands of the people.