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This is true, though.
The way the US elects presidents is terrible. It's basically certifiably insane.
There's an election in each state. The winner of that statewide election gets all the electoral college votes for that state. If no candidate gets an absolute majority in the electoral college, then it goes to the House of Representatives. However, each state delegation gets one vote.
Functionally, that means that if the election goes to the House, the Republican wins.
Third parties have never done well in the US because the system structurally disadvantages them. This is mostly because the US was the first modern democracy, and social choice theory was in its infancy when the constitution was written.
If you want to vote Biden out in favor of someone more progressive, the only chance of that is to primary him.
It's pretty obvious that if you keep playing the character others have determined for you in that charade and cast a vote for the evil candidate whilst telling yourself it's the "lesser evil", it's not going to get better, only worse.
The reason it's obvious is because that's exactly what's been happenning for decades now, possibly all the way since Eisenhower - you get alternance of ever less representive and increasingly evil politicians, with at best "one step forward, three steps back" kind of change (even within the mandate period of the same President as the early hope quickly turns into the usual shit).
The only way that fake democracy will change is if the electorate starts doing the unexpected (3rd party voting, voting for independents, refuse to participate and vocally deride the whole process and so on) rather than predictably bending over: politicians don't care why you vote for them, they only care you vote for them, hence why almost all of their campaigning nowadays is not about "here's what I've done for you and here's what I will do" but instead it's "the other guys are worse".
Sure, Tactically it's always "we have to take that hill over there" but Strategically you should've figured out by now they're always taking you in the direction they want, never towards the heights you need to conquer to actually end up in a better place: notice how almost all discourse in present day US politics, from both faces of the political duopoly, is about morality, not about - say - quality of life or more evenly shared prosperity.
What exactly do these acheive? How do these improve things? Why would this cause literally anything to be fixed? Why wouldn't this just entrench the current system?
Trumpism didn't take over the Republican Party by the alt-right voting third party or staying home. It took over by the alt-right showing up in droves at primary season to drag the Republican Party kicking and screaming in their preferred direction. Look at what Republican senators said about Trump just before and just after the primary.
AOC didn't get into congress by running third party. She did it by successfully primarying a more centrist incumbent.
It seems to me that to win, you need to do one of two things:
Win under the current rules. Show up at primaries to get progressives on the ticket, then show up and win.
Change the rules. Get your local and state governments to switch to using halfway- decent voting systems like instant runoff, or good ones like 3-2-1 or STAR. Get enough bottom-up movement on that to eventually change the way the president is elected.
Keep in mind, the president is only so powerful. President Sanders would still be limited by whatever he could get past Manchin.
Yeah, keep doing the same as so far, rationalizing the bars on your cell with variants of the same arguments as so far and hoping that the kind of token politician that plays the "outsider" in the same game as played so far will change the very system in which they're successful (which, funnilly, applies to both Trump and AOC), because doing all that stuff has really been working well for decades...
You're not going to find solutions for systemic problems if all you do is look within the system, just like a horse with blinkers on thinks the road is the whole World and there is nothing else to do but travel it, since that's all they see and that's exactly the purpose putting blinkers on a horse.
The closest the US has been to a genuine independent push for change in decades was Occuppy Wall Street, hence why the money and power elites pushed so hard against it.
It's not going to be the ballot that changes things in the US, it's either going to be massive civil society movements pushing for change that cannot be ignored or the widepread misery that will come with a couple more decades of continues decay, and the latter one will be the one with massive pain, suffering and death.
I suggest you study World History rather than be obcessed by the mechanisms and managed "choices" of the rat maze you've been born into.
Which is actually optional. States can split them (but iirc only 2 out of 50 do...). It just doesn't make that much sense in a two-party-system mostly split in the middle. That's the bigger problem.
Yeah.
Technically, the states can decide how they allocate their votes. Nearly every state currently goes with the winner of their statewide election.
There's the interstate popular vote compact, though. Basically, states will vote for the popular winner if enough states to guarantee the popular winner wins pass the compact.
But until that happens, we're stuck with the current system.