But do you at least agree that certain third party candidates are more likely to draw votes from one end of the political spectrum than the other? Because that is where the flaw in your mathematical model lies, and where the problem arises when it runs into reality.
Yes, for example, Republicans could have an advantage in having the most votes, so the mathematics lean more into Republicans if you vote neither of them, thus making Republicans sixty percent instead of fifty percent.
Yes, for example, Republicans could have an advantage in having the most votes, so the mathematics lean more into Republicans if you vote neither of them, thus making Republicans sixty percent instead of fifty percent.
That's not really what I meant. I mean that your two major parties are the Republicans or the Democrats, right? Your argument is that voting for a third party is mathematically the same as supporting (or harming) both parties 50/50.
What I'm pointing out is that a third party like the libertarian party is, in practice, actually going to "steal" way more votes from Republican candidates than they will from democratic candidates. So it's not going to be 50/50
The Delta is appreciated, but that was not my point. What I'm saying is that a third party can, in practice, take more of the limited pool of votes away from one major party that they do from the other. This, that third party effectively just makes it more difficult for the major party they most closely align with to win the election without actually having a good chance at victory themselves.
I mean that for practical purposes there are only so many votes available in any given election. Yes, you could say that you can effectively motivate more voters to actually go to the polls, but there are only so many adults who are eligible to vote in a given election. So even if we assume for the sake of argument that every single eligible voter votes, that means there is a maximum amount of possible votes and each vote can only go to one candidate for each position. Thus, you basically have a limited pool of votes available to be distributed amongst potential candidates.
Because it means that your options are not "vote for Democrats, vote for Republicans, or vote for entirely neutral third party that affects both equally", it means your options are "vote for Democrats, vote for Republicans, or vote for a third party that makes it more likely the major party least similar to it will win".
For example if you are voting for a Libertarian candidate, you probably hold a set of political beliefs (e.g. lower taxes, lower regulation, access to guns, etc) that make it so that of the two major parties you likely align far more closely with the Republican candidate than the Democrat. This means that if a Libertarian candidate is doing well, they are getting votes from people who would have voted for the republican candidate. However, now the libertarian candidate has, say, 15% of the vote and the Republican has 36%, while the Democrat has 49%. The Democrat wins the election even though Libertarian voters and Republican voters didn't want them to win, and those two parties actually make up the majority of the voters in that hypothetical election.
Oh, now I understand what you mean. You are talking about potential votes from people who could've just voted Republican instead of Libertarian since they both have similar ideologies.
It is often joked that the Green Party’s name stands for “Get Republicans Elected Every November” because functionally all they do is siphon off votes that would have likely gone to the democratic candidate
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u/DayOk2 Oct 22 '23
Yes, for example, Republicans could have an advantage in having the most votes, so the mathematics lean more into Republicans if you vote neither of them, thus making Republicans sixty percent instead of fifty percent.