What will it take for the democrats to lose your vote?

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Coucht2 says:

" One can choose to acknowledge teh world in which we live or they can ignore it at their own peril"

I wouldn't say it's at my own peril to ignore it.  Regardless of who i voted for, Obama will be president, so where is this peril that results from me not giving in to the current system?  I'd say a better alternative to accepting the things the way they are is challenging the politicians in the 2-party system and advocating a more democratic society.  During the past election i campaigned for Ralph Nader, an honest politician.  I tried to raise awareness to other third-party candidates as well.  We have more than two options.  As long as the democrats, republicans, and their corporate croanies control the elections we won't have change and 3rd-party candidates will continue to be ignored.  But if we see the political system the way it is and organize against it, we can progress.  I know this isn't happening on a large scale right now but we have to start somewhere.  And my words aren't empty rhetoric like Obama's speeches.  I urge you to visit november5.org and put your email address on their contact list.  They haven't decided exactly how to organize yet but the goal is to form local conressional watchdog groups in every district of the country in order to put pressure on representatives to act the way the people want them to.   

So is your answer to the question that there is nothing the democrats will do to lose your vote?  You will go along with whatever they say and do forever?

I'm not sure you are quite understanding the implications of changing from a 2 to a multi-party system. The massive parties will still be there and they will dominate for years to come. Eventually fringe party candidates will get 5% or maybe even 10% of the vote. All this leads to is a coalition within both chambers of Congres. The small parties latch onto the larger one in order to be heard and have some say even though in the end the wishes of the fringe party are mostly ignored.

While it is honorable to give your vote to Ralph Nader, or any other well intending third party canidate, the simple fact is that by giving up your vote to a canidate you know will lose, you risk allowing the greater of two evils to win.

What we need first is to remove this "One Person One Vote" and implement possibly a One Person Five Vote system, which Game Theory has a lot, mostly good, to say about.

I think we can only move to a multi-party system once we remove a single vote per person system.

How can one contend that nothing will ever change if we still employ the two party system? Think about the history of it: the Republican and Democratic Party do not stand for the same things they stood for even twenty years ago. I'm not championing two-party politics, but seriously, the Democrats changed tactics tremendously in 1912, throughout the 1930s, the late 80's and early 90's. Similarly, Republicans changed course before and after the Civil War, the 1930s, and 1980, and will probably have to change course once more as a result of this election.

Nader suffers from all the same pitfalls as any two-party candidate. Most notably, he's trying to build a political movement from the top down: instead of getting supporters and followers into local grassroots positions and building a usable base of support that could actually have a chance at displacing either of the major parties, he simply runs for president over and over again, which succeeds in nothing.

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What the Democrats (I presume you mean the political party), would, or will, have to do to lose my vote is EITHER (the most likely) to become worse than the Republicans in the sum total of their effect on the planet, as near as I can judge, OR Americans reorganize our present system into a proportional representation system, and third, fourth, and fifth parties arise, OR the Republican party disintegrate into irrelevance, the Democrats become the new corporate oppressors, and a third party like the Greens arise as the new second party.

There are other possibilities, but we're already in the realm of the highly unlikely...

I always view every election as a lesser of two evils situation. I vote for the person that best represents my views and will do better than the other major candidate. There has never been any candidate that I have been passionately for and I've gotten really sick of so many people saying that Obama is amazing and he will fix everything. I voted for him, but that doesn't me he's perfect.

I think the best situation rather than having a two party system or a three or four party system. Is to instead have a no party system (with many candidates) that way there is no sense of party affiliation and you're voting for the person entirely based on their own merits. I doubt this will ever happen.

Additionally the best way to deal with multiple candidates is to have many elimination rounds. People would vote for a candidate and the 5 candidates with the most votes would go on, then another round of voting with the 4 candidates with the most votes would go on, etc... This insures that if you're top choice is eliminated you still get to vote for your second and third choice. This would work better than just ordering your top choices in one voting round because a lot of people wouldn't bother to pick more choices when their top choice is still in the running.

I like to think that I am not commited to a single party. I hate when I am forced to classify myself as a democrat or republican. Why can't i just be a candidate supporter? When comes down to it, I am going to vote for the person who's ideals most relate to my own. If that means I vote red or blue then so be it. As long as the democrats keep producing candidates that are more appealing then the republicans, than I'm on board.

Nichols9,

     I think you should read into the history behind Ralph nader's record.   He does not simply try to change things in a top-down manner by running for president.  His first accomplishment was in the mid 1960's when he spoke out against General Motors for their faulty engineering in a car that was causing hundreds of needless deaths.  From there, he tackled automobile safety in general, leading to higher safety standards in all automobiles.  Then a little later, he organized more grassroots efforts with law school students, who would assemble small teams to tackle one particular issue affecting comsumers, workers, and citizens in general.  He has a record of accomplishments greater than that of any politician but he has never held any office-all of that was done as a "private citizen" as people put it. 

Here's some legislation where he was critical to it being enacted: The original Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA-it protects workers in risky jobs-i've worked as a laborer and OSHA has standards to make sure workers are safe and that their employers are responsible for keeping them safe), the Whistleblower's Protection Act (Which says you can't be fired for calling out your employer for doing something illegal), the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, National Automobile and  Highway Traffic Safety Act. 

It wasn't until 1992 he first ran for president when he realized that the presidential candidates were just getting worse and worse and no honest politician was stepping up to the plate.  And keep in mind, the reason Nader isn't more popular than he is is because the two main parties try as hard as they can to suppress him, to keep him from having a chance.  The Comission on Presidential Debates, which hosts the three debates between only the democrats and republicans, is a corporation founded by a former member of the Republican National Commitee and  a former member of the Democratic National Committee.  They exclude all third-parties from the debates based on a polling percentage that they know without national media attention the third-party candidates will never be ever to acheive.  If more people heard Ralph nader and other third-party candidates debate the main two, we would have more competitive, democratic, elections.  If you don't believe that the debates make a difference, consider this: Matt Gonzalez, Nader's running-mate for the 2008 election, ran for mayor of san francisco in 2003 on the Green Party tricket.  Initially, he was polling at about 6 percent.  After he was allowed into the mayoral debates he went from polling 6% to getting somewhere around 43% of the votes (I forget the exact number right now) and narrowly lost the election. 

Don't forget that the Democratic party has a huge team of attorneys whose job is to find ways to exclude Ralph Nader from ballots.  They set out in different states and find ways to get his legally removed from the ballot on technicalities or whatever reasons they can find.  They were very succesful in the 2004 election when they got his name thrown off the ballot in 14 states. 

Also, the democrats pinning the term "spoiler" on Ralph Nader in the 2000 election is crazy, and just not true.  It was very effective on their part-they got people to blame ralph nader, to hate ralph nader, and to vote for the democratic party instead, but it's unfair and untrue to pin him as the spoiler.  There were many factors involved: Every third-party candidate on the ballot in florida got more votes than the 543 vote gap between Bush and Gore.  94,000 votes were discounted in florida because they came from suspected felons-95% of which were later found not to be felons, but the votes were already excluded-the majority of those votes were for Gore.  200,000 registered democrats in florida voted for Bush instead of Gore, and half of the registered democrats didn't vote at all.  Confusing and faulty ballots caused votes to be cast for someone else that were intended for Gore.

One more thing to add: the Ralph Nader had the idea for, but is not affiliated with, a new congressional watchdog group called November5.  The idea is to be a completely bottom-up group where  every congressional district in every state organizes to put pressure on their elected representatives to act on issues that we deem important.  After all, they're elected to represent the us and often do not do that.  For example, putting pressure on Rick Larson to stop voting for war funding.  I urge you to sign up for the email list at november5.org. 

Any more opinions?  This was first written when the forum was relatively new. 

 If the democrats start acting like the current republican party.... We choose to judge but not to assist.

I like that idea!

I like game theory too. I wish I was a math major sometimes!!