...since that could mean handfuls of harder-to-own "lawmakers..."

n/t

of conspiracy theory

The Butcher, The Baker, The Munition Maker, The Candlestick Maker.

that to work. Otherwise get involved in the Party of your choice and take it over. that's what the Tea Baggers did to the Republican Party, which is why the moderate Republicans are becoming Democrats and increasingly pulling it to the corporate right. The labor, environmental and liberal Democrats need to take it back.

to remain viable for the next election.

Or that is what it use to be haven't kept up with the process for a few years.

I think it would be worse with more than 2 parties. Someone pointed out something about Japan: that with all their political parties, the right in some fashion has held sway for the vast majority of time since 1956 or so.

That doesn't mean it would be the same here but I bet it would. If there were enough people to truly give Progressives the majority, we wouldn't need more than the Democratic party, we'd just need to fine-tune it.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

TP we have suffers a government shutdown costing millions, don't think it help anyone or anything. Power comes in numbers.

parties.

We get the government we deserve.

They had to be pulled like hell to support women issues, race issues, tech issues, long hair issues, safety issues.

The baggers, the Republicans and the Democrats.

Split off the progressive caucus and the teabaggers and everyone else are Reaganites.

The idea that the Democratic Party is split between New Deal Democrats and Warren liberals is absurd. Most of the Democrats are Reaganites.

I don't see how this helps us.

Is to reach out to the people who are not old enough to remember Reagan (I was a baby when Reagan was elected and a 3rd grader when he left office). They're soon going to be a bigger block of voters than the baby boomers.

Key is just getting them registered and to the polls.

is that the apparatus of politics is set up to only allow two parties. I agree that it makes sense for them to split but the way political power is assembled, it can't happen. If it did, you'd end up with one right-wing party (Repubs), one centreist party (Dems) one social democrat party and one outright Fascist party (Teabaggers).

that the winner would have the votes of a small fraction of voters.

They caucus with the Tea Party. Democrats have been able to hold their divided Party together so far.

is in no way separate from the Republican Party. They nominate no candidates, they have no convention, no delegates, each and every politician who identifies with the 'Tea Party' is in fact a registered and elected Republican, member of no other Party than the Republican Party.
It serves the Republicans to pretend their craziest faction is actually a different Party when it is not, those are Republicans. A rose, by any other name, is still a Republican.

They get their agenda accepted, whether or not they caucus separately.

maybe it would work.

Whigs and Dems split over slavery along sectional lines.

I forget where I heard it, but the gist is that there were party splits in both major sections of the country, North and South. Each party had a northern and southern faction. Sorry, can't remember many details. It actually kind of reflects what's going on now, when you consider the Repubs and their business v. religious sides and the Dems and their 3rd Way and FDR sides. It's not as fractious now, but it is similar.

26% of the vote but still won because the others are so fragmented.

It would just be a standstill on everything. Anyone in office has 75% opposition.

he would probably straighten out every single thing that is wrong with America right now. And that's exactly what we need. I wouldn't care if it shut us down for a period of time to straighten out. The people will be out with pitch-forks after November if this next Congress doesn't get its' act together and work with this President.

and makes such a messiah out of Sen. Sanders. If only he could get elected POTUS. How come he can't, when he's so effective at speaking?

where will the apologists for corporate education, protection of criminal banks, austerity, mandated for-profit corporate health insurance, drilling and fracking, PNAC/MIC wars of choice, ramping up nuclear weapons, and the TPP and the TISA go?

I don't think these policies that are centered relentlessly around the interests of banks and corporations fit either category you offer for Democrats very well. Does that mean the consistently corporatist voices in our party will go back to one of the two right-wing parties, where they belong?

Or are you acknowledging that Democrats out in the country really don't support these things, and that merely the party's leadership, rather than its actual membership, has been hijacked (read: purchased) by banks and corporations?

to purge the Corporates. As it exists now, our only slogan is "We aren't as bad as the Republicans". Without them the party could stand for real issues and inspire support.

People form coalitions - they aren't looking to make that harder for themselves. If you can't get along with other people, you have breakdown in society. It is a good thing when a society can be moderate. The Tea Party is not a good thing to see developing.

...fine with me, but I suspect a lot of people here wouldn't be happy.

moderate or otherwise. That's just hilarious. Unhinged. As if history did not exist....

More fractious than what exists, which is quite bad enough, thanks.

All of the current neoliberal Dems find their best fit in the moderate GOP party.

That might be interesting. Then they'd have to be elected as Republicans, and Democrats could elect better representatives.

just mean that the candidate who eventually "won" could easily have the support of merely a quarter of the electorate!

So your question should be whether we should have proportional representation and/or runoff voting. If we get those things, then more parties would naturally spring up. But without them, more parties would just end up caucusing together anyway into two blocs.

Coalition politics already occurs within parties. There is no inherent benefit to simply putting a separate party label on each intra-party bloc if you still have plurality voting and winner-take-all elections.

the left-bloc and the winner of the right-bloc face each other.

California has a run-off system without the blocs (the "jungle primary&quot , and it has a lot of problems. For example, being a Democratic state, there are more Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. Because of this, each individual Democratic candidate can get less votes than their Republican counterpart, even if there are many more Democratic votes than Republican votes. So what happens is the two Republican candidates, receiving the most individual votes go the general, even if most people didn't vote for them and voted for a Democratic candidate instead.

A multi-party general would be even worse, since we wouldn't have any runoff. We'd just have someone who got 20% of the vote winning because the 40% that went to progressives was split 3 ways (with the other 40% being split however many ways).

The current system we have is pretty good. Some things could be better, like intra-party blocs and runoffs in primaries. But for the most part the problem is that the majority of people ignore the primaries. Trying to shove the primaries into the general is a pretty terrible way of fixing that.

all had their own candidate I wonder how the vote would go? I think the teaparty hurts the Rs. But when it comes to controlling the House and the Senate do our two branches hurt or help us. IF either one of the Dem parties could beat the other two that would still give us control of the Senate and the House. I would not feel comfortable if we are in danger of losing control.

At stake here is control of the SCOTUS, voting rights, the safety net, etc. I want a party that can and does keep control of the mechanism we use to govern. Ideally this would be a progressive party but I honestly do not think we have enough to control without the damn 3rd Way group.

on each line are summarized together.

are usually about 10 parties on the ballot. Usually most of them do not get many votes. The problem with getting a new party is that I have never seen a third party that really came close to winning. In the documentary The Roosevelt's that was brought up when Teddy tried to run in a third party. Even he could not win.

I'm beginning to wonder if America will ever catch up to the rest of the western world when it comes to rights and freedoms.

But the Republicans should go first...