Okay, first: Nebraska elects via plurality. That’s arguably worse in this case, because if 30% of the electorate votes Democratic, 25% DSA, and 45% Republican, the Republican candidate wins. That means that 3rd party candidates are in an even worse position.

Alaska has a real ranked-choice system, but also has the minimum number of senators (2), representatives (1), and 3 electoral college votes, which is the lowest that it’s possible to have. (Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont all also have only 3 electoral college votes.) That means that Alaska is largely irrelevant nationally, as they have minimal input on national policy, or ability to affect the outcome of the presidential election. Note that they got ranked choice voting because of a ballot initiative; only half of the states allow for that in the first place. Ohio, California, and Michigan are the most substantial states that allow ballot initiatives. Texas–which has the most electoral votes after California–does not. The states with the most representatives and electoral college votes generally do not.

Run-off elections aren’t the same as not being FPTP. Without ranked choice, they’re still functionally FPTP, because they drop all but the bottom two candidates. So your 3rd party candidates are going to get kicked off the ballot in run-offs, and you’re also likely to see much lower turnout. (That’s the only reason that Georgia has Ossof and Warnock as senators; they both won in run-offs that had far, far lower turnout than the general election.)

All you’re really doing here is proving that you don’t understand how winning elections work. If you want to win nationally with a 3rd party, you need to put in the work at the local level first, then the state level, and you need to build a large coalition across multiple states. Without doing that first, bitching about the national elections is verbal masturbation.

Mexico is not a purely FPTP system; there are elements of ranked choice at the national level for their legislature. That makes it possible for 3rd parties to build a power base an support sufficient to win the presidency, which is a FPTP election.

Unless and until there is election reform to allow ranked-choice voting–which Repubs and Dems will both oppose, and which is illegal in some states–you can not realistically have 3rd parties winning. Unless and until 3rd parties build up their power by winning at state and local elections, they will not win national offices. Right now, 3rd parties have no foundation of power that they can use to win national elections.

The closest the US has come in the last one hundred years to a 3rd party presidential win was H. Ross Perot, over 30 years ago. Before that, you have to look at Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party, right around the time of the Great War.

to say America was stable and great under Biden is a bit silly,

Jesus, people have such a short attention span.

Covid-19 fucked the economy hard. It was really, really bad. That started under Trump, and Biden was trying to pick up the pieces. By the time Trump was elected, the foundation had been restored. I don’t know how much you paid attention, but economists had been talking about how we were going to have a hard landing, that we were going to have a recession, because of all the money that had been handed out by Biden to stem the economic tide caused by covid-19… And then, the summer before the election, economists were saying, huh, maybe everything is going to be fine after all.

Does that mean that things didn’t suck for a lot of people as housing prices went through the roof? No. But it meant that labor markets were tight, and a lot of people could hop jobs to get better pay. (Not everyone, but a lot of people.)

Going back to 2008, we had the same thing; the housing bubble popped under Dubya, and took the economy with it. (That, BTW, is why I couldn’t get a job related to my degree; I graduated in the middle of that, and there were no jobs to be had in my field.) Obama spent eight years as president trying to get things back on track with the policies that he could control. And, by the time Trump was elected, most people were doing a lot better than they had been doing at the height of the recession. Bush had inherited a booming economy and an enormous budget surplus from Clinton; he absolutely tanked it with deregulation and tax cuts. Clinton, in turn, took a relatively stagnant economy from Bush Sr., and oversaw it getting turned around.

We keep having this same fucking cycle, and we’ve been having it for at least fifty fucking years now. People can’t remember anything past two years ago, and so they vote for the fucking morons that keep shitting the bed on the economy, or they sit it out because they don’t think their vote matters, or vote 3rd party because they don’t understand how voting works in the US.

And yes Kamala was and continues to be a horrible human being. She never would have survived a primary for this reason.

You forget that she has survived many primaries in the past, to get elected as DA in the first place, and then to get elected as senator. The problem as I see it is that there was no primary for her to run in in the first place; it’s entirely possible that, had there been a primary, she still would have been chosen. (I for one am very fucking glad that Gavin Newsom didn’t end up being the nominee.)

As far as the election went, the biggest problem that Harris had was the perception of the economy that people had under Biden, and the fact that she was a VP that couldn’t throw Biden under the bus. You can talk about the genocide in Gaza, but the fact is that there are very, very few Dems that could have run competitively that aren’t also staunch supporters of Israel, right or wrong (and Israel is most definitely wrong here). Harris also had a problem with immigration; a majority (53%) of the US approves of how Trump is handling immigration. source 1, source 2.

I have an earlier version of this (got it on sale from Costco, and it was the highest-rated model by Consumer Reports at the time); I love it. It’s not great for carpets, but it’s fast and easy for hardwood floors.

Would I have bought it if it needed to connect to my cell phone? Absofuckinglutely not. Not in a million fucking years. It could have been the best goddamn vacuum in the world at sucking, powered by a miniature black hole, sucking dirt to the event horizon, and I still would have passed.

I need LESS connectivity in my life, not more.