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The current top comment on the /r/politics post on this is:
(Post did not include a link to NYT, but here is the source from an article titled "Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record".)
I pretty much agree. I wasn't happy about Trump being elected but at first I was hoping there may be some silver lining in him actually being serious in his claims to care about corruption. But that hopefulness didn't last long. (Also, I'm not entirely sold on term limits; I think looking at other structural reasons for incumbency like first-past-the-post elections making it difficult to run an ideologically similar campaign is probably a better idea.)
I still don’t understand how the poster child for “draining the swamp” is a billionaire real estate mogul and entertainer from New York City. The constant self-advertising alone surely raised red flags. And that’s before the scandals, the inability to fill offices, the nepotism, the public infighting, and the general inability to pass anything.
Damn it, we need an alternative to FPTP.
That or we need people to actually use the system in the way it's intended. If people actually voted for the candidates they wanted instead of stupidly saying "well I have to pick one of these two or my vote is wasted" (and therefore, ironically wasting their vote) then the system would work great. I'm not opposed to designing a system which has rules to work against human foibles, but I do think that the voters deserve their fair share of blame too.
This is false for pretty any reasonable definition of "great". Vote splitting is a real thing, and with just 3 candidates honest FPTP voting can cause a candidate to defeat a loser who was preferred by as much as 33 points. And in a non-evenly split election? The odds of affecting an election via a tactical vote are exponentially (literally, not hyperbole, and the exponent is often large) greater than the the odds of affecting one via an honest vote for a non-competitive party.
None of that means you should never vote for a non-competitive party anyway. I had three Libertarians on my last ballot, knowing none stood a chance, because in a race between "bad" and "very slightly worse" it's freeing to abdicate and cast "pox on both your houses" instead. But at least try to understand how the expected value tradeoffs work, so you can discard that value with your eyes open.
If a plurality of people actually think candidate A is the best on the ballot, then even if candidates B and C split the rest of the vote then I think that's a fair outcome. My beef is nothing to do with vote splitting in itself, it's that it tends to happen because everyone has this mass delusion that votes for third parties are a waste and so they vote for someone they don't actually want.
The system of FPTP only works if people actually vote for the person they want in office the most. But people don't do that, so it breaks down. That is something we can (and should) address with a more robust system, but it doesn't absolve people of their responsibility in the breakdown either. It's kind of like how, despite having traffic rules, people who don't follow them can still cause accidents. We can (and should) try to make it so that people who don't want to follow the rules can't cause accidents, but in the meantime it's still their fault for ignoring the rules.
De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. But would you extend the same latitude in return? When others think that "nearly two thirds of the electorate wants a Foo to win and there are two equally popular Foo candidates in the race" should not lead to "therefore the Bar candidate will win", could you at least not refer to that as "stupid[ly]"? Seems kind of smart to me, frankly.
To be clear, what I'm calling stupid is the idea of "my vote is wasted if I vote for a third party". That is untrue and a frustrating myth that people keep perpetuating. What actually wastes your vote is to cast it for someone you don't actually want in office. If you are tactically voting that isn't stupid by itself, though it does break the system if you do that.
It sets up an awful hysteresis in the system, at least. It's a sad fact to me that most Libertarians don't have a shot because most people aren't at all libertarian ... but I do think that Gary Johnson would have had a decent shot against the most-hated and the second-most-hated Presidential candidates of all time, if only the game theory of FPTP didn't boil down to "he can't win because he can't win".
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This is akin to saying "FPTP cannot fail, it can only be failed." A system that can only work if the populace ignores strategic considerations, and otherwise outsizedly rewards the people who actually do vote strategically, is already broken.
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