@Charles

That Reagan advert was used again Walter Mondale in the 1984 election. Not against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

That's a Mondale or McGovern-esque electoral map. Here's hoping it comes to pass, even with Hillary in the pocket of multinational banks and middle eastern 'allies'.

Loving America is right wing?
Fuck that.

@1) right! thanks. I made the change.

It was obviously an electrifying speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPbUhcvD…

It's not that Democrats can't be or aren't as patriotic as Republicans, it's just that, for decades the GOP has co-opted that particular quality of our collective national character and wielded it as an analog for strident, unquestioning nationalism, while using their simplistic "'Murka, Love It Or Leave It" ideology to paint Democrats as anti-patriotic. In this election cycle the GOP's somewhat reluctant embrace of a narcissistic, self-serving demagogue is providing the Democratic Party the opportunity to reclaim the notion of patriotism, true love of country, as a quality that binds us together, rather than separating us, the e plurubus, unum to which Clinton referred in her acceptance speech last night. And the moderate wing of the Republican Party simply has no idea what to make of seeing the symbols and motifs with which they've always defined themselves used against them.

"GOP... is no longer seen as the party of American pride but the party of angry white American men." Being a white male, I will add to that: "...party of angry, entitled, spiteful, selfish, wealthy & amoral white men".

@8) "... as vividly personified by their selected candidate."

Trump has to be defeated and there are no more blank checks for establishment Democrats. One isn't mutually exclusive with the other. Pushing Democrats with a 3rd party vote in blue or very red states is as needed as Bernie running for the progressive left within the Democratic party.

@10: Establishment Democrats will always get a blank check as long as they and their media darlings keep ridiculing every third party candidate and keeping this narrative going that we need to keep voting for lesser evils or else "waste" our vote.

@10:

If your goal is to influence the Democratic Party you're going to need to work within it if you want to apply pressure, as was evinced during this current primary. Voting for a third party candidate, regardless of the context, isn't going to push Democrats further to the Left, because there are never going to be enough of you to exert that amount of external pressure. 131,000,000 votes were cast in the 2008 presidential election, and about 125,000,000 in 2012; given current trends we can expect the total number of votes cast in November to likely exceed that of 2008. That means a third party candidate would need well over 6,500,000 of those votes to even qualify for federal matching funds, which is more than twice the total number of votes the Green Party received in 2000. Considering what's at stake, thinking that is going to happen in 2016 is simply unrealistic, and particularly given the rather dismal showing these groups have consistently shown over the years. Will they gain some voters? Entirely likely. But, not THAT many, and certainly not enough to have any serious impact from the outside.

To be fair, the Republican convention was not so much about loving Trump as about hating Hillary Clinton.

@12 the 'narrative' known as reality.

@12:

What possible benefit is there to your cause to vote for candidates who can never be elected? If it's political influence you're seeking, trotting out a noncompetitive candidate for president every four years isn't going to accomplish that no matter how much you may wish otherwise. The truth is you don't have 50,000,000 fellow travelers out their on the fringe Left to compete at the national level; you don't even have 5,000,000, and you never will, because most people tend to stick closer to the middle by nature. And until third parties get serious about running candidates - a LOT of candidates - for local and state races where you actually COULD have some influence, you're always going to be standing on the outside looking in, clinging to your sense of smug sanctimony to assuage your inability to actually effect the kind of change you seek.

The modern right wing HATES America. Hating America is the centerpiece of their ideology.

They launch armed assaults on our wildness preserves. They insist they must be armed to the the teeth 24/7 so they can be ready with lethal force against fellow Americans. They use every opportunity to destroy our most precious institutions. They don't want to pay their taxes. They hate real freedom. They want to ban religions. They want to ban art, books, and movies. They want to take rights away from people. They sneer at education and American intellectuals. They despise diversity. They cheer when authorities kill minorities. They want to increase poverty. They want to cut science funding.

Seriously. There is literally noting American about the right-wing except for their zip codes.

@16: "The system is completely broken, but fixing it would take work. Fuck that. The status quo is easy"

If the massive amount of people who are upset because neither party works for them (all middle class and lower class Americans) actually voted for a third party, we could actually have a challenge to the stagnant two party system we are in. But the media and people like you tell them that fixing the system is impossible, so we just have to keep limping along with it.

This system of government was never designed to work with only two options, despite your dependence on not wanting to actually think about who you are voting for.

By the way, I feel obligated to inform you that I am not an entire political party, so I do not have the power to roll out candidates in local or national elections. I am just one voter, you seem to be confused by this.

Also, "smug sanctimony." Stop projecting.

@18:

And if wishes were horses, we'd all have ponies.

It's that WORK part that third parties don't seem much interested in doing; how else to account for the absolutely dismally small number of candidates they manage to field or supporters they attract? See, there's the rub: you WANT all those disaffected middle and lower-middle class Americans to come to your side, but what are you actually DOING to give them a reason to do so? You keep making the mistake of assuming they share your affinity for a far-Left ideology, when clearly that is not the case, and then scratch your head - or blame the "broken system" - when they don't flock to you in massive numbers. The simple fact is that most Americans are NOT as far to the Left as you want them to be - not by a long shot - and your efforts to drag them farther Left than they're comfortable with continue to fail. So, you're stuck in a quandary: you can't attract a sizable number of voters without simultaneously acceding to ideological compromises you are unwilling to make.

@19: Who said anything about "far-left?" What ideological compromise?

If any third party with any kind of ideology was able to gain a foothold, despite the efforts of those who love the lazy "choice" a two-party system provides, it would be a huge win for everyone, especially those who are continually harmed by the status quo.

Try reading more, projecting less.

I think it's really funny that some blogger saying she won't support Hillary (in a blue state) is somehow makes her a demagogue. It's also pretty silly to say Sawant is making ad hom attacks when she's perfectly cogent in explaining her reason.

Not everyone is going to line up behind Hillary. I'm one of them and these rabid vote or die Hillary people are more interested in shaming and bullying than engaging and moving more left so they don't want far leftist, they tell us they don't need us so just go ahead and fuck off.

Good luck. Seriously. Donald Trump marginally more disastrous than Hillary but they're both a couple of neolib bullies as far as I'm concerned.

The collection of tweets on TPM was encouraging. The majority of the GOP has lost its mind and embraced Trump (tribalism before patriotism, because Murica), but there's still some partially sane people still under that banner.

It will be eternally mysterious to me why, of all the elections in which one might decide to try and make a third party happen, people think this is the one in which to do it. You have noticed that Donald Fucking Trump is the Republican nominee, right? Maybe this isn't the time to try and solve the most intractable problem in the history of modern American electoral politics.

@18 That 'massive amount of people' is not on the fringe left. You are a tiny minority. Most of that 'massive amount of people' are perennial gripers for whom no party works for them because they are generally entirely clueless about what government does and what the real issues of the day are. A whole lot of those people constitute Trump's base of support.

@20:

ONE successful alternative party candidate in a City that has a perception for being ultra-Liberal; not exactly indicative of a groundswell of support for third parties in general.

@21:

Far-Left OR far-Right, the same principals apply: you can't win elections without fielding candidates people actually want to vote for in large enough numbers to make some sort of appreciable difference in their communities, and those on the extremes seem adamantly opposed to moving closer to the middle in order to attract voters in large enough numbers to accomplish that. Thus, you get what you've got now: preservation of your Ideological Purity at the expense of any actual ability to govern.

As for something more along the lines of a true multi-party system, well that really only works when you have a governance structure in place that allows for some form of proportional voting; something our district-based winner-take-all (Single-Member District Plurality - SMDP) system admittedly doesn't accommodate very well. The flaw with our system is that a third party, even one with a considerable amount of voter representation, is going to be a perpetual also-ran unless they can somehow overtake one of the top-two parties, which is understandably difficult. So, historically, when such parties have existed they've ended up forming coalitions with one of the major parties that most closely aligned with their ideology and eventually become absorbed by them.

It's a "feature" of our structure of governance as delineated in our Constitution, predicated on the Framers' desire to create a separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches different from the traditional parliamentary system where the majority in the legislative controls the executive, and with the judicial branch deliberately inoculated from the ravages of the electoral process, thus leaving the other two branches perpetually at-odds so that neither could amass too much power and therefore imbalance the entire system. When you have two entities designed to be in a state of tension with each other, it's a natural outcome of the system that two more-or-less oppositional forces will result.

In order to create an effective system of proportional representation in this country, we would have to engage in a wholesale scrapping of our current electoral system from top to bottom, eliminating the concept of SMDP altogether. And that would require re-writings of literally every municipal and county code, and 50 separate state constitutions, plus the federal, otherwise it's only going to impact the individual districts where it's adopted and nowhere else and thus have negligible effect.

So, maybe you-all should get started on that now and then get back to us in, oh, a century or so, and let's see how you've made out.

@26:

Really? Name one, because I've never heard of any council member besides Sawant profess a particular affinity with Socialist Alternative (Sawant's party), the Freedom Socialist Party, or the Socialist Workers Party, nor have any others been formally endorsed by them. They may be far-Left Democrats, but, as you can tell from recent comment threads, those on the FAR far-Left wouldn't consider them "ideologically pure enough" to qualify for their exclusive club.

In fact, the only other local candidates any of those parties have formally endorsed recently (so far as I've been able to determine) was John Naubert who ran for a Seattle Port Commission seat last year under the SWP banner, Edwin Fruit (SWP) for Council District 6 in 2013, and Linda Averil, who ran as FSP for a City Council seat in 2012.

Sorry, @28 is obviously meant for @27...

@30:

That type of deliberate subterfuge tends not to go over well with voters, and they have an annoying habit of booting politicians who attempt it after a single term.

As for Sheldon & Tom, well both represent very conservative districts, and both have somewhat erratic voting records. Tom actually started his political career as a Republican, and switched to the Democratic Party in 2006 to challenge Luke Esser for his State Senate seat. So, rather than calling him a "stealth candidate", I would characterize him as being the modern-day analogue to the Roman General Quintus Dellius, infamous for his embrace of political opportunism and willingness to switch sides whenever he felt it to his personal advantage; but certainly not secretive about it. Shelton may have been more circumspect about his political alliances, but again his voting record was never exactly consistent with the WA Democratic Party platform, and given his constituency, he probably could have just as easily run as a declared Republican.