2024 Third Party and Independent Candidate General discussion

[AltWorlder]

Really good and surprisingly non-Libertarian piece from Reason.com:

Here's How Donald Trump's 'Patriot Party' Could Become a Political Force by Matt Welch

I see four main obstacles, beginning with the man himself:

1. It takes a lot of thankless, expensive drudgery without an immediate, flashy payoff.

2. Americans are third-partiers in the streets, duopolists in the sheets.

3. Ballot access is a huge pain for third parties in non-presidential races.

4. Taking over an existing third party requires you to…take over an existing third party.

He goes into the four points in full and then considers all the possible parties that Trump could try to merge with. Really great detail.

[AltWorlder]

Patriot Party could be a plausible thing.

It could form but it would probably be a lot less significant than people think, please read the Matt Welch article, it really shows that there's a ton of structural problems against them and basically any other new third parties that are trying to form from the ground up today.

Aside from the ballot-access hurdles (on which more below), there is an important fundraising bottleneck at the beginning of a new party's life: The incumbents, including minor parties, that have "national committees" as recognized by the Federal Elections Commissions (FEC), are able to accept donations at $35,000 a pop. Individual campaigns along the lines of a prospective Trump 2024? Just $5,000.

And here's the catch about graduating to the big boys' fundraising club: The FEC won't grant national committee status until a political party holds a national convention, establishes national headquarters, sets up state party committees, and has a "sufficient number of party-designated federal candidates on the ballot in a sufficient number of states in different geographic areas." In other words, the Patriot Party better get cranking right now to compete in a whole bunch of 2022 House and Senate races; in the meantime, the candidates and the party will have to either self-finance (never a Trump specialty) or collect donations at a fraction of their competitors' size for a minimum of two years.

The only way at this point is to do what the Alliance Party has been doing and consolidate a bunch of  shell/zombie state third parties for their ballot access, or wait until 2028 because 2024 is too soon to build that party infrastructure.

[AltWorlder]

https://mobile.twitter.com/3rdPartyPromo/status/1361416659026644992
This party is such a meme

There's an entire quadrant of the political compass that's underserved.

[AltWorlder]

Not directly related to the ASP, but it seems like their brand of social Catholic economic leftism has more of an audience than expected, as apparently there's a publication called Solidarity Policy Collective with a nonprofit called Solidarity Lobby. The ASP Twitter is signal-boosting them.

https://twitter.com/AmSolidarity/status/1367270805332180993

They are podcast official with a Chapo lmao

https://twitter.com/SolidarityWonk/status/1367602560689913861

Their @SolidarityLobby account is retweeting both DSA and ASP tweets haha

The Bruenigs have been charting out the ASP's tendency for years now, it's interesting that they're now finally tenuously connected via this org. Gonna listen to the debate between Matt Bruenig and Oren Cass, hopefully it's a good one.

At least these guys have a sense of humor and self-awareness.

https://twitter.com/Tim_Wainwright/status/1367606456883834882

[AltWorlder]

https://mobile.twitter.com/AmSolidarity/status/1374407206444011526

The ASP twitter feed is a land of contrasts.

https://twitter.com/AmSolidarity/status/1374423709197340678

[AltWorlder]

In the realm of ASP and adjacent tendencies, the new Solidarity Policy Center (from Catholic Social Action), interviewed 2020 ASP vice presidential candidate Amar Patel.

https://twitter.com/SolidarityWonk/status/1386743939936530433

[AltWorlder]

As promising and as interesting as RAM is, I feel like it's going to go the same way as Unity08 and all of these other marginally-hyped efforts involving big mainstream political names. People's Party had a great roster but last I checked they fell into in-fighting and Tweeting angrily against AOC. I think Perot's Reform Party had the lightning in a bottle of being held together by someone with singular vision and drive; a lot of these movements do not have that sort of anchoring force, and falls apart whether it has "legitimate" politicians involved or not.

[AltWorlder]

Justice Party leader Rocky Anderson considering reforming and reactivating the party.

With a lot of room taken up by Bernie Sanders, the DSA, and WFP in the Democratic Party I expect it is going to be tougher to get talent. Not to mention the fact that the reformist left lane is clogged with greenery and Twitter users. In just third party spaces, coming late in the game as a third movement in this lane may be too much a task for such an old brand of politics.

He really should just join the People's Party but as always possible ideological compatibility is often trumped by personal ambitions.

[AltWorlder]

I thought the whole "Stork as our party logo" thing was the dead giveaway the ASP is a Trojan Horse for Christian neoconservatism, Christian democracy at best.

They are explicitly and avowedly a Christian democratic party.

They are not neoconservative, as they are for foreign policy noninterventionism and the Catholic doctrine of just war.

[AltWorlder]

The Alliance Party seems to be stuck in the third party niche ghetto imo. The people behind it are all like  3rd party insiders- Rocky De La Fuente, Darcy Richardson, Brian Moore.

That said, that wouldn't be a deterrent from them to endorse Yang.

[AltWorlder]

No reason the Common Sense Party of California can't fill the same niche that the PFP or the AIP does for their respective viewpoints.

The Alliance Party should just start an affiliate in CA, but I suppose this Common Sense Party might end up being just that. They really oughta rope in Chamath Palihapitiya, if not as an actual candidate, as a donor at least.

[AltWorlder]

If Gabbard doesn't go GOP, will she join the Constitution Party, or the Forward Party?

[AltWorlder]

Some outsider could do a Don Blankenship-style takeover for the party, at least for an election or two. Gabbard probably doesn't care to do that, though.

[AltWorlder]

I suppose if it hadn't already fallen to cultish in-fighting, the People's Party would be the ideal place for  Gabbard to be its flag-bearer.

[AltWorlder]

I don't know if they currently have a political party, but apparently Tulsi's a hit with at least one prominent LaRouchite

https://twitter.com/SocialismS4A/status/1580642614097084417

[AltWorlder]

lmao the Libertarians, Greens, and Constitution Parties collapsing ftw. Guess it’s time for some wandering in the wilderness.

West running will split the already niche-leftist but neither Green nor socialist niche that Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr. already occupy, so that’s both interesting and amusing.

It feels like a return to the days when Nader or Cynthia McKinney were headlining the Greens except there’s somehow three different semi-household names canceling each other out.

[AltWorlder]

He was in the Matrix sequels, have some respect

[AltWorlder]

Yeah pointing out the number of leftist third parties is irrelevant. There are multiple tiny third parties for any political alignment (there’s like two separate single-issue Legalize Marijuana parties alone). A prominent figure known to the mainstream like Coronel West running has the potential of uplifting any group he campaigns with, whether a third party or just a personal vehicle party, to ballot access.

[AltWorlder]

If some random bureaucrat like Evan McMullin could secure ballot access in 2016, surely Cornel West can do decently as we no longer live in pandemic times.

Kanye was unhinged and didn’t actually campaign. Rosanne couldn’t secure a third party nomination. So this West might have a better shot.

[AltWorlder]

Alliance is petered out since the 2022 midterms. No new news or website updates

Couldn't even make it long enough to serve as a Rocky De La Fuente vehicle, smdh

[AltWorlder]

The Alliance Party was studiously trying to not reinvent the wheel by forging alliances with local centrist independence parties to accumulate ballot access, rather than focusing on building an entirely new party on their own, but I guess that work is mooted by not having actual candidates to give that ballot access to.

[AltWorlder]

2000 tarred third party reputations as spoilers, at least for the left, forever, sorry

No candidate with anything to lose wants to commit political suicide

[AltWorlder]

So then what third parties need to do is combat the "spoiler" label and point out that those who want to restrict ballots are, by definition, anti-democratic.

Third parties can and should do that, and there's ways to combat the label by pushing for ranked choice voting and the like. But my point is the more mainstream of candidates like Sanders is certainly not going to risk it to run quixotic campaigns to split the vote. When was the last time an actual elected official did that on the national level, John Anderson? That was a lifetime ago.

I agree that leftists who run independent or third party are tarred as such, but that certainly doesn't make it accurate, and that certainly doesn't mean they should lie down and continue letting people make those accusations against them.

To be fair third party leftists and such won't do that, Nader himself ran two more times with ever more diminishing returns. But again I'm talking about a figure like Sanders. Heck maybe that's why Justin Amash won't run, I imagine.

[AltWorlder]

Spoilers don’t exist and the notion that these voters are unwinnable or stupid is incorrect. Like a huge portion of western native voters that democrats won in part due to changing their stances on pipeline projects, how the system works is you got to convince people to vote for you against other parties or not voting at all.

Don't tell me that, tell it to the entrenched narrative since Florida

And, well, now that I think about it, TR's Bull Moose run did lose 1912 for Taft and the GOP.

Also, from experience, how is what they are doing Electoral suicide?

I was talking about if Sanders (or Bloomberg in 2020, or any Republican in 2016, or whomever) defects to run against their party nominee as an independent. Perot was never an elected official of either party. I was specifically speaking about why no mainstream elected official (since Anderson 1980 at least) is going to suicide their career and reputation by running independent and be accused as a spoiler for all time. Those who do so are like Cynthia McKinney in '04 or Bob Barr in '08 or Virgil Goode in '12, who are already ideologically radical and reputationally unpopular enough to not have much to lose.

[AltWorlder]

Joe Manchin running for No Labels might make sense for himself in terms of his political aspirations but what would be funnier is if Joe Lieberman decides to run for that same movement