Attack on voting

[Spongebob]

Reasons why this idea holds no water:

A "no party" system would be ideal.

The only downside is idiots would not have the option of pulling a single lever to vote.

Candidates would need to be judged on their history and their stated position on issues.

Vote for the candidate - not the gang..

OLB proposes that we stop voting for representatives of a party and vote for individuals.  First of all, this would require the all political parities relinquish any and all power they currently posses, and that is a lot of power.  There is simply no precedent for such a thing to occur, not in our country or any other country for that matter.  How would anyone propose that this step be accomplished?  It's hard enough to get people to consider a "third" party like the Libertarian Party, which offers many good ideas.  The reason is simple, no one wants to waste their vote on anything other than the party that they believe can win and represent them.

Further, what this line of thinking really advocates is voting for populists because they appeal directly to voters and not to a party line.  In most ways, Trump was a populist.  He is not a true Republican, anyone can see that.  People old enough will remember Ross Perot, who ran as a populist in the 90's and made a little bit of a stir.  History is rife with people who rose to power through populism and the vast majority of them turned out to be disastrous.

We do have an established history of new parties rising to power.  We are currently in the 5th such 2-party system.  But a new party has an uphill climb; it has to pull voters from both of the parties in power to be successful.  The last to do so was the GOP, which took anti-slavery advocates from both the Democrats and Whigs.  If a few issues become important enough and neither of the parties in power are addressing them, that is an opening for a new party to emerge.

So, while I respect and appreciate OLB's unusually salient post, I don't believe it would accomplish what he believes it would, nor does it have any hope of actually happening, although I submit again that Trump is in most ways an example of what he is proposing.  Most Trump supporters are not supporting the vast majority of Conservative politics but rather responding to the populism of Trump.

So I'll argue again that the real problem is extremism in the two major parties and that can be traced to uncompetitive voting districts in the states.  If we made redistricting non-partisan, the result would be more competition and more centrist candidates and less extremism in congress.  The POTUS doesn't really matter all that much because congress writes the laws and holds the purse strings.  But with congress now occupied mostly by party extremists, we get this stratification and even a lunatic president becomes a focal point that they cling to.