this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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US: No mention of other political parties, other than republicans and democrats? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by Papanca@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca
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First off, i live in Europe, so i honestly don't know too much about politics in other parts of the world, other than what i sometimes see in the news. I hope my innocent question doesn't trigger any nastiness.

My question is; in discussions i see only talk about democrats vs republicans, for instance discussions only about Biden and/or Trump. But my understanding is that there are other political parties one can vote for. However, i never see any mention of them. So, is it that most people are not interested in those? Or maybe they don't get enough media time? Or are they seen as too extreme? Are the US basically a two-party system? And does it change over time? There are a lot of worries in the world - i don't need to name all of them - but this seems to trigger more extreme views. Does this mean that those other parties attract more voters nowadays?

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[–] robolemmy@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because the US doesn’t have proportional representation and uses “first past the post” voting, basically any vote for a third party candidate is wasted.

There are other parties but their main effect is to sway elections by “stealing” votes from the two main parties. There’s a group trying to form a party called “No Labels” right now but if you look at their financial backers, you can clearly see they only exist to try to weaken democrats.

Admittedly there are some other parties that genuinely try to get elected, such as the Green Party, but they rarely succeed in even the tiniest local elections.

[–] Papanca@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you for your reply, i'm starting to get a sense of how this works in the US