We need to have a meaningfully competitive electoral system.

I live in New York, although not in NYC. I call elections “affirmations”, as there are never meaningfully contested general elections, and probably a meaningfully contested primary about 1/3 of the time. All of the bigger offices (mayor, county exec, Congress) attract enough money that the incumbent can find an African American or other bloc voter candidate to run on a third party line and split the opposition vote. State legislative offices are only involuntarily vacated by death or felony conviction.

It’s difficult to envision a brighter future as the national GOP platform is so poisonous.

It's way worse than that. Even primaries in NY are essentially coronations - the party, not the voters, is able to choose the candidate it wants to win. And since the two parties have a gentleman's agreement not to compete in each other's districts, the candidate that the party leadership chooses is guaranteed to win both the primary and the general election.

https://nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-politics-pa...

This is why I'm so happy about the California top-two primaries - they've created competitive elections in a dominant-party state. But they were only created through a ballot initiative over the objections of the legislature.

Political parties will always resist the disempowering of the party, and things like runoffs, preferential and range voting, etc. gives more choice to the voter and fragments parties. It fragments them because the voter isn't punished as often for taking a chance on what are otherwise considered fringe candidates.

The U.S. is one of the older representative democracies now with the oldest written constitution, which is also difficult to change. Making elections more modern, fair, and actually representative will take a lot of effort by citizens.

If SCOTUS finds in favor of existing extreme gerrymandering practices in the Gill v Whitford case, it will be necessary for citizens to actively crack the grip of the two incumbent political parties, or accept generation long single party rule disconnected from representation of the citizenry. Gill v Whitford is the easier path, but modern elections still need to be a goal: city, state and federal. It will take time.

And House rules give the top positions based on seniority, so states are incentivized to gerrymander to protect their senior representatives. We need to change Congressional rules in that regard as well. Due to top-two, California lost a 40-year incumbent in Fremont who was fifth in seniority in the 435-member House. Sometimes California takes it on the chin with its referendum when doing things that are against its current best interests but provide a useful experiment and forcing function.

> This is why I'm so happy about the California top-two primaries - they've created competitive elections in a dominant-party state.

Have they really? It seems more like they've pulled candidates towards the center slightly and relegated third parties to the sidelines even more.

When the initiative was passed, third parties opposed it because they said it would make it more difficult for them to run competitive or even influential (but unsuccessful) campaigns.

For statewide races, the jungle primary approach seems to come down to which two Democrats attract enough votes away from other parties (and other Democrats) in order to make it to the final two.

A 40-year incumbent in Fremont actually lost to a younger candidate who seemed less controversial. In a primary, the younger / newer candidate may not have won due to lower turnout. Of course, the incumbent was 5th in seniority in the 435-member House, so California is hurt in that way due to House rules, which perversely, favor long-rooted incumbency and states with strong gerrymandering.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/11/...

Well yeah. In a FPTP system those third-party candidates hurt the major-party candidates closest to their viewpoints, whereas now their voters end up having a say once it becomes clear that their favored candidate is not viable.

Same with Republicans in liberal districts; a choice between two Democrats is just what the voter profile of those districts leads to, and at least this way the minority party gets to influence the final winner.

_It’s difficult to envision a brighter future as the national GOP platform is so poisonous._

Irony defined in a single sentence.

_Those other guys, right? Not mine_

GP was specifically talking about NYC, so calling out the specific party in power there seemed relevant.

> GP was specifically talking about NYC, so calling out the specific party in power there seemed relevant.

The original post really concerns the state government, not the city, and New York is definitely a two-party state. The Assembly is always controlled by Democrats, and the Senate is always controlled by the Republicans, even when Democrats win a majority of the seats.

Both parties benefit from this stasis, so they have no incentive to upset the balance.

> Finding out what is so expensive and fixing that never occurs to anybody

It occurs to a lot of people. We're just completely powerless.

Not only that does it occur, but it also occurs that the same people messing it up have bought off both sides. So it's not like voting for Dems or Republicans will magically make it cheaper. They'll just change who pays the insane prices, if that.

Are there any examples of states or countries that handle this the right way? Can this be applied to NYC?

Most European countries have a multi-party system, usually due to not using first past the post voting systems.

As a result you have more parties, more diversity of choice and less polarization and of course more competition. Parties can actually go away and they do, usually every few decades.

The downside is that you can get deadlocks as no party can get a majority sometimes, even after making coalitions with smaller parties.

Still better end result than the US end result, in my opinion.

You also have two parties, the "government" and the "opposition". They are created after the election. At that point, the voters no longer get any say. The voters don't even know what they will get.

Consider a situation that starts with 12 parties. One gets 45% support, and the others each get 5% support. When the 12 parties merge into the 2 that will actually govern, that party with 45% may be the loser. The other 11 can merge to become a party with 55% of the power. The party which is most popular by far is thus locked out of power.

First-past-the-post is bad, but it's not the problem here. Almost every city, state, and county election across the country is run under first-past-the-post rules, and only New York has the level of inter-party corruption that New York does. As I explain above, it's specific to New York and the way parties have written laws to preserve their stranglehold on power.

You also get small parties extorting billions in pork for their support or pet project in the UK the DUP and Libdems in the previous coalition did this and likewise the greens in Germany.

We haven't had a single-party government in Ireland since the '50s, and it hasn't done us a lick of harm. Quite the opposite, in fact, as junior parties tend to be a moderating influence on the senior one. If anything, it's typically the junior party that gets shafted the most when the elections come.

If you want real pork extortion, then you need a minority government propped up by a deal with an opposition party. That's what you have with the DUP.

Exactly my point though quite my comment was voted down I wasn't expecting many hardline brexiters on here.

And Ireland has had major problems like Bertie Ahern and Charles James Haughey?

Those two gobshites are more a consequence of political culture, especially within FF, than voting system.

The DUP and LibDems are examples of FPTP distortions in the UK.

The “extortion’ by the Greens doesn’t seem to have damaged Germany unduly, except by forcing it down the path to so-cheap-it’s-almost-free renewable energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany "According to Forbes, the IEA reports that in 2015, German prices were 17.9 cents per kwh for industry, and 39.5 cents per kwh for residential customers, versus 7 and 12.5 cents respectively in the U.S."

In what measure is that a result of bad policy and or a result of a desire to promote thriftiness? After all gas in the US is cheap and in Europe it's expensive and I think a major part of the price are excises meant to discourage consumpation.

As a side note, the EU is also pushing heavily energy efficiency for homes, this might be related.

Given that was the direct result of a panic over tsunami's in japan and guess what Germany doesn't have much of a coast line.

The early mothballing of Germanys nuclear reactor which where being phased out is the direct cause of the increase.

The German nuclear phase-out and funding of renewable energy development through electricity taxes was started in 2000, a decade before the Fukushima event and as a direct result of a (by then) two decade old environmental movement.

The German government decided to extend the lifetime of some reactors shortly before the event but that plan was immediately scrapped again. Risk of tsunamis itself were not the reason but rather that the public overwhelmingly did not trust the operators to follow safe procedures given that the Japenese operator didn't. But again, nuclear power was really unpopular even before that.

no its just rare in FPTP compared to PR systems which can give minority parties an advantage their small vote does not deserve

> Are there any examples of states or countries that handle this the right way? Can this be applied to NYC?

New York State is the source of the problem, not New York City (although the city government is affected by these as well).

The problem is that the two political parties have passed a series of laws that empowers the party leadership and ensures that voters have essentially zero influence in the so-called democratic process.

Party leadership, not voters, is able to nominate the candidates that they want to represent the party in each race[0]. The parties have a gentleman's agreement not to compete with each other in the other party's claimed districts[1], so the general election is almost always uncontested.

Due to fusion voting, third parties are pressured to endorse first-party candidates in order to maintain ballot access, so you'll almost always see the same candidate running (oftentimes uncontested) on multiple party lines. The only "choice" you have is in choosing which party to use to vote for the all-but-guaranteed victorious candidate.

Party registration is fixed as well, so it's impossible to switch between parties in order to influence party direction. The deadline to change parties for the 2018 cycle passed in October. If you submitted a change of registration on October 13, 2017, it won't' take effect until 2019. Yes, you read that right.

And the party leadership is controlled by a series of local clubs (yes, they literally call them clubs). For example, the dominant party in my district is the Democratic party, and my local Democratic club is run by the son and daughter of the last Irish mob boss in Manhattan[2]. The son, incidentally, openly jokes about how similar the system is to Tammany Hall when violating election laws[3]. If I wanted to have any influence in local politics, I'd have to influence the Democratic party, and if I wanted to influence the Democratic party, I'd have to pay the steep membership fees to join this club, and then hope that this dynastic family listened to what I have to say.

Any initiatives to change this have to go through the New York State legislature, and any bills have to be approved by the top three ranking members of the government, who are coincidentally the most powerful members of the two parties[4]. Unsurprisingly, they have little incentive to reduce their own power.

Unlike other states, New York doesn't have a ballot initiative process, so we can't bypass the legislature. Any statewide ballot initiatives have to be first approved by the legislature.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-poli...

[1] Think of the way Comcast and Time Warner Cable (Spectrum) don't compete with each other.

[2] You can't make this up

[3] You really can't make this up: https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/mcmanus-member...

[4] This is known as "three men in a room" https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/nyregion/us-attorney-pree...

Yeah my frightened brethren in coastal US cities dont get it, the political party is a sideshow: play by a more effective set of rules

If you DONT have a state-sanctioned racket I’m like “Do you even America bruh?”

Regarding healthcare, the problem is that, regardless of how that industry got to the point it's at right now, it's in the state it's in, and doing anything to jeopardize that would destructure a lot of things.

There are things that could be done to make US healthcare a lot healthier economically.

They are all politically impossible to get through our political system.

One important thing to understand is that the billions and trillions that are wasted are income and livelihoods for millions of people, and they have huge political power.

I think this nicely encapsulates the problem faced in a lot of facets of society.

I'm not sure how to address it other than to raise awareness, but that has its own potential to backfire unpredictably.

It takes leadership of a kind we don't have any more. The electoral process has been hacked and it's not really fixable without some larger dislocations happening first.

Well, one of the issues is that it'd probably take bipartisan effort to fix the cost problem in transit, but one party wants to "fix the problem" by just cutting it entirely.