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A comment on Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Parties. Parent comment

Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by newman314 on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @02:59PM (#4750360)
Problem is that with first past the post voting, you end up giving your vote to the 2nd of the two primary parties.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

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Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by tokenadult on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @04:24PM (#4750848)
Problem is that with first past the post voting, you end up giving your vote to the 2nd of the two primary parties.

This is not an invariant property of the United States electoral system. Minnesota

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Ventura

and Maine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_King

have both elected governors not endorsed by either of the two largest political parties in recent years, and there are members of the United States Senate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_S...

who were elected in statewide elections without major party endorsement.

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Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by aswanson on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @11:24PM (#4752098)
Those states probably have a much higher educational attainment level, civic engagement/consciousness and intelligence level than the rest of the United States.
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Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by newman314 on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @03:41PM (#4755093)
They did not have to contend with having to vie for the vote of 300+ million people.

Also, elections for governor do not have to account for the Electoral College which IMO is an anarchic holdover from a time when communication was much harder.

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Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by chimeracoder on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @07:58PM (#4751687)
Maine is one of the few states where that's viable - as Nate Silver notes[1], it's probably the most independent-leaning state in the nation, as evidenced by its support for Ross Perot in the 90s. Rhode Island would be another, and I'd peg Colorado as a distant third.

Minnesota is an outlier in my mind - it's more attributable to the fact that the Republican candidate (Norm Coleman) was a terrible candidate (he only won his Senate seat because his opponent died right before the election[2]), and the race was irregular in other ways too. It happened once, but I wouldn't bet on it happening again there anytime soon, unless things change.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/in-maine...

[2] To Coleman's credit, John Ashcroft ran against a dead man and lost, so I guess Coleman had something going for him.

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Re:Sergey Brin Calls On Politicians To Abandon Political Par... by derleth on Wednesday November 07, 2012 @04:16AM (#4752798)
> John Ashcroft ran against a dead man and lost

He lost to the dead man's wife, who the voters knew would take that seat even if the ballots couldn't be reprinted in time.

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