Factually, that’s what he did during his time in office as well. I’m not sure what they thought had changed.
This is what they actually learned.
- 1968, 1980, 1984: They learned that turning off moderate voters by putting too progressive of a candidate can lose you an election hard (McGovern, Carter, Mondale).
- 1992: They learned that a strong third party candidate can cannibalise voters from a weak or ineffectual major party, much like Perot took votes from the Republican Party when Bush-41 went back on his ‘no new taxes’ pledge.
- 2000: They learned that trying to placate moderates by picking a more moderate candidate costs them the election as surely as placating progressives with an ultra-progressive candidate does, just by thinner margins.
- 2008: They learned that hate for Republicans is far more effective of a strategy than building coalitions…
- 2010: …but they learned that Progressives turn into fair-weather friends when they don’t get exactly what they want.
- 2012: But that Republican hate is still useful…
- 2014: …and our fair-weather friends are still useful to Team Red.
- 2016: We relearned the lesson we should have learned in 2000 by placating moderates and running a dynasty.
- 2020: But that Republican hate is still useful!
We barely averted Biden as the Moderate Placator in 2024, running on the fear and hate of the Republican Party to make an otherwise moderate in Kamala Harris our standard-bearer, but if she keeps up with the talks about price controls, we MIGHT just find out if the lessons of 1968, 1980, and 1984 still apply.
And Jackie’s Fridge is right. In an election split 51 (Left) and 49 (Right), if you can convince 3 Left-Leaning voters to vote Third Party, you have convinced them to throw away their votes and assure all 51 voters on the Left get what they DON’T want while the Conservatives win on a 49/48/3 split. Unless and until you use a voting system that allows those 3 votes to NOT give the win to the 48 voters, voting third party is just helping the major party most opposed to your platform win. And if you need any evidence of how this screws up Leftists, look no further than our northern neighbour, Canada, specifically Ontario, where vote-splitting between the two major Left-Wing parties (Liberal, New Democratic Party) lets the Conservative party run the show.
