I don’t think that it’s going to work. I assume that the people who most aren’t happy are moderate Republicans who can’t stand Trump and company:
Disgruntled Republicans sick of being bullied by Donald Trump and Democrat centrists imperiled by the Left are secretly having conversations about forming a third party in American politics, The Swamp can exclusively reveal.
But they aren’t gonna be enough votes alone. The people they’d best get along with are probably moderate Democrats, but the Democrats just ran Harris, who is also pretty moderate, so I doubt that moderate Democrats are especially upset at the moment. I think that they’d have a tough time attracting a bunch of moderate Democrats.
If you had just had an election between, I don’t know, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, then maybe you could try to run off with the Democratic center.
The second problem is that the US electoral system always stabilizes around two big-tent parties. It can be disrupted temporarily, but you’re gonna eventually get two parties. If one or both of the Big Two parties splinter, they will just reform into a new two parties in a few years. So even if you get people who are unhappy with the status quo, once things stop shifting around, you’re gonna have two big-tent parties again.
It’s not clear to me that introducing a new party solves problems here. Like, you want a different coalition, you can do that within the parties. You’re gonna have to make concessions and sell people on it, but long run, you’d have to do that with a new party too.
EDIT: I guess technically they could get a few Greens, but the American Greens are more of a left-wing protest party than specifically being anti-carbon or whatever, the way the German Greens might be. That’s probably not gonna have much overlap with moderate Republicans. And there’s the Libertarian Party, which might like more relaxed borders and lower barriers to trade, but LPers probably aren’t going to generally be really enthusiastic about a muscular foreign policy, which I bet the unhappy people want.
EDIT2: My guess is a more-likely outcome, if the GOP stays Trumpy post-Trump, is that a bunch of Reagan Republican types give up on Trump, just join the Democratic Party and get some policy concessions out of the Democrats.
I don’t think that it’s going to work. I assume that the people who most aren’t happy are moderate Republicans who can’t stand Trump and company:
But they aren’t gonna be enough votes alone. The people they’d best get along with are probably moderate Democrats, but the Democrats just ran Harris, who is also pretty moderate, so I doubt that moderate Democrats are especially upset at the moment. I think that they’d have a tough time attracting a bunch of moderate Democrats.
If you had just had an election between, I don’t know, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, then maybe you could try to run off with the Democratic center.
The second problem is that the US electoral system always stabilizes around two big-tent parties. It can be disrupted temporarily, but you’re gonna eventually get two parties. If one or both of the Big Two parties splinter, they will just reform into a new two parties in a few years. So even if you get people who are unhappy with the status quo, once things stop shifting around, you’re gonna have two big-tent parties again.
It’s not clear to me that introducing a new party solves problems here. Like, you want a different coalition, you can do that within the parties. You’re gonna have to make concessions and sell people on it, but long run, you’d have to do that with a new party too.
EDIT: I guess technically they could get a few Greens, but the American Greens are more of a left-wing protest party than specifically being anti-carbon or whatever, the way the German Greens might be. That’s probably not gonna have much overlap with moderate Republicans. And there’s the Libertarian Party, which might like more relaxed borders and lower barriers to trade, but LPers probably aren’t going to generally be really enthusiastic about a muscular foreign policy, which I bet the unhappy people want.
EDIT2: My guess is a more-likely outcome, if the GOP stays Trumpy post-Trump, is that a bunch of Reagan Republican types give up on Trump, just join the Democratic Party and get some policy concessions out of the Democrats.