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To: discostu
It still takes 50%+1 vote to win an election in a single member district.

What that means is you MUST ally with other groups to get your candidate into office.

To eliminate "that problem" you need to abolish single member districts and set up the US as a single electoral district where all the Congresscritters are elected in a big ol' lump.

Then you'd get your third parties and everybody would have to campaign nationwide to get enough votes ~~~~~~~~~~~ and you'd have to be REALLY REALLY RICH to even think of running for office.

You think campaign ads are bad now, wait until you have 600 politicians running those ads in every city in the country ~ ~

74 posted on 05/01/2012 9:04:57 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah

But of course that district has been constructed to give 1 party a distinct advantage. It’s one of the reasons congressional approval is in the single digits on a general poll but 95% of them are going to be re-elected in November. If there aren’t parties constructing districts that problem goes away, you can still have districts without gerrymandering, and the districts become actually useful because the people in them are no longer pre-selected to keep one party in power.

Guys run for primaries now nationally without having to be really really rich. That’s what campaign donations are for. The only real difference in my system is that primaries reduce the field (probably to 5 for president, fewer for lower offices) instead of creating party nominees.

Campaign ads wouldn’t change at all. Primaries would be wide open like they are now, general elections a reduced field. Except of course you no longer have deep pocketed parties buying ads, because their alliances are now informal they’d have to donate to the campaign just like everybody else.


75 posted on 05/01/2012 9:14:14 AM PDT by discostu (I did it 35 minutes ago)
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