Comment by skissane
12 days ago
The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
People vote for people they don't agree with.
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)
Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...
Please don’t encourage people to waste their vote.
Encourage people to vote for the candidate they dislike the least, then try to work out ways to hold government accountable.
If you’re in Australia, at least listen to what people like Tony Abbott, the IPA, and Pauline Hanson are actually saying these days.
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That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
And minor parties receive funding from the Australian Electoral Commission if they receive over certain percentage of votes.
It was 5% last time I cared to be informed by may be different now, and they would receive $x for each vote, or what ever it is now.
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Also, there is nothing centre-right about Susan Ley.
She is the leftest left leaning leader of the Liberal party I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to live through.
She was absolutely on board with this recent Hitlerian “anti-hate” legislation that was rammed through with no public consultation.
Okay, that’s a bit uncharitable. We had 48 hours.
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Third parties exist. Folks act like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan don't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidentia...
18.9% as recently as 1992. I predict we will have a similar viable third party showing sometime in the next few elections due to the radical shift in the party system that AI is causing as we speak. I really hope Yang Gang can rebuild itself and try again, maybe without #MATH.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Minnesota_gubernatorial_e...
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" - George Bernard Shaw
In the US, there are tremendous structural barriers for third parties. They exist, it is just extremely difficult for them.
The centralization of power of each of the two dominant parties nationally at the expense of a more decentralized parties with strong state variability as in the past, makes it even more difficult for third parties to gain traction against all that coordination.
Perot had the best chance, but managed to blow it by bowing out and then back in.
I do think you are right, that times of great dissatisfaction are rare openings for third party candidates, if someone special enough appears. 2020 would have been a great election for that - but an inspiring third party candidate can't be manufactured on demand.
People have a choice between being rational and optimizing the alignment between the outcome and their preferences, or being irrational and doing something else, like not voting, spoiling their ballot, voting for a probabilistically infeasible candidate, voting "on principle", "sending a message", etc.
Combined with the quirk in Australia’s preferential voting system that enable a government to form despite 65% of voters having voted 1 for something else.
As a result, Australia tends to end up with governments formed by the runner up, because no one party actually ‘won’ as such.
I can think of an exaggerated scenario though in which that sounds reasonable depending on the goal:
say preferences are 1 (low) to 5 (high).
suppose 65% of the population ranked candidate A at 5 and B at 4, and the other 35% ranked A at 1 and B at 5. the majority doesn't get their favorite choice, but they do get an outcome they're happy with, and the minority doesn't have a horrible outcome. Exaggerated, but I don't think situations like this are unrealistic.
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I don’t recall the circumstances under which Morrison ended up Prime Minister.
Like most Australians, I’m in denial any of that episode ever happened.
But, using the current circumstances as an example, Australia has a voting system that enables a party to form government even though 65% of voting Australia’s didn’t vote for that party as their first preference.
If the other party and some of the smaller parties could have got their shit together Australia could have a slightly different flavour of complete fucking disaster of a Government, rather than whatever the fuck Anthony Albanese thinks he’s trying to be.
Then there’s Susan Ley. The least preferred leader of the two major parties in a generation.
Susan Ley is Anthony Albanese in a skirt.
I would have preferred Potato Head, to be honest.
Hmm. Actually, I think the suggestion of a law puts this whole thing on bad footing where we need to draw an otherwise unnecessary line (to denote where this type of rhetoric should be legal). I suspect XorNot just put the line there because the idea that true statements should be illegal just seems silly.
Really it just ought to be a thing that we identify as a thought-terminating cliche. No laws needed, let’s just not fall for a lazy trick. Whether or not it is true that lots of people agreed, that isn’t a good argument that they are right.
The case of Nixon really brings that out. The “Silent Majority” was used to refer to people who didn’t protest the Vietnam War. Of course, in retrospect the Vietnam War was pretty bad. Arguing that it was secretly popular should have not been accepted as a substitute for an argument that it was good.