Actually most people are not aware. So its better to spell it out.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

Because apparently throwing your vote away will somehow convince politicians to move left or something, despite all the evidence that it won’t.

FPTP is not real democracy for this reason.

Math doesn’t decide what people vote, they are free to vote anything they want. Parties don’t automatically side with each others because another is most likely to win. This video is rooted in the mindset that politics and elections are a horse race between left and right.

What’s preventing third parties from winning it’s not math but the propaganda and the power of the red and blue party. The ruling parties didn’t become this powerful mathematically. Over decades and centuries the ruling class paved their way and ensured their power with violence and repression.

In Australia government funding is distributed to political parties based on the number of first preference votes they get as well so even if your first choice doesn’t get in, you still helped them by putting them first.

I could get elected to senate probably, if I was willing to spend fifteen years doing local and state office first. Ain’t nobody got that kind of time I got hospital bills

If it’s easier to reason with third party voters than trump voters, it seems like the logical thing to do.

Note: Linkerbean is a republican troll here just to dissuade left-leaning folk from voting dem.

I said so to them a while back and their reply, since deleted, was “Cope.”

Downvote and move on, but you’ll get only nonsense if you engage.

Yeah, I’ve recently talked with my therapist about this choice between very slow, very hard work and sitting on my butt dreaming. And about the idea that it’s better to avoid action than to act, if I’m not sure I’ll act right. And how it apparently came to me in my teens, when I’ve been doing martial arts for some time, girls would smile at me often, and in general I thought I might be too stupid and happy and there should be something smarter. That ‘smarter’ was, of course, just another teenage idea of being wise and not like everyone else. Fucked up my life for a decade.

By the way, people who’d be removed and theoretical and talk about some imagined third movement created via some magic other than voting - would be called ‘idiots’ in ancient Athens. Because they are on the side of an idea, not real politics. Then it became a rude word.

Any such decision to try and find a smart shortcut, or that it’s better to wait and see how it goes instead of sweating, - are all wrong and are exactly what propaganda works for. Being honest is smarter than being dishonest. And voting for the party most fitting your ideals is smarter than for the lesser evil.

Voting for a third party, like trying to walk through a third door, is an indication of intent. Going through the door would be getting them elected to office.

And yes, supporting a party would be endorsing whatever evil policies the party supports—but voting isn’t an act of endorsement. Nobody knows how you vote; it has no meaning as a personal statement. Its only meaning is in the differential effects of the policies of the two candidates your vote decides between, in the most likely scenario in which it is the deciding vote.

You absolutely should support and endorse a party you believe in, but don’t mistake voting in a presidential election for either of those things.

I don’t know what the right time is, but it’s definitely not presidential elections.

The way to push them left is to actually push them left—protesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.

But voting in a presidential election doesn’t push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary one—there’s no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians responding by signaling their intentions with their policies. This leaves the media itself in full control of the political process by interpreting for each party what the other “means”, whereas votes and bills are actually devoid of meaning beyond their real effects.

Oh it’s that easy eh?

That takes money, lots of it and the 2 main parties have huge corporate donors who will never give money to an environmental party

Many countries with FPTP have multi-party systems, including Canada and the UK.

Yeah, fascist government are known for doing some voting reforms after all