… what an awful opening to a book without the annotation (which makes it a masterpiece). I feel less bad about my own writing now.

No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.

Good to see you still can’t read worth a damn.

I see you’re hip to the new form of left praxis on Lemmy.

Polls taken before Thursday all largely deliver the same answer: any Biden alternative — Vice President Kamala Harris, Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — performed about the same, or worse, than Biden against Trump when voters were asked how they’d vote in head-to-head matchups.

In averages of national polls fielded between February 2023 and January of this year, for example, Harris underperformed Biden by about 2.3 percentage points, per tracking by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.

Buttigieg, Newsom, and Sanders did worse than Biden against Trump (Newsom, for example, trailed Biden’s margin against Trump in every poll in which he was included, by about 3 percentage points on average). Whitmer did roughly the same as Biden, but that’s also based on only two polls.

Is this the part where I post polls and you say “Well, we can’t TELL because if things were different the POLLS would be different too”?

What the fuck

Again, I appreciate the advantages of ranked choice and support the implementation of ranked choice as a massive improvement over FPTP - but it’s not an answer to the question of “What system offers more than two choices, practically speaking, when two candidates have near-majority support”, which is the question under discussion.

Parliamentary systems.

So then I don’t get a choice as to who becomes the executive at all. Wonderful.

Ranked choice or approval voting.

Ranked choice still results in one of two candidates if those two candidates have near-majority support. They simply allow voters to pick one of those two candidates whilst expressing support for less-popular candidates. It creates MORE scenarios in which there are more than two candidates with a chance to win, but it neither eliminates the existing problem nor prevents it in all cases.

Ranked choice is better than FPTP. But it’s not a silver bullet to the issue being discussed.

What system would present more than two choices when two candidates hold near-majority support?

Given that the overarching question here is “is biden really the best candidate?”,

Yes, he is the best candidate currently running.

and that ranked choice voting would immediately fix that issue

No, ranked choice would give us an option to express a stronger preference for other candidates. It would not fix the fact that Biden and Trump hold near-majority support in this election cycle and one of them will be the winner of the election, making every voter with any sense pick one of them to support over the other.

while retaining democracy, yes i feel fairly confident that the current situation is one brought on by an imperfect implementation of democracy.

Okay, cool, if ranked choice voting was implemented, who would have the support of the electorate who isn’t Biden or Trump?

If you ignore the fact that trump wouldn’t be running if he hadn’t lost the popular vote in 2016 and still won, sure.

How is that relevant to my choices being narrowed down to Trump and Biden by the opinions of the electorate?

This started as you deriding the US’s system as an oligarchy, but now when pressed it’s your ideal democracy? What are you doing, friend? Are you okay?

Sorry that the idea that the candidates with near-majority support being the only choices is a symptom of democracy is so foreign to you, and the idea that an ultrawealthy megadonor attempting to change one of the candidates without democratic support being a symptom of oligarchy is, likewise, apparently incomprehensible to your worldview.

Or in other words, the system you’re in is flawed but you’re working within the constraints of those flaws to get the best outcome you can find.

Making the best of a bad system

Except that the issue you’re discussing, the choice being narrowed between Biden and Trump in this election, is not related to the anti-democratic flaws of that system.

However it’s clear from your repeated and deliberate attempts to reframe criticism of that system as an attack on the very concept of democracy itself that you aren’t arguing in good faith here.

Sorry that you find democracy such an offensive concept.

You think the US’s implementation of democracy that forces you to pick the least bad between two candidates you don’t like is

Democracy, yes. It will always be the ‘least bad’ choice in a democracy, unless you have some miracle roll of the dice where a candidate 100% agrees with you, or a cultlike devotion to them.

A good system

What parts of the system that make it bad are anti-democratic elements - which are not particularly relevant in whether my choice should be Biden or Trump.

The only implementation of a democracy

This may come as a shock, but if the majority of people in any democratic system prefer candidates that I think are shit, those are what my effective choices are going to be narrowed down to. That’s kind of the point of a democracy.

That’s literally “making the best of a bad system”

I didn’t realize I thought democracy was a bad system.

No, I think Biden is the candidate who has the widest support in the electorate, which is why he’s worth rallying behind to stop Trump.

Isn’t the push behind Biden “making the best of a bad system”?

Unless the ‘bad system’ is the opinions of the US electorate, no.

So I’m not sure what point you’re making?

That the influence of the ultra-wealthy on elections is derided by some until an ultra-wealthy donor is found who agrees with them.

“Oligarchy bad, until they agree with me”

Alexander the Adequate

Good on China. Regardless of our political leanings, I think we can all agree that renewable energy development is a positive thing.