Majority of Americans think there should be a third party

[eric82oslo]

To be honest, I don't think either variety can work in America. Although I think third parties are not totally doomed by the election system - I can count a few handful that have popped up over the years, centrism is not viable in a country where less and less people are truly "centrist". People may think politicians are too polarised, but they are wrong. The electorate is polarised. The parties are streamlining because that is the pressure from voters.

Not really. Kansas proves your point moot. So does New Mexico for instance. And many others. Loads of heavily Democratic states have become essentially toss-up states as of late; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Michigan, even sometimes Illinois (this year at least). Likewise, several heavily Republican states have become toss-ups as of late; Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

Surely some states are getting more polarized (think Hawaii, Vermont, Maryland, California, Wyoming and West Virginia), while many other states are becoming more toss-ups.



And the majority of voters are becoming more independent, not less!

[eric82oslo]

OK, I'll accept Kansas because Orman is promising the same kind of bland centrism that is popular with these things (Kansas is in a funny place right now though, and hardly representative of the rest of America).

As for the rest - all those states you mentioned becoming toss-ups prove my point. They aren't becoming toss-ups because half of fervent GOP's woke up one day and thought "huh, maybe I should vote for Obama". It's because of demographic changes. American politics is less and less about convincing people you are right, and more about catering to those who know you're right.

Yeah, but we can still change that narrative. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both near perfect examples of that, and John McCain and Mitt Romney aren't way too lousy they either, although they come a far shot away from the two really big guns. If there's something Barack and Hillary have had on their minds for the past decade or so it's certainly to make the US less partisan and more harmonic. Thanks to jerkasses like Rupert Murdoch and all his afilliates, their strategy hasn't yet worked of course. And even bigger obstacle than Rupert Shothead Murdoch is the insanely conservative Supreme Court of course. My point is basically this: Please blame the increasing partisanship of where it belongs: the constitution, the absolutely mind-blowingly insane composition of the Supreme Court (even countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria would never even consider appointing such dumb, right-wing jokes of candidates), gerrymandering, way too many billionaire/big business money in politics, religion in America (the US is in fact almost as darn and dangerously religious as the vast majority of muslim countries in this world), the ridiculous constitutional right to bear arms, the almost equally (almost-constitutional right) to assassine a fellow citizen deemed guilty by someone (most of the time you don't even need the evidence of DNA, just share finger-pointing). I mean, if you try to tell me the US is not a crazy society then you're definitely off on a very wrong mission.