I wonder if the real lesson is that the sense of urgency created by “snap” elections works out better than our system which involves politicians endlessly being in campaign mode.
Voter fatigue is very real, and often I would say on purpose. As in it behooves politicians to have a constant unending spiel.
At the same time, the turnout for the UK election was the second lowest its been since 1885, at 60%.
2001 was the lowest at 59%.
tldr; Vox talks about multi-party systems where coalitions of many groups (not just two) can join together to defeat anti-democratic candidates – but then thrusts the U.S. in the mix as if it is comparable, and it is not. It is just another lazy commiseration, “Woe is us! Woe is us! Throw Joe Biden under the bus! We don’t like Trump! We say it loud, – but another change is not allowed! We’ll only fight with our own kind. So right moves forth. And left? Behind.”
chunks FTA:
In particular, the winning parties in both the UK and France won by realizing that the nature of their systems required that they sacrifice some specific candidates in order to defeat the right.
Unlike France and Britain, the United States only has two viable choices on offer: the center-left Democrats and the radical right Republicans.
Biden can’t count on help from other parties to boost him the way it helped Labour or the NFP; polling suggests he actually does slightly worse when third parties are on the ballot.
In their systems, the French and the British had a strategy for addressing their problems: sacrificing marginal legislative candidates in service of the greater good of defeating the right. But in the American system, sacrificing marginal candidates won’t be enough to overcome the effects of general public discontent and anti-incumbent sentiment.
Here, the ticket is defined by the president — a man increasingly seen as too old for the public to trust in addressing their concerns. Defeating the right might very well require the center-left in America to make a more radical kind of political sacrifice: a change at the very top of the ticket.
FU, Vox! The comparison is invalid. This COULD have been an article on why the U.S. needs to change its voting system, but instead it was just another take-down of Biden. removed about Biden and wringing your hands about Trump is EASY. Worse, it is stupid and LAZY. We already know the anti-Biden arguments. We need an alternate playbook. Something like a 2025 plan for the left where as soon as a Congress can do it, they pass new laws invalidating the idea of ‘Presidential Immunity’, taking back rights that the Courts have revoked, and fixing what has been broken by years of deregulation and underfunding (fund the IRS, fund health/food/safety inspectors, and pay them through tax rates of America’s Golden Age of the 50s/60s).
Your final paragraph is kind of the central point they’re making, though. There seems to be a public mood of antipathy towards incumbent administration, which is bad news for Biden and the Democrats. People are fed up of the way things are and want a change, and Biden is deeply unpopular.
In order to convincingly beat Trump they need to do something bold: either offer a fresher, younger candidate or make big, daring bi-partisan policy plays on healthcare, education, more affordable housing, etc.
If they do nothing but stick to the old “vote for Biden and ‘business as usual’ because it’s the only way to beat fascism”, it looks like it may not be enough.
make big, daring bi-partisan policy plays on healthcare, education, more affordable housing, etc.
As the head of the executive branch, the President is over the DEA and the Department of Education.
Given the new “absolute immunity for official acts” SCOTUS has now ordained him with, Biden should absolutely cancel all federal student debt and move marijuana to Schedule V. Do this a month before the election and he’d coast.
I agree with you on most points except your first: the central point Vox made was to dump Biden as if that was the only option. I WISH Vox suggested a daring change – or ANY other option. Personally, I don’t think that simply replacing Biden would seal the deal.
I do absolutely agree that the U.S. public seems to blame Biden for inflation and credits Trump with … what? wanting retribution? As if being a wind bag means a person is a strong leader? At the least, too many potential voters seem to have forgotten that a consensus of countries ousted their monarchs/dictators in favor of either democracy or communism. Populations everywhere seem to agree that strong man leaders are both bad for the people and painfully hard to remove. Further, lots of U.S. citizens lost relatives fighting Nazis, so why are they trying to give Nazis power now? We fought that war. We paid in lives to stop that. It dishonors the dead to just give in to it now.
It’s so funny how people will always talk about how they wish they could’ve gone back in time and killed some kind of hard right douche bag, but when it’s time to not vote them in everyone is suddenly on the fence.
There was so much hand wringing on this platform about it being a bad idea to call the snap election.
I mean it had all the hallmarks of the Brexit vote. There was reason for concern.
Just because it worked out in the end didn’t mean it was a good idea to try.
Had he waited, it would 1) softened the issue of the rise of the far right in voters minds, and 2) given the right time to organize and get into a position to do better.
I think it is and was the smart strategic move.
I really feel this article underrates the Congressional races happening at the same time and more of a comparison to the British and French elections. What I take from this is that the strategies available to the Democrats are constrained by the two party system, and almost completely hamstrung in the presidential election with a candidate who is incumbent. But it would be more interesting to compare what’s happening among the legislature where there are (or were before primaries) more candidates and more likelihood of creative alliances.
The big flaw of this article is that it compares legislative elections to presidential elections In France too, presidential elections end up in a duel between far right and an unpopular and disconnected candidate
