Seems odd that if you win by 0.001% that’s treated the same as if you win by 50%. “You barely won, here’s the same mandate as someone who won soundly”
Probably a bad idea, but there’s an idea in there that isn’t dumb.
Only issue I see is it would skew the priorities. A potential strategy I see would be to lie as much as possible to secure a lengthy first term, and just don’t try for re-election.
The prospect of regular re-election is one of the systems that pushes our leaders towards actually trying. Once they no longer have to worry about it, they become much more powerful.
That’s a good point. Usually you find out how someone actually rules once they’re in power and it’s often quite different than they campaigned.
Can you provide examples of this being “quite often?”
Most politicians are not lying to constituents when they run, and most politicians are heavily supported by constituents during their time in office.
“Politicians are all liars” is one of those things that’s said a lot but not really borne out by data
If you want to see examples of the policies that politicians campaign on but then drop once they’re in power, just take a look at what legislation ends up getting put on the table when there’s absolutely no chance of it passing.
The Democrats had control of both houses of Congress in the us, but it wasn’t until the Republicans ended up with Congress that they decided to put Federal wealth taxes on the table. Now I’m not saying that I agree with Federal wealth taxes, but that’s obviously a thing that they are holding over people’s heads to get them to vote for them.
The Republicans on the other hand talk a really good game on fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets when the Democrats are in power, but when they controlled the executive the Congress and the Senate they ended up passing budgets with some of the largest deficits in history. If you go back in history, for the past 40 years that’s been the case with conservatives. They’ll magically put things on the table to balance the budget when the other party has control of the government and they know there’s no chance of it passing.
In the past 20 years, the Democrats had achieved a supermajority in Congress and the senate, they could have passed any piece of legislation they wanted. They could have passed Federal legislation forcing the states to keep gay marriage and abortion legal. They didn’t do that. So when the flimsy court case gets overturned, there’s much caterwalling over activist judges.
Of course everyone knows about obama, who rose to power in large part because of the anti-war faction of the left and center, but it was actually his Republican successor that finally started the ball rolling on getting America out of Afghanistan. He also talk about shutting down Guantanamo bay, and never did. The Obama administration in general was a perfect example of an administration that campaigns one way and rules other.
Up in canada, prime minister today Justin Trudeau ran on a number of different promises including Senate reform, and proportional representation. Both of those promises were dropped immediately once he got into power. Another quite famous promise was that he was going to bring clean water to all the native reserves that had been underwater advisories in some cases for decades. Despite spending more debt than every single prime minister before him combined, there are still lots of native reserves without clean water.
The previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, was a member of the Conservative party of Canada and obviously ran on fiscal responsibility. It was only in his very last year in charge of the country that he finally balanced the budget. He had been handed a balanced budget by the previous administration, the Federal liberals.
So in general, you can’t actually trust politicians to rule the way that they say they’re going to. You have to wait until a little while after they get into power to see how they’re actually going to rule. You can say that it’s just cuz they’re liars, but in reality a lot of the times answers seem a lot easier when you’re not actually having to make the decisions. I know myself, I’ve been put into positions of power and the people below me thought that I had a lot more latitude than I actually did. They’d say things like “you can’t let them do that!” Not realizing that having a little bit of power did not mean that I could boss everyone around.
Now I’ve talked about a bunch of things that people kind of wanted that went differently, but sometimes while running someone promises to do something really stupid and then they don’t do it, and that’s something else too. Donald Trump repeatedly promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail, and as far as we can tell he didn’t even try. Thank goodness.
The fundamental flaw in your reasoning is assuming that Democrats are a unified bloc. The Democrat party is a coalition of various ideologies, and their representatives are therefore representative of a wide array of ideologies. You’ll note that those individual representatives absolutely vote how their constituents want them to.
Obama both tried to end Guantanamo and both of the wars. He was stopped by Congress. He tried to close Gitmo on literally his second day in office. He ended the war in Iraq and began the pullout of Afghanistan - but the country frankly was not ready for a pullout by the time of the Biden Admin, as history shows. Worth noting Biden was compelled by precedent and Afghani leaders to follow Trump’s abortive pullout strategy.
Gitmo: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo
Trump did try to put Clinton in jail : https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/us/politics/fbi-clinton-foundation.html
I’m failing to see how you are showing any realistic examples of widespread lying.
Edit: for the record, and by way of demonstration of the “loose coalition,” I would not support my Dem representative pushing a wealth tax. Wealth taxes don’t work and are inefficient at best. I am a lifelong democrat, union activist, and climate lobbyist. We don’t all agree on the same things. We aren’t Republicans.
Also I think you’re mixing up Republicans being dumb enough to think that cutting taxes reduces deficits with them being smart enough to lie about that.
Disenfranchisement with the system increases the less people actually pay attention to the system, both in how it functions and what it actually does.
The problem there is with the people not paying attention. Democracy requires participation or it spirals into tyranny.
I like this question, although I don’t think it could work. Someone who campaigns really well, does not necessarily mean they will fulfill their office well. It also penalizes when there are two good candidates running against each other.
I could see it being more viable if the upper term limit is still along the lines of what we have today. Perhaps a presidential candidate winning an election by landslide could get a maximum term of 8 years, whereas someone just barely winning would have a shortened term of 1-2 years. I would definitely still be concerned about the negative ramifications of potentially more and more dirty campaigning to try and capture the highest portion of votes that others have mentioned.
I mean, that’s to a minor extent how parliamentary systems work. There’s a limit on how long you can go without an election, sure, but the government can call one basically whenever they want, which means if they have a stronger mandate they’ll probably try to stretch it out whereas if they barely have a government yet the people support them they may try another election to increase their standing, and if you have a flimsier support you may end up being vote-of-no-confidence-ed sooner
Fixed-length terms prevents the incumbent from having any excuse to try to extend their term.
hah very good point.
No, it’d just be giving more incentives for politicians to lie, cheat and steal. If getting a full 100% of the votes means you get to reign for life like a monarch, then the amount of misinformation, buoyed by an industry made infamous by Cambridge Analytica, and aided by PR, Ad agencies, and Facebook, would explode. If that’s not enough, politicians can just outright cheat and steal, prevent supporters of their opponent from voting, pervert the existing laws to one’s ends, or downright steal the ballot boxes (and tamper with the votes or how they are counted).
It’d magnify the worst of current politics by giving politicians a reward for playing dirty.
would you want Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in office for that long?
Compared to a lot of what I’ve been seeing, Camacho isn’t looking half bad right now.
at this point, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that Idiocracy has become canon.
2036 Presidential Election: You voting for Amazon or Meta?
Biggest problem with this is election cycles.
It’s no easy thing to facilitate and organise every single person in your country to put in the effort to vote, manage the logistics of vote transportation and administration tasks like rezoning districts to match population density etc.
Even though we see it as a thing which takes a few months, the gears never stop turning, and if you want to wedge a crowbar between those gears, you might want to start preparing for a civil war.
This is the exact opposite concept of a representative democracy. What we should be asking is that our representatives should be voting based upon their margin of victory. For example, if you win by one vote you need to REPRESENT your constituents 50/50.
One of the major problems with politics is that those elected think they should vote based solely on their own opinion, which is not representative.
I too doubt it could work but man it would be great if it was margin of victory rounded up to the nearest 10 percent with one year for each 10 percent maximum 5 years. Oh and no re-elections one term based on your first result then out. To get the max you would ned over 70% of the vote. Also all unopposed elections are one year terms.
Short sightedness in politics is already painful for all of us.
Nobody’s tackling climate change, nobody’s building anything fairer for younger generations, especially in places without enough housing (and what there is owned by older generations).
I won’t list all the problems this would make worse, but for example, do you really want a government with only 6 months to do 2-3 extreme populist things, hoping to dredge up enough support to get a larger mandate next time?
If we didn’t live in a universe of an obviously (over)reactionary electorate this might be the ideal.
The problem is consensus building takes time, as long as political wins are narrow you’re reinforcing the outage cycle.
