Maybe. It has better access to information. Doesn't mean it uses it more than it has in the past. A citizen may have declined to walk to campaign headquarters buildings 100 years ago, he may have preferred to just read the newspaper. Similarly they may decline to search for candidates on the 'net. It's surprising for example how many hard-core political junkies on various forums haven't even bothered to go to each major party candidate's website and look through the platforms.
There are always people that don't care. This does not change the fact that as of today the available access as a whole means that we are more informed than ever.
Hardcore supporters may tend to limit their information, preferring to only get their news from their chosen liberal/conservative media machine. They may avoid any objective news or simply refuse to seek it out because they see it as subjective and biased.
Always has been this way, there will always be zealots. This does not contradict that they have more information.
This does not mean all of the information is perfect, it does not mean that the entire electorate approach anything with an open mind. There will always be idiots in the world.
Yes, but in order for that position to be known it has to be seen by the electorate. Have you gone to each third-party website?
Me? Over the past few election cycles, absolutely. Then again I do spend quite a bit of time analyzing fringe politics, and have done so for some time. My conclusion that these movements are made up mostly by crappy idealogues with followers that are either willfully blind to reality or who are casting a vote into the darkness as some sort of protest isn't a conclusion I've reached via simple prejudice.
I've done the homework, and once the third party scene starts to fully form in the next few months there will likely be posts by me pointing all of this out with some detail.
The only third party movement that is rational is one that seeks to build a small following about a narrow range of issues and seeking to exchange their votes for influence in a larger party's platform. For a third party to be successful it has to take most of the support away from a larger party, and at that point it is no longer a third party. The Whig party becomes the Republican party, and life moves on. Unless it unseats one of the big two, any third party movement has a lifespan of maybe two electorial cycles at the most. Usually it follows a somewhat strong intitial showing with a disappointing collapse.
Candidates in each major party's primary elections debate silly fools in the early stages of that process.
Nope. Those candidates are likewise screened. There are a bunch of candidates that filed with the FEC as candidates within both the Democratic and Republican parties that are not invited to debates because they are not viable candidates.
I'm not a supporter of that myth, nor do I think third-parties would win a Presidential election. It would be amazing if they even got a single Electoral Vote (that wasn't an unfaithful elector). But they have won local congressional elections in the past. Some parties are fairly venerable, they've demonstrated continued support, and deserve to have a greater profile than literally 0% of major media coverage. And deserve to be on each state's ballot in November, not just 30 or 40.
No they don't. They only deserve to be on the ballot if they can demonstrate support. They only deserve media coverage if someone cares. Being different in no way makes a person smart or noble. Local support should equal local coverage, and it generally does. Just because some candidate wins a seat in congress does not make his party nationally viable, In some local elections there is for all practical purposes a one party system, so any second party is as likely as the other to win a local office.
I'm no third-party revolutionist, I just think the major media is far too influential to completely ignore them without criticism. And if criticism doesn't work, I'd advocate legislation similar to equal-broadcast laws for the two parties in some areas. (which should be proportional for third-parties or independent candidates).
This criticsm was valid pre-internet, but oddly enough we can point to two third party candidates (Perot in '92 and Anderson in '80) that have fared quite well, mostly because of a major media with far, far more control over how we get information than now.
Post internet we have Ralph Nader getting some crumbs and then disappearing. We have a Libertarian party that has outed itself as being made up of mostly paranoid kooks rather than free market oriented civil liberty advocates. A green party that disappeared after shooting itself in the foot by supporting an anti-corporate relic rather than supporting the by far greenest viable candidate in modern politics.
Think about that for a second. The Green Party, a party whose main issue is the enviroment, did not vote for Al Gore. Mr. "An Inconvenient Truth" himself, the author of
Earth in the Balance, a man clearly dedicated to enviromental issues.
This is madness. Once you toss in that this support resulted in a Bush administration that has been an enviromental nightmare, it becomes arguably the worst act of collective political stupidity in American history. These people somehow convinced themselves that there was no real difference between Al Gore and George Bush as to enviromental issues. No difference between a man that wrote books on the subject and spoke often about same, and a man with major connections in the energy business with a pattern of pro-corporate positions. A truely breathtaking moment of collective willful ignorance.
It was when the core premise that the two major parties are for practical purposes the same should have been buried forever, yet it lives on.
