Abigail Disney, the granddaughter to Roy O. Disney, who cofounded The Walt Disney Company, told CNBC on Thursday that she plans to withhold donations to the party she has funded for years until Biden drops out. The president has said he has no plans to withdraw from the race, despite calls for him to do so.
“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket. This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high,” Abigail Disney said in a lengthy statement to CNBC. “If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”
I didn’t realize I thought democracy was a bad system.
You think the US’s implementation of democracy that forces you to pick the least bad between two candidates you don’t like is
?
And that’s without getting started on the electoral college.
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.
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.
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.
You know there are other forms of democracy right? This isn’t the only way to select an executive, and many of those systems aren’t about choosing the least bad option.
What system would present more than two choices when two candidates hold near-majority support?
Parliamentary systems. Ranked choice or approval voting. These two candidates don’t actually hold majority support, they’re just the end result of filtering and internal politics in a FPTP system that needs to have two parties.
So then I don’t get a choice as to who becomes the executive at all. Wonderful.
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.
Ranked choice’s end results are not the issue. It solves the problem because it allows multiple similar candidates to compete, which means the left wouldn’t have needed to winnow down to a single candidate. If Biden becomes incapable that’s fine, people have another candidate already available who wasn’t spoiling him by existing. And if we don’t all agree that Biden is incapable? Biden-stans can vote him first and the other candidate second, and vice versa, and one of them will garner the full vote of the left.
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.