you’ll have to forgive me, i’m not here to debate people so i don’t link a million things or drop the good ol’ tankie wall of links unless its asked for. my assumption is that if someone wants to learn something they can just look it up themselves.
Perot was not a spoiler, another source for that, people mad at hw bush lying about taxes voted for clinton, the wikipedia article on public opinion about nafta.
now usually I wouldn’t link a wikipedia article but there’s just so fucking much there that i’d rather someone actually read the sources linked in it rather than try to wrangle its’ citations. one thing that isn’t covered in the wikipedia article is that as public opinion changes, polls that ask specifically about nafta get negative results and polls that use more open ended language about “free trade agreements” get more positive results.
of note: the wikpiedia article specifically recognizes the effect perot had on public awareness of nafta, citing two sources that say support rose after his 93 debate with al gore (those sources cite one of the polls that asks about “free trade agreements” and not nafta specifically, natch).
I don’t have the energy to figure out what sources would convince a person that kerry ran to the “left” of gore. i just have to trust that a person would see it and figure it out even though kerry was a piece of crap in his own way. as far as proof that platform was a response to the greens in 2000, there was no major third party turnout in 2004 and the greens positions in 2000 were subsumed into the democrats platform or winnowed away in 2004.
to your claim that third parties can’t force other parties to do anything: you’re right, they can’t. we have the right tacking biden regime because of that. the democrats have decided that it’s a better electoral strategy to run on, and i know i’m sounding like a broken record and its frustrating to always have to respond to these positions, genocide and border detentions rather than literally anything else.
third party votes can’t force the biden regime and the democrats to abandon those positions, but they can show the democrats how much support they could pick up by taking them on.
you said every major candidate runs on platforms that the majority of americans don’t support. you’re right. why can they get away with that? is it possibly because people have accepted the “throw your vote away” logic?
I don’t know the answer to that, but i do know that actually expressing what we want with the only voice we are given that politicians can’t deny is a phenomenal way to change it!
wow, maybe you ought to hold the biden administrations feet to the fire on that! i bet a person who was president could do something about it no problem!