The 5% Club

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Since the turn of the 21st Century, the Gallup News Organization has polled on the following question: "In your view, do the Republican and Democratic Parties do an adequate job of representing the American people, or do they do such a poor job that a third major party is needed?"

Not surprisingly, a large percentage of those polled over the past 20 years have expressed a desire for a third major political party, but none has emerged that are as powerful as the Old Parties.

Yes, there have been alternate party and independent candidates on most ballots, but the most common thought about those candidates is that they are spoilers in key states in presidential elections. This includes Ralph Nader in 2000, and Jill Stein in 2016. Thus, it's still unclear to what extent Americans actually desire a new major party as opposed to simply expressing their continuing frustration with political parties who contest elections (regardless of their veracity) and whose only other purpose seems to be to act as mirror opposites to each other.

Even Gallup concedes that their results are not conclusive due to their small sample sizes, but even so, the results seem to speak for themselves.

I've said before that Texas always casts their electoral votes for the Red team. In fact, the concept of Texas voting Red in a presidential election is so fundamentally reliable that the only time a presidential candidate even comes to Texas is to suck up to our more affluent residents for campaign donations. I suspect that it's similar in California, which consistently votes for the Blue team. As a result, both Texas and California have been relegated to "flyover" status, as in "these are areas that candidates 'fly over' on their way to more important areas, like 'battleground' states."

Since Texas is not a battleground state any more than California is a battleground state, and if you already know that you are not going to vote for the Red team, you can pretty much vote for whoever YOU want to vote for regardless of party affiliation. 

And here's another factoid that the Old Parties here in Texas don't want you to discover: your non-Red vote won't affect the Electoral College votes in Texas, but it WILL affect the popular vote, and with enough of that, we can make tsunami-level waves on politics at the national level.

I call it "The 5% Club".

With just 5% of the national popular vote, any political party attaining that threshold qualifies for recognition as an official national party, and also qualifies for federal funding in the next presidential election equivalent to the proportional count of presidential votes received - in this case, roughly $10 million dollars. Can you imagine the apoplectic shock that the Old Party stuffed-shirts would have if they weren't the only ones to have federal funds to fill their campaign war-chests? Just that image alone would make me want to vote for an alternate party candidate (if I wasn't already voting for one).

So, here's my proposal for the 2024 presidential race: vote for the candidate of YOUR choice. If that's for the Red team or the Blue team, fine, but if neither of their candidates blows your dress up, there will be at least three other candidates on the presidential ballot that you can choose from; vote for one of them. And that's what the Old Party stuffed-shirts fear; that you will vote for someone other than their feckless candidates. It's YOUR vote, and YOUR choice. Don't get caught up in the distractions or the false rhetoric that your non-Red vote (or non-Blue vote) is wasted.

As long as you vote for someone that YOU can support, your vote is never wasted. MAKE it matter. Vote for the candidate of YOUR choice and maybe you can help to give all of us another major political party, or even two.

[Link to Gallup Page]