5. Strategy, part 2: Clean Money Politics
To be effective, progressives must first recognize and address the root cause of the American political class' rightward march: corporate money in politics. Progressives should realize that corporate-funded politicians cannot and will not implement a progressive agenda, and having realized that, start organizing around public commitments to support only those candidates who refuse corporate money.
Public campaign financing is a goal worth pursuing, but progressives should not wait until public financing is established to adopt an aggressive strategy of supporting clean-money candidates and withholding support from corporate-sponsored candidates. In its early days, the conservative movement gained clout well beyond its numbers because conservative voters were willing to withhold their votes en masse from candidates who didn't support their issues. If we are to reclaim politics for the people from the corporatists, progressives must be willing to do the same.
6. Strategy, part 3: Electoral Reform
The democracy gap will exist as long as the plurality-take-all voting system coerces Americans to vote for the lesser evil, and progressives will be particularly underrepresented while money continues to play a dominant role in elections. Fortunately, there are tried-and-true voting systems that allow voters to vote for the representation they truly want, and get it.
An improved system for single-winner elections that is already used in the United States is instant runoff voting, or IRV. With IRV, voters rank the candidates in the order they prefer them. If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences, then the last-place candidate is eliminated, and their first-place votes are transferred to those voters' second preferences. This process continues until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner. IRV eliminates the "spoiler dilemma", where voters are afraid to vote their sincere preferences, lest they "split the vote" among candidates ideologically close to them and allow a candidate they oppose to win with less than a majority.
IRV is already in use in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and a number of other American cities. While both dominant parties publicly decry the "spoiler effect" and enact restrictive ballot access laws to keep competitors off the ballot, neither has shown any initiative in pushing for instant runoff voting. In places where IRV is used, it's usually thanks to Greens, other independents, and voter's rights groups like FairVote. Although voters who have used IRV report that they prefer it to plurality-take-all, even after being enacted it often faces opposition from establishment parties and corporate special interests, who feel perhaps rightly that IRV threatens their grip on power.
While any single-winner voting system leaves significant numbers of voters "wasting their votes" on candidates who win nothing, there is an improved system in widespread use in legislative elections around the world that allows all voters to vote for the representation they want and get it: proportional representation. With proportional representation, if 25% of voters vote for a certain party, that party gets 25% of the seats. Under the German system of proportional representation, voters cast a personal vote for their favorite local politician and a party vote for the party they agree with most; the resulting legislature combines local representation with proportional representation to achieve the maximum degree of accountability to voters. Once they receive their proportion of legislative seats, parties form a coalition that represents the majority and work out a compromise agenda to turn their electoral mandate into public policy. The legislature is, in effect, an ideological mirror of the voting public.
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