The majority of votes come from the Center of America. See the Bell curve
:
in my article,
Creating a Geonomic Political Party in New York State
or in http://www.holisticpolitics.org. I disagree with this chart a bit in that I don't believe the center of America is represented by the Status Quo. More on that later though.
What happens if a left-leaning party, like the Green Party, runs in an election? The Greens take votes from the far left. Maybe you agree with them politically, but the majority of Americans don't, and that's why they can't win big elections. Even worse, by running, they allow the Republicans to win by forcing Democrats to tack Left to regain the lost Green vote, losing the Center Electorate.
On the other hand, the Federal Government, especially the anachronistic Senate, is FAR to the Right. It takes only 40 Senators, representing a scant 19% of the electorate - inevitably from the sparsely populated, rural, Red States - to filibuster anything. Throw in a Corporatist or two (these two categories are NOT mutually exclusive!) and you've got a corporate controlled legislature.
We are not being properly represented. In poll after poll, the country is further to the Left on all Social and Economic issues than the Government. People STILL want a public option in healthcare (especially if it's pay-as-you-go Medicare), despite scarecare tactics from both Democratic and Republican leaders, and they don't want abortion restrictions, by and large, either. People DO want to do something about alternative energy and are even willing to be taxed for it, if they can be assured that's where the money will go. The majority wants out of both Wars, yet the Congress just approved the largest military budget in history without a peep, largely to fund the wars (does this include Yemen yet?).
However, these desires don't always translate to the ballot. Why? People are terrified of throwing their vote away and causing the opposition to win. To resolve this, I think EVERY third party should form a coalition demanding an end to winner-take-all voting and instead support a Second Choice (or Third Choice) ballot, where someone's second choice could become the Elected official if they got more votes than anyone else. This would free voters from the fear of wasting their vote, plus it would avoid increasingly expensive runoff campaigns and, most importantly of all, it would allow people to make a real choice, based on what they want and not what the Corporate lobby pays to shove in front of them in a vote-for-me-or-else fashion. The Democrat/Republican duopoly will never support this since it would undercut their power at the next election (at least until the politicians got smart and switched to suddenly empowered third parties). As Second Choice Voting points out,
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