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goobster  ·  951 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Andrew Yang to launch a third party

Yeah, I am bitter. I loved Yang the presidential candidate. And yes, he is a policy wonk, and his excitement for, and experimentation with, UBI is laudable. I encourage all that.

But then he ran for Governor of New York. Something he is PERFECT for... and completely dropped the ball. Zero execution. No message. No engagement. No coherent message or policy. No coalition building with other like-minded and powerful people like AOC.

His mayoral campaign was simply disrespectful to those of us who WANTED to see Yang in office, working on his policies.

For me, his NYC mayoral campaign showed him to be the usual clueless tech bro we thought/hoped he wasn't.

In short, he failed to lead when leadership was needed.

To me, that shows me that he is all hat and no cattle. A windbag of ideas with zero capability to execute. Like every other tech-mogul-fixing-the-world wannabe.

I have no idea what the public and chattering classes thing of Yang, honestly. I'm just bitter as fuck.

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Ranked choice voting is EASY. You start with local council and school board positions, and a marketing/awareness campaign targeted at soccer moms and millennials who are frustrated as shit with the political system, see there are good people out there with good ideas, but know they can't vote for them because voting for anyone without a D or R next to their name is throwing away their money.

Many local elections are even non-partisan, like the Seattle Port positions. So ranked choice voting makes even more sense. Who has the policies you like the most? Who else has good ideas you want to support? Vote for all of them in ranked-choice voting.

That gets people's feet wet and over the initial hurdle of confusion about the process and results.

Then people will wonder why they don't have those options for their local state legislature and mayoral races... and then national representation...

The ONLY barrier to ranked choice voting is messaging, and the messaging is simple: politics and politicians are fucked because of limited choice and backroom dealings. Get this one simple concept, and suddenly MANY of today's political problems go away... campaign finance, gerrymandering, big issues getting buried under the latest blood-and-guts story, cancel culture, and actually feeling like your vote MEANS SOMETHING, rather than being a purely performative task that only enables you to complain about the status quo.

Ranked Choice voting is the magic bullet that can help our country find common ground, and get people engaged again by making them feel like they and their vote actually matter.