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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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Why does she need to do this before the election? They can just form a coalition after the election if Kamala doesn't win
That’s not how the US electoral system works.
This is to elect the President. In a presidential system, as in the US, you choose the leader of the executive portion of government separately from the legislative leader. In a parliamentary system, as many countries in Europe use, the public doesn't choose the leader of the executive portion of government. Instead, they just vote for representatives in the legislative portion, and then those legislators form a coalition (if necessary) and choose a leader of the executive (the prime minister). The closest analog to coalition forming in the presidential election is doing exactly what the Greens are proposing above -- having a candidate drop out and endorse another, with the hopes that they can sway their supporters. It's basically what JFK Jr did, for example, with Trump.
While hypothetically the US could form legislative coalitions, in practice, due to the way the US electoral system works, US parties are essentially equivalent to electoral coalitions in parliamentary systems already -- we already form "big tent" parties necessary to control a house. In the US, the closest analog to this sort of thing actually happening after the elections is when you hear about something like "an independent legislator who caucuses with the Democrats". The US also has weak party discipline compared to many countries in Europe, so legislators are much less constrained to vote along party lines anyway.
Different systems, function kinda differently.
But I keep hearing how the American system isn't democratic since you don't directly vote for the president, you vote for some middle person who promises to vote for your president? Those people might not be members of the parliment but they can still form coalitions after the fact by voting for who has a chance to win
Well, okay, so, the US does have the electoral college, and strictly-speaking, you're choosing electors that choose the President, but the election is and has for a long time functionally been a direct one. That is, you know the person that you are voting for in voting for the elector. Some states don't even constitutionally let electors vote for anyone other than the person they have pledged to vote for, and in any case, the electors are chosen by the parties, who have no incentive to choose someone likely to vote for anyone other than the candidate that they've pledged to vote for, so it's not really an aspect of the electoral system in the normal case. While false electors exist, normally as a protest vote if they know that their candidate can't win, they're rare and have never altered the outcome of an election.
This came up this year in some discussion in the context of what happens if a President drops out after being placed on the ballot but prior to becoming President, which I assume is what you're thinking about, so that the electors cannot vote for the person on the ballot, and in that situation, yeah, they'd have to find some kind of fallback.
But that's a pretty limited corner case. That is, they don't just have a blank check to go out and build coalitions and select someone.
The US doesn't really do coalitions. In Congress we kind of do, but since the presidency is elected by the citizens, not like a prime minister being elected out of the legislature, they only have their own party membership.
Ie. All elections are for single member districts using a first past the post system, which means only one person can win and any vote for someone who isn’t in the top two is pretty much a waste.
It’s a shitty system.
Parliamentary systems basically do the same thing as presidential systems, just in a different way.
There are only two really viable parties, and other parties can only really influence things via the spoiler effect in the US.
Yes. However, there are also very few actually viable party coalitions in most parliamentary systems. Like, the far-left party probably isn't going to enter into coalition with the far-right party. And neither has anywhere near enough support to actually determine the executive. Any coalition they enter into is going to mandate a lot of compromises from what their particular party program -- what we in the US typically call a "party platform" is. So...they aren't really an option for running the executive, even if they show up on the ballot.
In a parliamentary system, the parties make their promises to the public. Then the vote happens. Then there's some horse-trading, and parties throw out some -- not known to the public at the time of election -- of their electoral promises, and create a coalition.
It's true that in the US system, you basically only have two viable parties...but that's because in the US, parties are more analogous to party coalitions in some parliamentary systems. Basically, in the US, the horse-trading happens before the election, so you see the coalition that you can vote on at the time of the election. The parties in a parliamentary system with many parties are maybe more analogous to the caucuses. So, we don't have a "party for black people" in the US...but we do have the Congressional Black Caucus, which (mostly) operates inside the big-tent Democratic party.
The fact that parties expect to likely have to throw out some promises in a parliamentary system also comes with some issues. The UK uses FPTP rather than proportional representation, so tends away from having coalitions, but is a parliamentary system, and can do so. It is very likely, from what I've read, that the reason that the UK Brexited was because of some jiggery-pokery associated with this. Basically, the Conservative Party in the UK had promised its voters a referendum on UK membership in the EU. However, at the time this promise was made, the Conservative leadership expected not to be able to achieve a majority, that they would have to form a coalition with the Liberal Democratic party, as they had previously. The Liberal Democratic party was strongly in favor of being in the EU, and probably would have required them to not hold such a referendum as a condition of being in coalition. Holding a referendum is not actually something that the Conservative Party likely wanted to actually do. As a result, the Conservatives could make such a promise and get the electoral support from doing so...with the expectation that they would never have to actually follow through on it, because they'd get the opportunity to throw out some of their electoral promises to voters during the coalition-forming process. However, they did better than expected, and didn't form a coalition, and were stuck holding a Brexit referendum. You won't get that in the US, since the executive makes their promises prior to the election.
NGOs, like the EFF or Greenpeace or the like, also tend to play a larger role in the process in the US, which provides for a lot of options as to involvement in advocacy. In Europe, some countries developed "Pirate Parties", political organizations that work something akin to the EFF here (though there's also the EDRi in Europe, it acts as more of a coordinating institution).
One other issue that parliamentary systems run into is that after the election, they have to decide on a coalition to choose the new executive. This usually doesn't take too long, but sometimes the legislators don't agree in the post-election horse-trading process, and the result is that no executive gets chosen (or, in some cases, as in Italy, a "technocratic" executive gets chosen for the public). Belgium and Northern Ireland have recently had extended periods without an executive (which, in their terminology, is "without a government"), which hampers their ability to do much. In a presidential system, after the election, you know who is going to be running the executive.
In the US, the Big Two parties also hold primary elections, which permits you, as a member of the public (usually registered as a voter of that party, though there are even some exceptions to that), to choose which candidates you want your party to run. That isn't a constitutional requirement, and some parties do not do that. However, it's also input that frequently isn't available to the electorate in Europe, where legislative candidates are selected internally by the party.