Should all elections be nonpartisan?

Mr Cat Dog said:
The internet's reeeeeeally bad for sarcsasm.
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Uh I wasn't being sarcastic, were you? I know it would be hard for politicians to stop attacking each other but if they did for at least one day that would be one day where they could do something productive.
 
FreakyLocz14 said:
I won't even get into the racist history of the Republican Party.
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I fixed it for you.

The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.
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This sounds like a strictly judicial issue to me. It's not like Obama himself ordered this like you seem to think.
 
America's version of a Democracy is full of failure, in my perspective. The first thing the politicians did whenever the first official political leader - that advised against parties - left, they made parties. I don't know if that was an act of pure ignorance or something they truly thought would help.

Not only this, but governments around the world are all corrupted and the United States of America's government was supposed to stand against that, to have a form of leadership made for and by the people. But the image of American leadership has been saturated with crookedness by the politicians that have made their beds, but make the people lay in them.

That was a bit too deep for my liking, but whatever...
 
The only president who didn't belong to a political party really was George Washington. Ergo, pretty much since the start of American history politics has been polarized, from the Anti-Federalists to the Federalists, from the Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans, from the Democrats to the Whigs, from the Democrats to the Republicans.
(George Washington warned heavily against political parties)
 
You've got to be kidding me. You think the Civil War has any real relevance to the modern democreatic party?

If you want to play that game, fine. During the years leading up to the Civil War, political parties were split by North and South. Northern and Southern Democrats or Republicans had become almost different parties, even with all of them offering up their own Presidential canidates.

The racism issue in the 1960s were different, there was no regionalist split, it was just rampant racism.

You obviously don't know your history
 
lx_theo said:
You've got to be kidding me. You think the Civil War has any real relevance to the modern democreatic party?

If you want to play that game, fine. During the years leading up to the Civil War, political parties were split by North and South. Northern and Southern Democrats or Republicans had become almost different parties, even with all of them offering up their own Presidential canidates.

The racism issue in the 1960s were different, there was no regionalist split, it was just rampant racism.

You obviously don't know your history
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In 1964, Democratic Senators attempted to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The percentage of Democrats that voted against it was more than double the percentage of Republicans the voted against it. If those Republicans didn't vote to end cloture, it would have never passed.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that her father was a Republican because the Democrats in Alabama wouldn't register him to vote, but the Republicans did.
 
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The Democratic party had gained considerable strength in the south, yes, but it was still based on regional tensions not political parties opposing each others.

And again, this is relevant in no way or form. So why this brought up is beyond me. All I can assume is that there seems to be some intent to try and defame the Democratic party with such ignorant statements.
 
lx_theo said:
The Democratic party had gained considerable strength in the south, yes, but it was still based on regional tensions not political parties opposing each others.

And again, this is relevant in no way or form. So why this brought up is beyond me. All I can assume is that there seems to be some intent to try and defame the Democratic party with such ignorant statements.
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The topic of this thread is to discuss nonpartisan elections, not to go over the history of American political parties.

Let's get back on topic.
 
So I can assume I'm right and go to sleep? Okay, good to know where you stand realistically.
 
lx_theo said:
So I can assume I'm right and go to sleep? Okay, good to know where you stand realistically.
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I'll just wrap this up by saying how the modern political parties were formed and their history is very relevant today.
 
lx_theo said:
So I can assume I'm right and go to sleep? Okay, good to know where you stand realistically.
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And yet you were the one that drove us off topic.

How exactly does the Civil War have no relevance to today's politics? Now I'm no historian but wasn't the Civil War really important. The country almost crumbled because of political ideal and had to be rebuilt. In that time political parties changed greatly.
 
FreakyLocz14 said:
In 1964, Democratic Senators attempted to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The percentage of Democrats that voted against it was more than double the percentage of Republicans the voted against it. If those Republicans didn't vote to end cloture, it would have never passed.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that her father was a Republican because the Democrats in Alabama wouldn't register him to vote, but the Republicans did.
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You still don't know your history. Southern Democrats in the 1950's and 60's, ideologically/politically wise, would be today's conservatives/Republicans. Also, Lyndon Bird Johnson, a Democrat, backed the Civil Rights Bill (not to mention other social entitlement programs, so not a Republican by any stretch of the imagination) in congress and signed it himself.

Pro tip: If you don't want the thread to wander off-topic, Freaky, then don't make wildly outlandish statements.
 
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I thought the Confederate states denounced political parties. The fact they didn't have a two-party system made them politically unorganized and contributed to their defeat.

So history is telling me that the absences of strong political parties, parties competing and coming up with better ideas than the other, is only a short way from a dictatorship.
 
I'm all for restructuring American political parties in general, but as long as we have political parties a candidate's affiliation (or lack thereof) should be noted during elections and on ballots. Politicians are known to hide and play down potentially divisive views that voters would rightly want to know about. Especially in a time of hot-button issues you can have a candidate who only seems to talk about 3 topics during an election, but never voices their views on dozens of other issues important to people. Knowing what party someone belongs to can give you some idea what kind of ideology candidates are willing to associate with and so can give you insight into their views on things that they might not willingly share.
 
FreakyLocz14 said:
You can have your values represented in a nonpartisan system. By learning a candidate's stance on issues important to you, you could decide whom to vote for without a partisan label. The 2 Party System causes me to have to compromise and vote with the Republican Party most of the time, even if my beliefs fall more in line with the Libertarian Party. We need a massive campaign to educate voters on the presence of third parties and that they can win elections if people in the middle stop voting for the "lesser of two evils" candidate and en masse vote for whatever candidate they most agree with on the important issues of the election even if that candidate happens to be a Libertarian, a Green, etc., or even have no party identity.
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The US Constitution has been set up in such a way that in the federal and state levels the viability of 3rd Party candidates to win elections has become very minute. Each district is a winner takes all system where you need a majority to win the election.

Statewide, the Senatorial direct elections require a cross ideological consensus to elect 1 person to such a seat in a state.

Presidential, the Electoral college system also requires a Majority of votes where if a majority is not reached, the House of Reps votes for the president, which requires, you guessed it a Majority of House of Representative members.

So unless we have a parliamentary system where governments can rise and fall on the whims of a vote of no confidence by a coalition, the idea of nonpartisan elections is very hard almost impossible to implement.

That aside, I'm more than happy to have multi-party systems in the United States. But what? Most votes will fall to ideological lines, Libertarians will vote with Republicans, the Greens will caucus with Democrats. Heck Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman caucus with the Democrats.
 
WriteThemWrong said:
And yet you were the one that drove us off topic.

How exactly does the Civil War have no relevance to today's politics? Now I'm no historian but wasn't the Civil War really important. The country almost crumbled because of political ideal and had to be rebuilt. In that time political parties changed greatly.
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Of course ignorant attacks should be ignored if they are off topic...

But what's not relevant is the ideology of the party back then and how that defines them today.
 
If we judged it by Civil War positions, the Democratic Party would be considered incredibly violent and incredibly racist. How ironic that the first black president is a Democrat.
 
I always wonder how other nations have more than two parties but we don't (though in those nations two parties or more usually team up to create a majority)...or is it just culture...
I also think that the media might have something to do with us only paying attention to two parties...most of the time I barely hear people talk about them if they do at all...
 
Netto Azure said:
Libertarians will vote with Republicans
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Please don't presume. Actual Libertarians, not these Tea Party filth and Glenn Beck followers who claim to support Libertarianism while knowing nothing about it, would only vote Republican in an exceptional circumstance (such as Ron Paul). Above all else, Libertarians value freedom, both personal and economic. Republicans seem to have a stick up their rear trying to eliminate personal freedoms.
 
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