The System is Broken

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Across the US, the Tea Party is winning primaries against traditional Republican candidates.

How are they doing do? Primaries are generally voted on by a tiny percentage of the electorate. So they have always been driven by the ideological halves of the parties. So what does it take to kick a 10-time senate seat winner out of office? Turns out about 25,000 votes. Which is really not a lot at all.

And the end result? A slew of unelectable candidates, and what is shaping up to be a disaster for the Republican party. Yes - they will gain back seats, that much is clear, but they may not gain back the majority, all because of the Tea Party. And that is a big deal.

The issue is this: primaries favor the extremes, while general elections favor the middle. The Tea Party is using this to elect "Republican" candidates who are, quite simply, unelectable.

As I have said before, we need to move away from the two-party system. It is really preventing rather than helping the political society of the United States at this point. The Tea Party should be able to find representation. Winning primaries which then cause one party to lose a seat it otherwise would have won is a far far cry from an effective and representative political system. In many of those elections now, the vast majority of voters will have no one at all that they can vote for.

This is not to say that the Tea Party is wrong in what it wants, I happen to agree with a fair number of their main objectives (smaller government, lower taxes), but right now the only way they can gain any influence is by screwing over the party which they are aligned with. Does not make a lot of sense to me.

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