The Green Party has no chance of winning. There is no difference between a vote for a third party and not voting for the purposes of counting votes between Biden and Trump. So, the Democrats will not see the difference between a progressive who voted for Biden in 2020 and then voted Green Party in 2024, and a progressive who voted for Biden in 2020 and then didn’t vote in 2024. As far as the Democrats are concerned, both voters threw their vote away, because the votes didn’t go to a candidate who had a chance at winning. As long a we have first-past-the-post voting, American elections will be a zero-sum game between Republicans and Democrats.
If progressives vote Green Party in November they will still be out numbered by moderates. The Democratic party is going to look at the larger group of moderate voters and the smaller group of progressive voters. They will decide it’s not worth risking the larger group for a smaller group who may never vote for them no matter how progressive they are.
Not voting for the Democratic Party because they weren’t progressive enough isn’t a feedback loop the Democrats are going to want to engage with. The Democrats could be more progressive in 2028, but they still weren’t progressive enough, so progressives still won’t vote for them. Progressives didn’t vote for the Democrats in 2024 and then the Democrats became more progressive in 2028, so why should progressives ever vote for Democrats? It’s an optimal stopping problem of when to stop not voting for Democrats. The loop has no optimal stopping point because progressives keep getting rewarded by not voting for the Democratic Party so the optimal strategy for progressives would be to never vote Democrat forever.
The Democratic Party doesn’t want to be a progressive party or a conservative party, it wants to be the party that wins by representing the largest group of voters possible. If progressives want the Democratic party to be a progressive party, then progressives have to vote for them in the general election. That will prove there is a block of progressive voters that the Democrats can cater to if they move to the left.
Conservatives and moderates still tied as largest ideological groups
Liberals remain the smallest group at 25%
Republicans’ and Democrats’ ideological identification unchanged
Interestingly, the Democratic Party specifically has about a fifty-fifty split between moderates and liberals. It’s not clear what percentage of liberals would consider themselves progressives. But based on how the word liberal is throw around here on Lemmy among progressives it would seem to indicate that being a progressive and identifying as a liberal is not a 1:1 match.
Only about 18 percent of the American public (and 38 percent of all Republicans) identify as MAGAites.
This number could definitely have gone up a bit, since last year. I would assume it has yet to reach a majority of conservatives identifying as MAGAites.
People throwing their votes away to third parties isn’t how political parties judge where to move on the political spectrum. The Republican Party looks at the MAGA voting block, that do no make up a majority of conservatives but keeps voting for Trump, and they move further into fascism in response. This is true whether Trumps wins or loses, by the way. Trump lost in 2020, but Mitch McConnell endorsed Trump this year because Mitch is a coward and the MAGA voters keeping voting for Trump.
This should be true for Biden as well. Even if Biden loses, but their is a high voter turnout among progressives for Biden, Democrats should see that a core part of their voter base is progressives. The Democrats should want to cater to progressives in that case, where progressive voter turnout is high for Democrats. Are the Democrats bad at communicating this? They sure are, because back in 2016 and now in 2024 people are accusing the Democrats of thinking their entitled to votes. If MAGA voters can drag the Republican party to the right despite being not being a majority of the Republican voter base, then progressive voters can drag Democrats to the left despite not being a majority of the Democratic voter base.